Top 120 Hallie Rubenhold Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “Fighters generally came from working-class backgrounds, and the Midlands contributed a number to their ranks.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

102. “At some point after this date, Elisabeth’s syphilis entered its latent phase. Although her symptoms would disappear and she would no longer be contagious, eventually, many years later, the disease would return for its destructive, and terminal, tertiary stage.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

103. “The only means by which she could then sustain herself would be to resort to the profession she had been accused of practising.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

104. “Wilmott’s catered to female lodgers only; for a solitary woman, this was the safest accommodation available.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

105. “According to the writer Jerome K. Jerome, who lived there as a child in the 1860s, it was a place of contrasts, where “town and country struggled for supremacy,” where the surrounding marshes were still dotted with farms, and where herds of goats and cows might be driven through the streets.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

106. “Is it any wonder that Polly fled the comforts of the Cowdrys’ home, that Annie could not bear to tell her sisters where she lived, that Elisabeth never let anyone truly know her, that Kate fell out with her children, and that by age twenty-five Mary Jane had become an angry drunk?”

— Hallie Rubenhold

107. “Coachmen generally lived in the narrow mews, strung with laundry lines and smelling of stables. Nonetheless, these humble homes, usually with three or four rooms, one of them designed as a respectable parlor, were located in some of the country’s most aristocratic districts.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

108. “Over the course of his career as a factory owner, he would use foreign workers, death threats, spies, and imprisonment to break strikes.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

109. “His engaging patter would have enchanted strangers in every pub and marketplace. He was footloose and went where the wind blew him.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

110. “Like Ellen Holland, whose name the journalists could not even bother to confirm or record correctly, Polly was just another impoverished, aging, worthless female resident of a Whitechapel lodging house.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

111. “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the trafficking of women between Britain and continental Europe had become a lucrative enterprise.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

112. “Before the introduction of the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules in 1868, boxers were permitted to wrestle as well as throw punches.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

113. “Irregular unions,” the term for couples who lived together without benefit of marriage or who carried on extramarital relationships, went against the strict regulations of the Peabody Buildings.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

114. “For five months after Annie’s birth, Ruth’s position remained a precarious one, especially as she soon found herself pregnant with a second child.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

115. “In early June, the London Fever Hospital proclaimed a crisis when ‘upwards of 100 patients’ were admitted for scarlet fever alone. What then exacerbated the situation was the arrival of a second epidemic: typhus.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

116. “If the lodging-house population was comprised of 8,530 people and a third, or 2,844, of those residents were female, and if it were to be accepted that 1,200 of these women could be identified as prostitutes, that would still indicate that the majority of them, or 1,644, were not engaged in any form of prostitution at all.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

117. “Ellen described her roommate as “melancholy” and said “she kept herself to herself,” as if “some trouble was weighing upon her mind.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

118. “While the coffeehouse may have had its dedicated adherents, a business could rise or fall based on its location: too many pubs and too few teetotalers nearby could close the shutters of even the most welcoming coffee room.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

119. “The family, now six in number, took a house at 131 Trafalgar Street, on what was described as “a terrace of two-story brick cottages.” Although the road and its dwellings had been constructed relatively recently, shortly after 1805, they had not weathered the passage of sixty years especially well.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

120. “While life in London held many benefits for a private coachman, John’s work could come and go like the tide.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

121. “Far from being a sanctuary to which sufferers could retreat for a cure, Gothenburg’s venereal disease hospital had a reputation for treating patients as prisoners.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

122. “Household income ebbed and flowed according to the number of mature earners residing under a single roof.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

123. “Neither did the editors nor the journalists covering this story deem it necessary, worthy, or interesting to delve into the biographical details of the victims.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

124. “The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended. It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and give back to them that which was so brutally taken away with their lives: their dignity.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

125. “That jubilee summer had been exceptionally warm and rainless.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

126. “Whatever relationship they formed, whether it was one based on a niece’s admiration of an older family member, or common interests, Kate came to believe that her Uncle Tom would offer her the sort of home and sympathy she did not find in Wolverhampton.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

127. “While William and Rosetta pursued their relationship, they were gambling with the reputation and the secure living circumstances of both the Nicholses and the Vidlers.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

128. “Shortly after Ruth and George’s marriage in 1842, a brother, George William Thomas, joined Annie and her parents. He was followed by Emily Latitia in 1844, Eli in 1849, Miriam in 1851, and William in 1854, bringing the number of children to six.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

129. “In the span of only three weeks, death had carried away four of the Smiths’ six children. The enormity of such a tragedy is almost inconceivable to modern, Western sensibilities, particularly as their lives might have been spared had they lived in an era of antibiotics.”

— Hallie Rubenhold

130. “Had it been safe to return to the West End, she might have continued to do business in her former manner.”

— Hallie Rubenhold