Victorian Workhouse Press

A tiny press dedicated to bringing old Victorian novels to today's readers. Some people restore old furniture; we restore old books.

[allaboutrings]

Victorian 14k Gold Amethyst and Pearl Ring

[flowerytale]

Charles Dickens, from “Great Expectations”

[vox-anglosphere]

Eight Victorian homes surround a secluded village green in Highgate

[vestatilleys]

Lotte Medelsky as Joan of Arc, 1909.

[heartcountry]

How do you deal with grief? I just can't stop the overwhelming feeling of it.

i'm muslim so the islamic perspective comforts me a lot. the idea that the person isn't gone forever, that my prayers are reaching them, that the love i have for them meets them where my hands can't. i was chosen to love them. i was chosen to lose them because God knew i would still make something of their love. but muslim or not, the point remains true. the love you had and still have for them is making the world a softer place. every smile you give a stranger. every bird you feed on your morning walk. every hug you give to someone who's still living. this is your greatest evidence. yes, someone loved me once. yes, they walked with me here once and i look for their footsteps still. yes, i dream them back all the time. yes, they made the world bearable, and i will too. ill do for others what they did for me with all the love they left behind.

[treasure-of-the-ancients]

Gold locket ring with tuqouise and silver skull, English, circa 1800

from Timeline Auctions

[catonhottinroof-deactivated2023]

Elizabeth Forbes (1859 – 1912)

Will-O’-the-Wisp, ca. 1900

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Opal bracelet, 1849.

[victorianworkhouse]

Exquisite.

[victorianworkhouse]

All three of the Sweet Little Shamrock series are on sale on Smashwords for $1.49 each!

This is a sweet Victorian series by Birdye Latham Hartman about a young Irish girl who is wed to a stranger and is then taken to London after her father dies. Can she find happiness with her new husband, despite the machinations of her new mother-in-law?

https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/67260

[victorianworkhouse]

I've made some logos and I'm trying to figure out which ones I like best for our books.

[victorianworkhouse]

I'm still here!

I've been distracted by many shiny things but I still have several books I need to put back out into the world. I'm working on a different computer at the moment so I don't have anything ready to post because all the stories I'm working on are all somewhere else. I just wanted to let you know I haven't been kidnapped by some nefarious villain or anything.

[victorianworkhouse]

Fripperies. This is my word of the day now.

Me, probably

[victorianworkhouse]

I worked way too long on these covers but I wanted to make them so pretty.

I seem to have not done a blessed thing with the rest of the Guilty Bridegroom stories, as I’ve tried to clean up the racist nonsense, but one of the biggest plot points pivots on a racist stereotype, and I tried to think of ways to circumvent it, but I’m here to have fun, despite being locked in a garret in Victorian London, so oh well.

But I’ve been fixing up two old favorites of mine, which makes me very happy. Both of these I read when I was a young girl of sixteen, and they’ve stood up well over the years. I was positively giddy about THE FIRST VIOLIN as well as THE MASQUERADER back in the day, and I’m sure you will be too. I’ve written a nice biography for Katherine Cecil Thurston in the back of THE MASQUERADER, and this book is almost ready to go. I’m still cleaning up both books, doing a little editing, tidying up a half-million of those semicolons. I’ve found the old illustrations for both books and have inserted them into the text as well. I need to write a nice biography for Jessie Fothergill for her book as well. 

I have a very old laptop computer, which is better than writing with a broken quill pen, but I need to get a slightly newer computer so I can get a better book formatting program. I do all my formatting, painstakingly, on this old laptop in Microsoft Word, but it takes ages. If I could get a newer Macintosh I could really make the prettiest book interior with Vellum, and save myself a lot of time. Perhaps some rich toff will toss me a gold coin and my problems will be solved. Perhaps somebody will employ a poor writer so she can have a proper job. Perhaps perhaps perhaps. 

I don’t have a preorder date with these yet as some of the online retailers have odd rules about public domain work (though I completely understand why), but I hope to have them out within the month. Fingers crossed!

[victorianvampire]

An interview with Mrs Florence Pannel (born in 1868)

First shown: 25/02/1977

[scourgie]

Did you know that in Victorian England, women were considered physically weaker but morally superior to men

[victorianworkhouse]

Though men would still mansplain morals to any woman they saw because they also considered themselves more intelligent.

[victorianworkhouse]

As it turns out, I was away for a while because I had to flee an evil landlord and was struck by a runaway team of horses, and when I came to, I’d forgotten my name and who I was, so I lived in the employ of a cruel baron as a maid, except after a while, as it turns out, he wasn’t as cruel as he let on, and we were to be married, but at the last minute his old fiancee, who he thought was dead, came back after having been kidnapped by a midshipman in the Royal Navy. At the wedding, I banged my head on a silver salver and remembered who I was again. Fortunately the baron was also a slumlord, so now I have a new garret in a new neighborhood, and there’s not a hole in the roof here, so I have come up in this world.

At any rate, I am getting ready to publish this book, so look for it soon.

[victorianworkhouse]

I’ve been distracted while trying to get Book 2 out because I have run away from an evil man and am fleeing through the mean streets of Victorian London. But! I did find some kind temperance people who took me in, and now I have cleared my name of calumny. 

I will be uploading Thrown Across His Pathway today and I hope you will be able to read it soon!

In the meanwhile, please enjoy this little book, which you can find at the evil giant, Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Guilty-Bridegroom-Sydney-Watson-ebook/dp/B08S366ZMZ