Per the Colonels request

'Don’t you read or get read to?' [Mr. George]
The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. 'No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don’t pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!' [Grandfather Smallweed]
Bleak House

Worthy to be a duchess...or queen as it were

'My dear,' he returned, 'when a young lady is as mild as she’s game, and as game as she’s mild, that’s all I ask, and more than I expect. She then becomes a Queen, and that’s about what you are yourself.'
Mr. Bucket to Esther. Bleak House.

What's better than a good reputation?

The name of Professor Dingo, my immediate predecessor, is one of European reputation.
Mr. Badger, Bleak House

Seeming rage

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder, and to see the lightning; and, while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage, which seemed to make creation new again.
Charles Dickens - Bleak House

A dissolved partnership

‘It won’t do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers,' exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form a separate establishment, and have dissolved partnership with truth and justice for ever and a day.
Bleak House - Charles Dickens.

The slander of women

Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian said, was to show the world that woman’s mission was man’s mission; and that the only genuine mission, of both man and woman was to be always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings. …Such a mean mission as the domestic mission, was the very last thing to be endured among them; indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before we sat down to breakfast, that the idea of woman’s mission lying chiefly in the narrow sphere of Home was an outrageous slander on the part of her Tyrant, man.
Esther from Bleak House by Charles Dickens