3-052-405 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Miss Tabitha Monckton, 1880. 'The Old Maid...Miss Tabitha Monckton, a single lady who lives in her neighbourhood,...is constantly coming to see [Miss Millicent] with three dogs, an unmanageable umbrella, and a large parcel of scandal. Miss Monckton resembles the typical old maid in whom the world believes, and who is indeed most frequently met with in society; for popular notions of things and people are seldom altogether wrong. There is something contrary and unsympathetic in her...She is fidgety, crotchety, and painfully disagreeable...Her mental furniture is an absurd pernicious jumble of odds and ends, for she has no intellectual digestion of what she reads, which is mostly silly; and she gossips perpetually...Still Tabitha and her neighbour are very old acquaintance, so that Millicent cannot show her a cold shoulder...Somehow or other, Tabitha did not get married - perhaps she flirted too indiscriminately; perhaps she did not flirt enough, which is still more likely...She comes twice or thrice a week from her cold hearth to pour all these things in a continuous stream before her gentle, high-souled neighbour, and not a reputation in the county is safe from her acrid and vengeful tongue'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.