thevictorianlady:

From Charles Dickens’ letter to his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth on the deplorable state of his friends’ mustaches. 

The next thing you will be interested in hearing of, is the progress of the emulative mustaches of the two other members of the triumvirate [Dickens was traveling Italy with his friends, author Wilkie Collins and painter Augustus Egg]. They are more distressing, more comic, more sparse and meager, more straggling, wandering, wiry, stubbly, formless - more given to wandering into strange places and sprouting up noses and dribbling under chins - than anything in that nature ever produced, as I believe, since the flood. Collins has taken to wiping his…at dinner; and Eggs are not near his nose, but begin at the  corners of his mouth, like those of the Witches in Macbeth. I have suffered so much from the contemplation of these terrific objects…that this morning…I  seized my best razor, and, as a great example, shaved off the whole of the Newgate fringe under my chin! The mustache remains, and now looks enormous; but the beard I have sacrificed as a dread warning to competitors - which I am bound to add does not produce the least effect; they merely observing with complacency that “it looks much better so”.