English Eccentrics and Eccentricities

English Eccentrics and Eccentricities is John Timbs’s entertaining gallery of the strangest characters in English life, first published in 1866. Timbs collects the misers who starved amid their gold, the hermits who withdrew from the world, the impostors and self-styled prophets, and the men and women who dressed, ate, or spent in ways that startled their neighbours, along with odd wagers, curious delusions, and remarkable feats of memory and endurance. Drawn from newspapers, memoirs, and old records, the book is a browsing treasury rather than a single story, full of the human oddity that fascinated Victorian readers. This free PDF and EPUB presents the complete collection.