‘Proverbs and idioms are never used by people of education,’ Mrs Gaskell makes Molly Gibson's genteel stepmother say towards the end of Wives and Daughters (1866), in shocked response to Molly's description of the Squire's son as ‘the apple of his eye’. Nonetheless, proverbs abound in the pages of 19th-century literature (including Mrs Gaskell herself), providing a convenient way of identifying characters' attitudes and feelings concisely and colourfully.