Tipping the Velvet

Title: Tipping the Velvet
Author: Sarah Waters
Published: 1998; this was a poorly edited e-book
Genre: Historical romance
Pages: 472, at least in proper book form


Mom: What are you reading?
Me: Umm... it's called Tipping the Velvet (don't ask don't ask don't ask)
Mom: What? How do you tip velvet?
Me: I don't know. I... think that it's a... an old English saying. Or something.
Mom: Must be. Weird.
Me: ...yeah. Weird.


This is Sarah Waters' first book, set in Victorian London -one of my favourite places!- and it's about Nancy Astley, an oyster girl from Whitstable who falls for a music hall star, drag king Kitty Butler. Nan soon becomes Kitty's dresser and follows her to London, where her role in Kitty's life and show grows.

Tipping the Velvet is a fun book, pacing's great, I love the characters... I just really like this book. This is the second time I've read it, first go was in... 2007, so before I started this blog. This time I read it as a very poorly edited e-book, which was full of typos. Typoes? Still, I kept reading until my phone's battery ran out.

There's also a pretty decent 3-part BBC adaptation out there, which I recommend! Might watch it again myself one of these days...


   I didn't listen: I was too taken with the gay girl's story. She was saying now: 'We flat fucked for a half-an-hour; then tipped the velvet while the gent looked on. Then Susie took a pair of vampers, and -'
   I looked again at Florence, and frowned. 'Are they French, or what?' I asked. 'I can't understand a thing they're saying.' And indeed, I could not; for I had never heard such words before, in all my time upon the streets. I said, 'Tipped the velvet: what does that mean? It sounds like something you might do in a theatre...'
   Florence blushed. 'You might try it,' she said; 'but I think the chairman would chuck you out...' Then, while I still frowned, she parted her lips and showed me the tip of her tongue; and glanced, very quickly, at my lap. I had never known her do such a thing before, and I found myself terribly startled by it, and terribly stirred. It might just as well have been her lips that she had dipped to me: I felt my drawers grow damp, and my cheeks flush scarlet; and had to look away from her own warm gaze, to hide my confusion.