Michelle

“If anyone cared to look, there was an analogy to be found in a new novel by Charles Dickens, called "Great Expectations," just then being published in installments in an English literary weekly. The first installment appeared in December, 1860. One of the book's key characters, Miss Havisham, seemed the perfect embodiment of South Carolina. Having been stood up at the altar, she retired from the world, stopped her clocks, wore her wedding dress forever, and even left her nuptial feast in place, rotting on the table. Jilted at the altar of the Railroad Age, South Carolina had retreated into its own world of indolence and myth.”
― Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War