“Nothing but long meditation and preconcerted arrangement of effects could have enabled Tom to present so striking a figure as he did to Maggie when she looked up. Dissatisfied with the pacific aspect of a face which had no more than the faintest hint of flaxen eyebrow, together with a pair of amiable blue-grey eyes and round pink cheeks that refused to look formidable . . . he had had recourse to that unfailing source of the terrible, burnt cork, and had made himself a pair of black eyebrows that met in a satisfactory manner over his nose and were matched by a less carefully adjusted blackness about the chin. He had wound a red handkerchief round his cloth cap to give it the air of a turban, and his red comforter across his breast as a scarf—an amount of red, which, with the tremendous frown on his brow and the decision with which he graped the sword as he held it with its point resting on the ground, would suffice to convey an approximative idea of his fierce and blood-thirsty disposition.
     Maggie looked bewildered for a moment, and Tom enjoyed that moment keenly; but in the next, she laughed, clapped her hands together and said, ‘Oh, Tom, you’ve made yourself like Bluebeard at the show.’”

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.