The illustrations in Passages in the Life of Blue Beard (1872) feature hand-tinted blue beards.

From Cinderella: A Parlour Pantomime, 1878.

We hear a lot about "the end," but where does it leave us?  Beckenham, Kent, to be precise!  From History of Kent by Henry Francis Abell, 1898.

Every ending has an equal and opposite terminus.  From The Besom-Maker & Other Country-Folk Songs by Heywood Sumner, 1888.

From Clarion State Normal School's Sequelle yearbook, 1917.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

From Leslie's Fate; and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein by Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, 1892.

At the end of a story, the characters are collected into a locked trunk.  From The Oxford Thackeray.

It's not just any book that gives the reader a final curtain.  From Local Records, or Historical Register of Remarkable Events Which Have Occurred Exclusively in the Counties of Durham and Northumberland, Town and County of Newscastle Upon Tyne, and Berwick Upon Tweed by John Sykes, 1833.

Here's "the end" from Sequelle, 1912.

The pen is mightier than the [s]word-smith.  From Le Chemin des Écoliers by X. B. Saintine, 1861.

"It is characteristic of the imagination to always consider itself to be at the end of an era.  ... But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era.  ... It exists in every civilization. ... [I]n our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically.  ... The apocalypse demands a lack of seriousness.  ... Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety.  Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we're all going to die together or separately. ... In the end ... the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously, because actually ... what it offers ... is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of ... something to do in the future." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

"In the end, why shouldn't a madman rule the world?"
—Gustav Meyrink, Walpurgisnacht