Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...influence is seen in the writing of such critics as George Jean Nathan who love to employ dynamite prose for blowing up anything at all just to see how it looks in little bits. "Steeplejack" Huneker, as he was known, liked to exasperate the uplifters of the late Victorian era by his disgraceful behavior. Many a stein of beer he quaffed in scandalous company. Many an adventure he enjoyed because no proper person would. Slyly he defended the social standing of young ladies with bodies like "white satin stoves." He exulted in his holy war on behalf of Chopin...
...characteristics one associates with a first. There is plot without novelty, capable and charming description overdone to create a sense of mystery, a medley of characters, some drawn, with breadth, and reality, but others idly cast off or, worse still, caricatured from the conventional types used by the Victorian novelists. What the reader bent on analysis more than care free enjoyment most deplores, however, is the failure of the author to use great opportunities. Action takes place on an ancient but ill-kept farm, Saltacres, close by a marshy lake and near to a sleepy town. The farm...
...finest episodes of the book is the one where Senator Buddenbrook finds by chance a philosophical book and becomes enchanted by it-no name is given, but it is unmistakably Schopenhauer's pessimism, entering upon the tired mind of the last member to a hitherto romantic, Victorian, uncomplicated tribe. For, last he is, the last grown-up at least. His son dies as a boy; we accompany him to school, suffer with him the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that he is heir to. But the first serious attack on Hanno's health severs the thin thread that holds...
...Hanseatic City, spoke "partly in a sombre, partly in a comical vein of the things of life, of births, christenings, weddings, and bitter deaths". The first outstanding figure in the family line bears still a light touch of eightteenth-century-grace and sprightliness; his-still successful-son is of Victorian solidity, not without a note of religious and general hypocrisy. The third generation consists of one sister of energetic, lively character, and of two brothers; one an entirely useless person, given to a frivolous life much to the sorrow of his parents, and yet-poor Christian-a good companion...
There is no doubt but that a Ritz is an asset to any city. What confidence is necessary to be able nonchalantly to arrange a luncheon--at the Ritz;--it takes confidence--and much more than confidence. Even the eminently respectable and rehabilitated Parker House and the Victorian solidity of the Touraine yield to the superior glorifications of the Ritz. The ultimate goal of the aspiring undergraduate now changes from being able to chat familiarly with the Copley doorman to possessing sufficient boldness to call the Ritz headwaiter by his first name...