Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...used to occupy with his wife and two children in a house he got rent-free from his in-laws. Recently elected an associate of the august Royal Academy, and sporting a new beard, Bratby has come up in the world. Hit, new background is his own rambling, Victorian house, with cracked swimming pool, in London's Blackheath district. But the exuberant pictures of the disorderly, newspaper-strewn interiors and the sunflower-choked garden (often with the face of a Bratby child peering through the stalks) show that Bratby is still a glutton for life...
...McCarthy Florence bears almost no resemblance to that of the Brownings, of "Old maids of both sexes, retired librarians, governesses, ladies with reduced incomes," who, in the Victorian era, gave it the tone of a genteel rest home. This is the city whose people "invented the Renaissance, which is the same as saying that they invented the modern world-not, of course, an unmixed good." Its great artists-Michelangelo, Leonardo, Cellini-wrought wonders in a time of bloody political and family feuds such as history has seldom seen. Murders were committed at the very altar; homosexuality was a passion shared...
...Shakers distrusted the ornamental; they avoided both "carpenter Gothic" and Victorian arabesques. Their furniture is functional to a T, and yet their tools are subtly shaped to charm the eye and hand. The Shaker wheelbarrow opposite, for example, looks as elegantly clean-lined as a Ferrari...
...civilised man or woman who cannot win some enjoyment from this book," wrote Havelock Ellis about Casanova's Memoirs, "there must be something unwholesome and abnormal-something corrupt at the core." Writing in the Victorian era, Scientist Ellis (Psychology of Sex) idolized Casanova as a free spirit, a man who had the courage to live life fully, and as a shining example of "adjustment"-for Casanova adapted himself so easily to his own desires. Yet there may be more truth in Ellis' exaggerated view than in the more conventional notion expressed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which complains that...
...essayist proceeds however to draw some intriguing but quite probably specious conclusions about the mental state of today's American youth, its confusion over a double moral standard: the hedonistic view of the individual versus the Victorian ethos of the community. The essayist exhorts all future writers of Harvard Square sex-fiction to probe more deeply into the unhappiness which is the apparent outcome in most of the stories under discussion, and come up with a moral framework which is bigger, better and all in all more valid than that which exists or is in the process of ceasing...