Word: victorians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This gloomy Victorian coastal mansion is run by a bland sharper who calls himself Dr. Chesterfield. An educational quack, Chesterfield prates of clean minds and bodies but has sold four of the school's five bathtubs. Boating and riding are advertised in the school brochure. But the boat is a suicidally leaky scow, and riding is discontinued when the resident donkey drops dead and is carved to vary the diet of congealed herring and paste porridge...
More than half a century ago Rudyard Kipling advised the world to walk wide of the Widow at Windsor (for '"alf o' creation she owns"). Now British Satirist Angus Wilson offers a look at the other side of the Victorian coin-a blowsy Widow Britannia, landed tails down on the wet asphalt of the Welfare State...
...Vanbrughs made fools of themselves in one way or another, but they did so in the grand manner. There was Eustace Vanbrugh (born 1834), a truly Victorian loony with an army of servants to command. (Linklater suggests that the servant class has disappeared only to re-emerge as civil servants taking revenge, in the name of socialism, on their former masters.) Eustace's lunacy revolved around the theological implications of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. He would bribe maidservants with a guinea in order to investigate whether or not they had tails: discovery of a vestigial caudal...
...response as a criterion for evaluation, relying solely on theoretically objective tests that are often based on standards more arbitrary and less reliable than the emotions themselves. This withdrawal of feeling can explain the anti-sentimentalism--which may be repressed sentimentalism--that rejects all Romantic music, rococco art, and Victorian literature while it lavishes its pent-up critical enthusiasm on movies whose artistic worth is patently...
That is how nymphet-nuzzling Victorian Lewis (Alice in Wonderland) Carroll evoked a little girl's seaside idyl. The lines might well apply to nine-year-old Hilary Bray and her discovery, in Devil by the Sea, that little girls who walk along the shore can expect to find more than sand castles. The friendly knee that innocent Hilary encounters is the shank of an old derelict whom she meets at the amusement park in her seaside home town of Henstable. Later that afternoon Hilary sees the old man lead another little girl across the marshes. Watching his "clumsy...