Word: 1860s
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Fowles' technique is to take a ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel-with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom...
...1860s, some 6,000 Shakers were living in 18 communities scattered from New England to Indiana. Today the sect is virtually extinct, since Mother Ann regarded sex as a device of the devil and Shaker "brothers" and "sisters" lived in separate dormitories. Their only mutual recreation was prayer meetings, at which they sang hymns and "shook" together in frenzied dances that must have looked like Saturday night at the Electric Circus...
James Farmer looks on black power as part of the "American experience," not as any extremist quirk. "The Irish went through the same thing. There would be signs, 'Men wanted, N.I.N.A.'--no Irish need apply. The Irish riots of the 1860s, especially one in New York, would make the riots of the last five years look like child's play." He describes how New York vigilantes organized the first American police force, how the police were to rough up Irishmen, and how the Irish struck back by joining the force. He laughs and pauses. "You know, they used to draw...
They had much else in common. Born in the 1860s and early 1870s, brought up in the Midwest (Turner in Wisconsin, Beard in Indiana, Parrington in Kansas), all of them came of age at a time when the balance of power and influence was shifting from the effete East to the still raw and resentful Midwest. The financial panic of 1893 was in the making. The Populist movement was galvanizing Westerners and farm folk everywhere into a struggle against big money and big-city interests...
Wisely, Author Haight contents himself with chronicling his heroine's dazzling success in her own time. By the 1860s, the lady whom George Eliot unkindly referred to as "our little humbug of a Queen" was reading her books aloud to Prince Albert. Proper people were inviting her to dinners (she often declined). World rights to her books had brought in ?41,000, in buying power the Victorian equivalent of a cool million dollars. After Dickens' death in 1870, she was revered, quite simply, as the greatest novelist alive...