Word: brighton
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...BRIGHTON-Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton-Houghton Mifflin...
...Thackeray-"with his warped, middle-class outlook, poor, frightened little mid-nineteenth-century Thackeray"-who gave George IV and his Brighton days their bad reputation in Victorian England. To that novelist George was everything that an English monarch should not be: a bigamist, a liar and a lecher who played practical jokes, gambled, drank heavily, and, as Prince of Wales, with an income of ?70,000, managed to accumulate ?250,000 of debts in three years. Brighton, despite its quaint, un-English charm, its surface respectability, had been the scene of his historic revels, remained so charged with memories...
Sharing none of Thackeray's prejudices, Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton, in their new history of Brighton, find George IV, while not exactly an ornament to Britain, at least no unmixed Victorian monster. His streak of family insanity "had softened down to a curious, harmless and most effective eccentricity." He was frequently drunk, but no more so than most English aristocrats of that period. His delusions, that he had defeated many butchers and bakers in fistfights, that he had commanded at many a battle, including Waterloo, were merely symptoms of the same madness that had made his old father...
...Brighton was merely a small health resort when George of Wales made it his summer court. Eighteenth Century physicians commonly prescribed large quantities of mineral water for all ailments; at Brighton invalids dosed themselves accordingly and discovered the pleasures of bathing almost by accident. By the time Prince George arrived, bathing had become popular, although noblemen were still usually so dirty that no sensitive person could stay long in a crowd of them. At Brighton the young prince found congenial companions-most of them enemies of his father-and with them raced horses, chased girls, picked quarrels, went shooting...
...mettle nowadays is the Home Office's great criminal pathologist. Thrice in a twelvemonth Sir Bernard has failed to solve spectacular murder cases: The Brighton Trunk Crime No. 1; the Brighton Trunk Crime No. 2; and the Case of the Waterloo Legs-limbs which, as Lord Beaverbrook's blatant Daily Express never tires of repeating, were found under the seat of a Waterloo railway train wrapped in a copy of the Daily Express...