Word: old
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Unhappily, he is contained in a clumsily updated block off the old Chips. It is no longer the Great War but World War II that punctuates the scholastic calendar, Chips' missus (Petula Clark) becomes the victim not of childbirth but of a V-l rocket. Still, the boys are the same deferential crew; the school is ivied and kind, an eon removed from the kind of place Orwell considered "a tightrope over a cesspool." The only instance of sadism, in fact, is the disastrous decision to make Goodbye, Mr. Chips a musical. As a result, Leslie Bricusse was given...
...hero, Charles Smithson, a young model of Victorian gentility redeemed by intelligence and irony, is an amateur naturalist and a postulant for the new faith of evolution. But he is still pledged to old pieties through his engagement to the shallow daughter of a rich London merchant. Fowles' strategy is to bring the contradictions of Charles' situation-and, by implication, of the Victorian age-to a crisis...
This thesis makes relevant all of Fowles' seemingly disjointed literary games, documentary digressions and attempts to make the Victorian past appear imminent to our present. In a cunningly oblique way, the whole novel employs an old-fashioned method to draw a timeless moral. As Fowles' epigraph from Marx puts it: "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself...
From his 180-year-old house high on a bluff in Lyme Regis, Dorset, John Fowles can look down to a curving stone jetty called the Cobb. Two years ago, he had a vision of a woman in a long Victorian skirt standing there with her back to him. It was the basis for the opening scene of The French Lieutenant's Woman and, says Fowles, "the tiny seed from which the whole book started. It was just an image that came to me in a "hypnagogic state between 'waking and sleeping...
...central figure is 1st Lieut. Marius Catto. The 24-year-old lieutenant is an orphan who feels that the Union Army is his first real home, a bumbling but compassionate leader, an idealistic virgin consumed by lust. Catto manages to get himself shot in the shoulder by Martin mainly out of sheer carelessness. He feels no animosity toward the boy, and while recuperating from his wound, Catto fights the court-martial and the subsequent execution with an increasingly anguished awareness of the complexities of life. "What had been a duel, lost honorably and without resentment, became a charade, himself...