Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shortly before Easter in 1895, two English boys, aged 8 and 9, were wrenched from the security of a happy family life in Victorian London and sent abroad like fugitive criminals to forget their past, their parenthood and even their names. The crime from which they fled was that of being born the sons of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, the most famous and quite suddenly the most notorious literary figure...
Next day the Britons gawked at a lavish agricultural exhibit, where Bevan peered dourly at the gilt-and-gingerbread buildings, commenting: "Pure Victorian. All show. This is the Victorian age of Russia. An immense show of wealth, concealing poverty. The landau at the door, the servants in the attic." At lunch there were long silences between toasts, broken at last by Attlee, who abruptly asked: "How do you get your milk in Moscow?" The Russians told them, in a laborious hum of translation, broken by the clear, social-worker voice of Dr. Edith: "I'm not interested in yield...
Emily Lytton, daughter of Lord Robert Lytton, British Ambassador to France, and granddaughter of Author Bulwer-Lytton, became one of Parson Elwin's "blessed girls" in 1887. Emily was as rare a bird in her way as Elwin in his: she was in angry rebellion against the Victorian way of life. Urged to become maid of honor to Queen Victoria, Emily snorted: "I must indeed have fallen low to considered just the type to keep company with the royal family...
Innocence & Scoundrels. Emily was 18 when the fundamentals of botany proved to be just as dangerous as Lady Ampthill had suggested. Poet Wilfrid Blunt, "a strikingly handsome" married man of 53, attempted to seduce her in the best tradition of Victorian villainy. Blunt wore Arab dress and exuded a virile masculinity breathtakingly different from the jam and waxworks of everyday life. "He took me through the park to a wood which was very pretty," Emily wrote his Rev. He at once took my hand and kissed it and stroked it, said he adored me, which I told...
...lived to see Emily happily married to young Architect Edwin Lutyens. (She is now 80 and edited the letters herself.) To read A Blessed Girl is to understand the why and wherefore of the Victorian novel, with its passion for brazen scoundrels, innocent girls and rescuing heroes. Such conflicts were not mere fiction; they were the very spice of Victorian life. Emily herself found it hard to decide whether her reaction to her tragedy was "happiness or misery," but her mother, respectable Lady Lytton, was not undecided at all. Wrote Emily: she was "bitterly disappointed that it has all come...