Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Partridge clears Charles Dickens of all responsibility for the expression "go to the dickens," a Victorian nice-nellyism for "go to the devil." But Dickens' perpetually optimistic Mr. Micawber produced micawberish and the pompous Mr. Bumble lent his name to incompetence forever after. Similarly, a hangman named Derrick is immortalized in hoisting devices, French Physician Joseph Guillotin in a machine which struck him as more humane than the ax, and be-trousered Suffragette Amelia Bloomer in billowing pantalets. It is a process that has never stopped, concludes Partridge happily-from Solon, who became a synonym for lawyer...
...white office building. Next to Rockefeller Center, the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas crumbled before the wrecking ball and plans for a new building for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. A great, bare office building was rising on the site of the Murray Hill Hotel, in whose Victorian lobby old men had drowsed among the aspidistras and memories of tenants like Grover Cleveland and Mark Twain...
...cottage near the sea at Marldon, Devonshire, lives a little spinster named Elizabeth Goudge. Pottering about her garden or taking tea with friends, she could pass for a spiritual D.P. from the Mid-Victorian Age whose most violent activity is the occasional pressing of a rosebud in a volume of Lamb's Essays of Elia...
...most prolific and popular novelists now wielding a pen; with the help of the Literary Guild, her Green Dolphin Street (1944) and Pilgrim's Inn (1948) sold more than a million copies each. Yet in a deeper sense Novelist Goudge is just what she seems: a middle-aged Victorian lady with genteel literary inclinations...
Author Goudge's aim, through all this, is to show that everything is a "carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain [lays] the foundation for a woof thread of joy"-which is a fair example of how the sonorous Victorian style sounds in Miss Goudge's version. However it sounds, Miss Goudge's simple optimism, her invariable happy endings and her soufflé of fairies and folklore always pull her through. Gentian Hill should do it again...