Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...story could have been transmuted into a film of coruscating irony. Instead, Richardson has chosen to subordinate the drama to an illustrated primer on sociology. With facile juxtapositions, he shuttles between the airless, reeking slums and the sunlit gardens of the Victorian aristocracy. The bloody flogging of a sergeant is contrasted with the gleaming comfort of an officers' mess. Richardson sporadically punctuates the action with animated cartoons of the Russian bear and the British lion ruffling the feathers of the Turkish turkey. The animations, done in the style of period Punch cartoons, are wittily rendered by Richard Williams...
Such resounding but paradoxical praise for novelist George Eliot was characteristic in her time. Today, young students and many adults who are obliged to read her worst book, Silas Marner, look on the great woman author as a kind of nanny-goat novelist. But the Victorian public, teetering between reason and sentiment, and tormented by the discrepancy between public virtue and private vice, was shocked and then charmed both by the author's daring life and her works. It began by accepting her early writing as the creation of a country parson, and it ended by making...
Loving and Flying. As with many another famous Victorian, her trouble-as well as her eventual triumph-lay in a longing for love and an excess of earnestness. Born plain Mary Anne Evans, the bright but ungainly daughter of a non-U Derbyshire estate agent, she lost her faith at 22 (in 1842) after a characteristically exhaustive study of new scientific attacks on the Scriptures. (She had attended several schools, but was largely self-educated.) When she declined to accompany her father to church, he refused to have her under the same roof and sent her away...
...capable of loving as of flying." But when she developed a plain woman's devotion to "the ugliest man in London," a chatty, witty, sensible litterateur named George Lewes, she found herself deep in one of those parallelograms of passion that so often defined Victorian domestic life...
...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...