Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Verses like this, which today would hardly cause a raised eyebrow were they to appear in the Sweet Briar College literary magazine, burst like a sinful star shell in the stodgy gloom of Victorian England. Mothers clutched their daughters. Fathers bethought themselves of horsewhips. Staid critics, resorting to apoplectic prose, apostrophized the author as the "libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." But a youthful public in London lapped up copies of Poems and Ballads when it came out in 1866, and Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne became famous and infamous almost overnight...
...only certifiably sinful relationship-with Music Hall Actress Adah Isaacs Menken-ended after six weeks. "I can't make Algernon understand," she ruefully explained, "that biting's no use." Eventually, he retired to the country for his health under the care of a proper Victorian solicitor-scholar named Theodore Watts-Dunton. And the world, learning that his poetic passions had been mainly pastiche, soon decided his passionate poetry was merely overblown...
...Majesté. Today's trend toward wholesale restoration of time-tarnished Victorian literary reputations may not wholly reverse this judgment of Swinburne the poet. But antiquarians in England are now beginning to rediscover Swinburne as a writer of prose. In the U.S., Critic Edmund Wilson became fascinated with the new researches and the incidental light they threw on Swinburne's strange personality. In this volume Wilson presents two Swinburne novels, along with a gargantuan preface that includes an advance tour of other finds-letters, quips and critical writings-soon to come...
Swinburne in prose often displays what he most lacked in poetry-restraint and humor. His method was deadpan parody. According to Wilson's preface, his targets included Victorian bluenoses, stuffy fellow poets, and French romantic novelists. In one such parody of an imagined French historical novelist's handling of Victorian England, the Bishop of London gallantly seduces the heroine in a London cab. In another, Queen Victoria confesses a humiliating affair with a commoner. "It wasn't a prince," she sobs, "not even Sir R. Peel. It was one . . .called Wordsworth who recited to me verses from...
Husk & Fangs. The two novels on display, Love's Cross Currents and Lesbia Brandon, both deal with the frustrated yearning of a young man for a close relative-a girl cousin in one case, a sister in the other. Swinburne, who alone of all Victorian writers belonged to the top aristocracy, has no trouble handling those extra comic confusions that come naturally in a society where everybody seems to be related to everybody else. When he is being funny-for example, minutely recording the malicious troublemaking of an old gorgon ("all husk and fangs") named Lady Midhurst-Swinburne...