Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seventy-eight years have passed since Bram Stoker dredged him from the velvet underground of Victorian sexual repression. The authentic apocalypse of war, the real specter of deprivation, should have exorcised this titled vampire long ago. Instead, Count Dracula has become the Western world's most durable ghoul. There are Dracula dolls, songs, comic books and histories-proving the existence of a 15th century tyrant dubbed Dracul (dragon). Vampire movies have been made almost since the dawn of cinema and, according to Editor Leonard Wolf, there are now more than 200 Draculoid film titles, ranging from the silent Nosferatu...
...contemporary psychology can controvert the evidence that here, in all its banality and glory, was a true love story. Kitty (in the metaphor of her biographer) was a magic bucket in a fairy tale. When Parnell died, she went empty. The sometime spell that had changed her from a Victorian housewife into a femme fatale was broken. All too soon she lost her powers, her odd beauty, and from time to time her sanity. After World War I she ended up back in Brighton, at the scene of her vision, in a seaside hotel-a short, plump, obscure old lady...
Surprisingly, Sutherland leaves out some prominent - and promising -names. Where, for example, is Christopher Marlowe? Lewis Carroll is absent, not to mention his celebrated crushes on Victorian nymphets. And the book shows a predilection for minor clerics and third-rate poetasters that is a bit too donnish for 1975. Yet in the end, the musty, bibliomaniacal quality only adds to the volume's charm. Lord Chesterfield once told his son that "there are very many [books], and even very useful ones, which may be read with ad vantage by snatches and unconnectedly." This is one of them...
This season's most agreeable literary game is the counterfeiting of Victorian novels. From Brian Moore (The Great Victorian Collection) to Michael Crichton (The Great Train Robbery), no artificer plays the game more entertainingly than the writer who calls herself Leonie Hargrave. The pseudonym, notes the publisher coyly, "may be said to be the Maiden Name of an author both prolific and much praised for work in other modes...
...here is Clara Reeve, a sober send-up of the Victorian three-decker, as ingenious as an embezzlement scheme -and incidentally an astringent comment on the predicament of being female. As a little girl, Clara is orphaned, and raised in the forbidding London home of a pious uncle. When she is so light-minded as to laugh aloud at the antics of a bird in the garden, he whips her neck with a watch chain. The child accurately notes that it was indeed the custom to birch girls on the bared portions of their anatomies, but adds that nevertheless...