Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...still writes with Victorian verve, and each of her chapters ends with an upbeat sentence that impels the reader on. But Miss du Maurier's latest novel lacks the suspense, pageantry and ro mantic insight of Rebecca, French man's Creek or even the recent best-selling House on the Strand...
...Prince Andrew lands in Scot land and Prince Charles in Wales to lead true Britons back to independence. The United Kingdom, one feels assured, will recapture its flag and muddle through the economic crisis. Pretty thin treacle, and, as another Victorian said, we are not amused...
...fights, some humiliating and some victorious, he vanquishes his oppressor, the prototypical cad, Flashman. Flashman, the school bully, was the subject of a Howard Hughes-like book of biography a few years ago, and he has endured at least as well as has Tom Brown himself as a model Victorian social leper...
Richard Morant, as Gerald Flashman, is an ideal smirking cruel dandy, and Iain Cuthbertson, as the headmaster Doctor Arnold, presents an acceptable outward resemblance to the pious Victorian reformer. But in attempting to portray Arnold at all on television, problems arise that Hughes never faced in his novel. On a TV screen there is no way to show the headmaster as he appeared to a 12-year-old boy. So taking refuge in a stereotype is pardonable, even if the stereotype is something of a distortion...
HUGHES WASN'T A LITERARY MAN, and he lacked the Victorian preoccupation with searching that better writers possessed. But his almost innocent and completely straightforward pride in things like the British Empire is very revealing of one part of the Victorian attitude. And the book's final and complete commitment to the combination of gentlemanly Christianity as a mirror for rulers--even on a level meant for a nine year-old--is a far cry from much that this century, including the BBC's Tom Brown's School Days is quite willing to represent...