Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...childhood favorite, The Arabian Nights. Dickens kept telling another tale. Jokes and fantasies, social and political critiques, plummy visions of Christmas swept from his pen. He even wrote a front-page article in his own magazine, Household Words, to explain and justify the breaking up of his staunchly Victorian marriage after 22 years...
Submerged Society. The teeming streets of London helped lend shape to Dickens' lifelong, horrified fascination with the submerged of Victorian society-the poor, the grotesque, especially the criminal. A long line of murderers stalk through Dickens' novels, from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist to John Jasper in Edwin Drood. Among other things, they embody his belief in an irredeemable evil in human nature-a belief that tends to be forgotten because of the hilarity Dickens spread through even his darkest passages...
...other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation as a hearthside moralist and improvising Toby-jug showman. Readers are now ready to acknowledge with Wilson that Dickens "leaps the century and speaks to our fears, our violence, our trust in the absurd, more than any other English Victorian writer." It no longer seems so far from the chancery court in Bleak House to Kafka's trial of Joseph...
...VICTORIAN STUDIES IN SCARLET: MURDERS AND MANNERS IN THE AGE OF VICTORIA by Richard D. Altick. 336 pages. Norton...
These case histories gradually create a portrait of Victorian life-social sport, gossip, entertainment-centered on a succession of gory crimes. In the process the author dispels once again the myth that a genteel, civilized Victorian England ever existed. Its underside was a subculture of squalor, misery and brutality, all sanctioned by public apathy...