Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Victorian Gimcrackery...
Also, I knew the Baptist church tower, theme of the artist's Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night. That church tower was a masterpiece of Victorian gimcrackery. It was so downright, honestly ugly that, like George Arliss, it was positively beautiful. The sound of its bell, to paraphrase Poe, was "In the startled ear of night/ How it screamed out its affright!" I think that old tower perhaps may have had a soul, and Burchfield, like William Blake, was able to commune with such spirits...
...Soviet Union almost never swings, especially as far as sex is concerned. Scoffing at sexy Western-style romance as a symbol of capitalist decadence, the Communists have imposed an almost Victorian prudery upon the country. Prostitution and pornography are outlawed. Soviet films and television usually portray love in terms of hand-holding affection, and foreign sex flicks are forbidden. There are no beauty contests, no pinup girls, no men's magazines. Sex education is almost entirely limited to a single injunction...
Copley's humor often stems from a kind of situation comedy-for instance, the Victorian gentleman all dolled up to meet a shady lady when his rendezvous is suddenly thwarted by a policeman. One of his best series resulted when in 1967 he came across a book by Robert W. Service, whose poetry he had loved as a child. Service's Yukon saloons,^ Canadian Mounties and rootin' tootin' shoot-em-ups meshed perfectly with Copley's scampering W.C. Fields style and his love of Victoriana. The lady is often nude ("Women's bodies...
...upper-middle-class circumstances (Tonbridge school; King's College. Cambridge; an inherited income of ?8,000 a year). His confrontations of plot and apparent symbolism at first seem to fit easily enough into the new century's dramatic reaction against the massive structures and stifling legacies of Victorian England: passion and beauty v. respectability and ugliness (Where Angels Fear to Tread), personal freedom v. conventional success (The Longest Journey), cultivation and simplicity v. the strangling encroachments of industrial wealth (Howards End). Most important, in taking up the issue of colonial oppression and racism in British India, Forster, with...