Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scarcely missed. Here Dodgson, again under the nom de plume Lewis Carroll, is in full control of his genius. Gone is the Victorian treacle, the sentiment that seeped through his earlier writings. In its place is a premonitory feeling of dread. As always in Carrolliana, logic lies on one side and absurdity on the other. Between the two, humor leaps like a spark, illuminating the strange journey of an impossible crew (nine men whose occupations begin with B, plus a Beaver) in search of an inconceivable creature. It will ultimately consume one of them. At the end, there...
...Victorian age produced sexual cripples in quantity; it is no surprise that Ruskin was one of them. He never matured emotionally, and he could respond romantically to women only when they were safely unavailable because of physical absence, extreme youth, or, in a couple of cases, death. He fell windily in love with a succession of such phantoms, and was sufficiently blown about by his own gusts of inky ardor that he proposed, by mail, to a healthy, warm-hearted girl named Effie Gray, whom he married when he was 29 and she 19. She believed him when he wrote...
...atmosphere of gentility: china cups sprinkled with dainty flowers, velvet or taffeta ball gowns with lace collars, ruffled canopy curtains atop four-poster beds. Half of the sales come from women's clothes, the other half from decorating products. The firm traces its success to the distinctive, neo-Victorian look of all its goods, which creates a setting where Charlotte and Emily Brontë could easily feel at home. Says Peter Revers, president of the firm's American operation: "Laura Ashley sells lifestyles, not products per se-English life-styles...
That, and all the couple's later products, bore the touch of Victorian England and became known in fashion circles as the Laura Ashley look. A succession of items, including striped garden smocks with three large pockets in front, and long, flowing dresses, sold well in the U.S. and Britain. In 1961 the Ashleys set up their first factory in an old dance hall in Carno, Wales. Opening an experimental shop in Kensington in 1968 convinced them that they could sell their products better than wholesalers could and, with out middlemen, at lower prices...
Since the mid-'70s, Laura Ashley Ltd. has ridden the Victorian revival and the renewed appreciation of delicate, curving and ornamental patterns in place of austere and mechanical design. The number of the firm's shops has increased from 55 to 100 since 1978, while sales have gone from $34.8 million to almost $100 million. The company's fastest-growing market at present is the U.S., where annual sales this year will almost double to $13 million. After opening new shops last month in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Cleveland and outside Chicago, Laura Ashley now has 15 stores...