Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Victorian attitudes to children were famously forbidding. That might partly explain why London's Museum of Childhood is little heard of by most visitors to the capital. Then there's the building itself - a red-brick and iron shed, an unloved[an error occurred while processing this directive] remnant of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington that in 1872 was rebuilt in Bethnal Green as a cultural outpost for the museum's overspill, particularly its collection of dolls and children's costumes. Some of the gloom and an aura of worthiness persisted even after its rebirth as the Museum...
...streets: 132 km long, the world's most elaborate sewer, which began construction in 1858, was completed in little more than a decade and is still a vital defense for a city that has not recorded a single outbreak of cholera since 1866. It's a testament to Victorian England's ability to construct grand solutions to big problems. That's a skill the modern world could use, says Johnson, noting that some 2 billion people are still at risk because they do not have access to clean water. "Unlike hiv or global warming, this is a problem we fundamentally...
...Christmas card and its wicked counterpart—the holiday newsletter—both have a long history. A product of the Victorian period, our current Christmas cards first came into vogue in 1840s England. From the very beginning, they often included a newsletter. The entire Victorian project of keeping up appearances and maintaining a veneer of respectability made it inevitable that this newsletter was a heavily amended summary of the events of the year, of course interspersed with all of the proper holiday pleasantries...
Today, as during the Victorian period, the Christmas card itself is purchased at the store, but the newsletter is no longer handwritten. In modern America the holiday newsletter is printed on the family’s DeskJet and usually has a festive border around it. But don’t be fooled by this ornament, the letter’s content is a veritable popcorn chain of falsehoods, all strung together with conventional and informal prose...
...historian’s life comes to imitate literature. Neatly broken into three volumes, her narrative rivals the structured verbosity of the Victorian novel, and its notorious long-windedness...