Word: victorian
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...work of granite built on top of the brick sidewalks of Cambridge; its street-wise ramps and stone benches will make it a pleasant part of the environment. In addition, a recently installed row of two-pronged cast-iron street lamps has lent a sense of Victorian charm to Mass...
...19th century, however, heaven had hit a sort of ornamented bankruptcy. The stark vision of the Puritans had given way to what would later be called the Victorian heaven. Here was the humanistic heaven with a vengeance, calmly convinced of its own literal truth but with a spiritual core seemingly provided by House & Garden. Its strongest proponents were not clergy but a new breed of popular novelists like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose 1868 The Gates Ajar, set in heaven, was a runaway best seller through the end of the century. Wrote Phelps of one celestial interlude: "We stopped before...
...production of As You Like It at the Agassiz is one splendid example of a working marriage between the Renaissance text and a modern aesthetic. The Arcadia of Shakespeare's Forest of Arden is shot through with visual evocations of the Victorian period, from the nineteenth-century images hanging quietly among the trees to allusions to Alice in Wonderland. The Victorian icons have a resonance which seems strangely suited to the fantastic atmosphere of the comedy, and the bowler hats, black umbrellas, high collars and spats worn by some inhabitants of the green, fruitful forest lend the entire stage...
...funny thing, of course, is that Lincoln never slept there. That room served as his study. And because of a renovation ordered by Harry Truman that demolished the interior of the White House, even the walls are 20th century. The mattress is no treat; the furniture is lugubrious Victorian; and for good measure the place is supposed to be haunted. Winston Churchill is said to have sighted Lincoln's ghost. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands reported an ectoplasm in a stovepipe hat. Bill Clinton thought he saw some easy dollars. He must have been mistaken. They weren't that easy...
...friezes of androgynous Shirley Temploids hold the long scroll format beautifully, with a fine sense of interval and grouping. With the big, delicate flowers and butterflies alternating with weird, cavernous landscapes, searchlight rays and puffs of rifle smoke, they are like a skewed version of Kate Greenaway's Victorian illustrations. The pale, blooming color is rarely less than inventive, and it can break out into a startling decorative richness--as in Two Spangled Blengins, showing a pair of dragons with striped and polka-dotted wings hovering protectively around a cutout of a little girl...