Word: victorianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...charmless people in classically noble poses, and with the same care that earlier artists lavished on saints and goddesses. Coolheaded and warmhearted, easy and austere, her art had the perfect balance that only will power achieves. Beyond that, Painter Cassatt was blessed with psychological penetration as unwelcome in the Victorian age as it is prized today. In the picture opposite, the baby's burgeoning life subsides to bedtime weariness. Relaxed and perfectly possessive, the child clasps its mother's chin. The mother is peaceful too, but stiff in her tight bodice, and careful to hold her baby securely...
Lionel Stevenson, biographer of Thackeray and professor of English at the University of Southern California, is just such a historian and a Meredithian to boot. His Ordeal of George Meredith is the first grand-scale resurrection of Victorian literature's most neglected writer. Other writers (including Henry James and Oscar Wilde) have briefly and brilliantly discussed Meredith's peculiar genius, but none has placed him in the great chain so accurately as Stevenson or studied his life and letters with such devoted care...
...Rembrandt had been to his. To portraitists of such quality, models are not only flesh and bones in a chair but also thoughts and feelings in the air. Madame Lebrun's sad, narrow gaze-as much as her elegant blouse and the stiffness of her spine-is forever Victorian...
...pays little or no heed. One was Prohibition, which helped destroy respect for law and. indirectly, for all authority (and which also taught women to drink). Another was the widespread breakdown of formal religion. Perhaps at the root of all the causes was the inevitable reaction against the prim Victorian era, which itself was not nearly so safe & sound as it appeared. For beneath its placid surface, a social and intellectual revolution had long been rumbling, which enshrined science and progress as twin gods and established a view of man as a creature governed more by "environment" than by preordained...
...they entered their old colleges and once again moved into their old rooms, they found that many of the gate porters still recognized them. As of old, the scholars slept in their old Victorian mahogany beds, shaved in the morning at the same old jug and bowl. "It is still 100 yards to the nearest john," complained one ex-scholar. All over Oxford, middle-aged men showed off old haunts to their wives. Arkansas' Senator James Fulbright, awarded an Oxonian honorary degree, said nostalgically: "Nothing has changed-only...