Word: victorianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...their prudery, the Victorians were considerably more willing than modern men to discuss ideas-such as social distinctions, morality and death -that have become almost unmentionable. Nineteenth century gentlewomen whose daughters had "limbs" instead of suggestive "legs" did not find it necessary to call their maids "housekeepers," nor did they bridle at referring to "upper" or "lower" classes within society. Rightly or wrongly, the Victorian could talk without embarrassment about "sin," a word that today few but clerics use with frequency or ease. It is even becoming difficult to find a doctor, clergyman or undertaker (known as a "mortician...
...school and insist on superhygienic cleanliness so that their children reflect well on them in public. Such families, says Bettelheim, exploit their children to fulfill their own "narcissistic needs"; they choose to follow Freud where it suits their convenience, and are as demanding of conformity as "the worst Victorian parent" where it does not. For the children, Bettelheim says, the result has been a "senseless" uncertainty about their own identities that turns to self-hate and later to resentment of the world at large...
...original luster the work of art called George Bernard Shaw. It is not an easy task. For one thing, Shaw himself spent a long lifetime creating his own image. Just where the real Shaw ends and Shaw's Shaw begins is hard to discover. The great Victorian iconoclast, moreover, survives today mainly as a great Victorian icon - the last best literary ornament of the age he helped to destroy...
Shaw the iconoclast was not exempt from the Victorian passion for theological speculation. "Mere agnosticism leads nowhere," he once wrote. "I hold as firmly as St. Thomas Aquinas that all truths, ancient or modern, are divinely inspired." Shaw believed in evolution, but was worried about the diverse effects of Darwinist thinking. He agreed, with Samuel Butler, that "by banishing purpose from natural history Darwin had banished mind from the universe." Shaw would have no part of a universe from which a first-rate mind (such as his own) was expelled...
...much has been lost to art, to journalism and to life itself by the extinction of the great Victorian know-it-alls, the proud and prodigious polymaths of an age whose greatness is now seen to lie in the clever children who wrote its obituary? As these collections again attest, the cleverest child of all was George Bernard Shaw, who could invent a new name for God and tackle anything and anyone, even though he could never learn to eat and drink or make love like other men, occasionally shut up, or even master the bicycle...