Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Adelaide grew up in Victorian London. Like most Victorian storybook heroines, she lived in a nice house, wore a merino dress and behaved like a skittish filly. It was Papa's idea that she should take drawing lessons. One afternoon her drawing master, Mr. Lambert, up and kissed her. What could Adelaide do? Mr. Lambert was poor and he drank; Papa declared that of course she couldn't marry him. She married him anyhow, and went to live in his dingy flat in an alley known as Britannia Mews. Thus it all began...
...solicitors and sued with a vengeance.* As it is, The Scarlet Tree is by no means the spectacular Sitwell history that may some day be written, but it is a family album with portraits in the best Sitwell style, and a precious, corrosive, amusing record of a swaddled & sheltered Victorian-Edwardian childhood...
...modest Victorian himself was confused on one point: just how far down did a blush extend? A Frenchman had once told him that some bashful artists' models blush clear to their toes, but that hearsay evidence was not scientific enough for the great fact collector. Darwin wrote to his friend and portraitist Thomas Woolner, begging the advice of "a cautious and careful English artist" on the subject. Thanks to him, Darwin was able to state that "with English women, blushing does not extend beneath the neck and upper part of the chest," but Woolner got little credit...
...case rocked Ireland. It practically ended the career of the Victorian doctor, whose name was William Wilde. Then nearing 50, he was talented, versatile and unquestionably eccentric. His professional standing in Dublin and elsewhere was of the highest; he had, in fact, been knighted only a few months before. The Wildes lived in a fine house on fashionable Merrion Square, Dublin. They had three children: a daughter, Isola, 7; a son, Willie, 12; and another son, 10, named Oscar...
...court.* People then inevitably recalled Sir William's troubles, though by that time he had long been in his grave. Nowadays Sir William is generally remembered, when he is, because he happened to be Oscar's father, or because he was, as an outraged Victorian put it, a "pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality." Victorian Doctor attempts to give him his due as a medical man and to show the sort of person he actually was, scandal aside. T. G. Wilson, himself a prominent Dublin doctor, tells the story well, in reasonably dispassionate if sometimes long-winded detail...