Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria appeared, at the dawn of the debunking '20s, many critics deplored its un-Victorian tone and sardonic bias. Now, time has so mellowed Strachey's lèse-majesté that his biography has been accepted both as a classic study of Victorianism and a human portrait of the great Queen...
...study of mental illness did not make much progress in the 19th Century. Victorian doctors, concentrating on the microscope and on the autopsy table, were determined to find a physical reason for every illness. Fascinated by blood, bone and bowel, they decided that neuroses were caused by upset "nerves" or "brain." The treatment of mental illness lagged-with a few exceptions-until fairly recent times...
Much of the fourth volume of Osbert Sitwell's "biography of a family" is devoted to the new forms of literature, music and painting that took root in Britain after World War I. But the old Victorian form of father, Sir George Sitwell, Bart., makes the other characters (even such brilliant ones as Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot) look slightly dwarfish. Something of father Sitwell's impressiveness can be judged from the fact that when 24-year-old Evelyn Waugh, already a hardened connoisseur of the old regime, first laid eyes on him, Waugh simply...
...Charles Evans Hughes went to bed thinking that he had been elected President of the U.S. He woke to find that he was wrong; victory vanished as the returns came in from California. He accepted his defeat philosophically. He was a judicial man who, someone said, looked "like a Victorian child's image of Almighty God." And history had a judicial role cut out for him. He lived out a public career as a tidier-up of disorder, an impeccable caretaker of constitutionality...
...secure that she could play an entire picture in an iron lung (Technicolored, of course) and send her admirers away happy. This might be true, provided she could remain her buoyant blonde self, complete with legs. When she tried to hide behind long skirts and a prim Victorian manner in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, the faithful were outraged. Many of them got the word and stayed away altogether; more than 100,000 others complained of the sacrilege by mail. Miss Pilgrim, an attempt to tinker with the Grable formula, is that rare Grable picture that lost money...