Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Perhaps little new can be said about Jane Eyre, for both the novel and its film adaptation have enjoyed a hardy popularity. Like most Victorian novels, Charlotte Bronte's book is a thinly-disguised social criticism with its target religious bigotry and self-righteousness. Miss Bronte was indeed indignant, and once described her novel as an attempt "to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee." In true Dickens' fashion, she wrote about insufferable aunts, cruel schoolmasters, and orphans' asylums, and made them all as black as the corridors of Thornfield. But she added to her novel a vivid...
...banditti, with the action of galvanized frogs, the dress of mountebanks, and the hue of pestilential putridity . . ." There is something terrifyingly timely in Fuseli's nightmarish mysticism. In some ways, Fuseli bridges the gap between the 18th and the 20th centuries; his shrieks and murmurs carry across the Victorian era (which merely stopped its ears) to the present. In several paintings and drawings all called The Nightmare-whose principal characters are variously a monstrous dwarf, a leering horse and a recumbent maiden-Fuseli seems as modern as Dali or Freud. Despite his inescapable similarity to his great friend ("Blake...
...Wrong Cue. Economic historians have too often taken their cue from the reports of royal commissions, completely disregarding the fact that the commissions were dealing "with social grievances, and not with normal processes of economic development." The picture they painted of early Victorian society "has become fixed in the minds of popular writers and is reproduced in my scripts." Yet, says Ashton, a careful study of these reports should have revealed another picture-that it was not in the factories, but "in the garret or cellar workshops that conditions were at their worst...
...studio; Bulgarian-born Assen Peikov, a society portrait painter who affects a Mongol-style mustache; brunette Novella Parigini, a great friend of Errol Flynn's, who paints sexy calendar girls and looks like one; dignified, 70-year-old Giuseppe Carosi, who lives with his cats in a genteel Victorian apartment; lean, intense Communist Sculptor Nino Franchina, who does abstractions in metals...
...true, then, that in the bowels of this crazy indirect-lighted monolith, one can relax, and forget the pressures of the Victorian reality that lies in waiting outside the big glass doors. Indeed, some of the hardier lads can even, I know not how, manage to catch a little sleep beneath the soft lights, amid the soothing rustle of encyclopedia pages...