In a rather acid moment, my publisher once said that all my books could secretly be titled Fun Stuff I Have Found Out. He did not mean it unkindly, or at least I tell myself he didn’t. And up to a point it’s a fair cop, guv. I came to
Tag: Victorian
Total 26 Posts
Double visions Should anyone need an object lesson in archetype vs stereotype, the dip back into the nineteenth century performed by these two radically different companies could scarcely be bettered as an example. Potential dance audiences tend to be gun-shy, skittering at unfamiliar titles or mixed bills. The
Andrew Lycett: Wilkie Collins, A Life of Sensation (Hutchinson, 544 pp.) A nondescript street near Regent’s Park in London bears a blue plaque. It uses the old, postwar style, with a minimum of information: ‘Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), novelist, lived here’. Whenever I pass it, I always wonder, if I only
On 9 January 1863 was both a day of celebration, and sheer relief. 650 of the great and the good travelled three and a half miles by underground railway, from Paddington to Farringdon Road, stopping to admire all six intermediary stations before lunching at Farringdon Station to mark the completion
William Morris has been in and out of fashion so often that the sympathetic watcher can get whiplash following his reputation. Lauded by his contemporary, the great critic John Ruskin, by 1904 he was merely “a great man who somehow delighted in glaring wallpapers”. Yet Morris, the forerunner of the
British television has a lot to answer for. From “Upstairs, Downstairs” to “Downton Abbey,” it has perpetrated an image of “historical” Britain as a country filled with a loved, even revered, upper class that gracefully patronizes the lower orders, who in turn are thrilled to roll over and have their
The British upper classes have long had a problem with their younger sons. The eldest son inherits, the daughters are married off, but what to do with the other boys? One answer was, ship ’em out. It was one of P.G. Wodehouse’s most joyous diversions to have feckless younger sons
“I think people marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and to a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.” So wrote Queen Victoria, and reading Kate Summerscale’s extraordinary dissection of a failed marriage, it is hard to argue. In 1850, Isabella Robinson, a bored and restless
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