Making the case for Victoriana

When people use the word ‘journalese’, they always do so pejoratively. They are not thinking of James Cameron, Bernard Levin or Walter Winchell. They mean a style that traffics in clichés. The poet B. I. Isherville has derided that kind of writing:

Where every heresy is rank
And every rank is serried;
Where every crook is hatchet-faced,
And every hatchet buried.

There are cliché headlines, too, and for some reason articles on food seem specially to attract them. Any novice sub-editor thinks he or she is being wildly or Wildely witty in heading a piece on puddings ‘Just desserts’. And was there ever a curry recipe that was not headed ‘Some like it hot’? (yes, just occasionally ‘Favouring curry’ is preferred, as a neat inversion of ‘Currying favour’.) Judith Flanders probably thought she was being original in calling her book Consuming Passions; but in 1970 Philippa Pullar gave that title to a ‘history of English food and appetite’; in 1986 Judith Williamson brought out Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture; and in 1996 appeared Alan Hunt’s Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Laws.