The fight has gone out of Victorian- bashing as a pastime. The high moral aims and low double standards of so much 19th-century culture, characterised by unsmiling portentousness and once regarded by Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford et al. as a ‘shriek’, pale alongside the emptiness of modern celebrity worship. ‘Victorian’, which once meant ugly, silly or undesirable, has come to suggest the opposite — and so a harmlessly malicious parlour game falls by the wayside.
But the massive swell of the 19th century continues to throw up genius oddities. Take Henry George Alexander Holiday, who died 80 years ago this year after a career that embraced notable successes as both a painter and a designer of stained glass. Holiday was a follower of just about everyone — from Burne-Jones and Albert Moore to Gladstone and Mrs Pankhurst. His horrible painting ‘Dante and Beatrice’, of 1883, was among the most frequently reproduced images of its day.
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