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Updated: May 14, 2025
Gone were the Early Victorian portraits; gone the big glass cases of stuffed birds and weasels; gone the round mahogany table, the waxen bouquets, and the horsehair chairs. The ancient tapestry beside the carven balustrade of the staircase remained, but it had been cleaned, and even mended. An oak dresser, black with age, and laden with blue and white china, lurked in a shadowy corner.
But in the early Victorian era it would not have been thought becoming for a girl to step out upon a terrace alone, nor, indeed, to leave the wing of her chaperon, save briefly for the dance.
Dickens was the People, as it was in the eighteenth century and still largely is, in spite of all the talk for and against Board School Education: comic, tragic, realistic, free-spoken, far looser in words than in deeds. It marks the silent strength and pressure of the spirit of the Victorian middle class that even to Dickens it never occurred to revive the verbal coarseness of Smollett or Swift.
"What a lovely frock." "I am so glad you like it. Poor mamma! She said it was too Early Victorian for anything. She despairs over my frocks." "It is perfect," said Marion decidedly. "Thank goodness you know what suits you, and haven't got your skirt tied in at the ankles so that you shuffle like a Japanese." "Or hop like a kangaroo!" added Philippa, laughing.
What a delightful thing I now know my English strawberry to be! But to the New South Welshman my doctrine is a stumbling-block and to the Victorian it is foolishness. Mr Sala preached it years ago and the connoisseurs of the Greater Britain of the south have never forgiven him. Another patriotic delusion is the glorious climate. The plain fact is that there is no such thing as a climate.
She wears no make-up whatever, and, however plainly she may feel it her duty to dress in these days, her clothes are cut by a master and an excessively modern one at that; there is none of the Victorian built-up effect, to which our own grandes dames cling as to the rock of ages, about Madame d'Haussonville.
Our view was well summarised in a typical Victorian song with the refrain: "The mill will never grind again the water that is past." There are many answers to this. Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made.
We have but to contrast ourselves with our early Victorian grandfathers to realize the profound revolution that has taken place in public feeling. It is only with an effort that the practical common sense of the twentieth century can realize the excessive sentimentality of the earlier generation. In those days poetry stood in high and universal esteem. Parents read poetry to their children.
In the introduction of shipbuilding improvements they are without a rival still. Their Bavarian was the first Atlantic liner entirely built of steel; their Parisian the first to be fitted with bilge keels; their Virginian and Victorian the first to use the turbine.
Du Maurier, in drawing children, for instance, secures their prepossessing qualities. Drawing is great when it conveys something which in itself has not an outline like the "atmosphere" of a Victorian drawing-room. Intensely artistic natures make everything very self-expressive without conscious intention.
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