FAR OFF THINGS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 8 September 1938, Page 9

FAR OFF THINGS

TRACES OF VICTORIANISM LEFT [From Our Own Correspondent] LONDON, 11th August. One of the most amusing—and instructive —books I have picked up for some time is Mr Alan Bott’s “Our Fathers.” Its survey of “the manners and customs of the ancient Victorians” is, apart from a shrewdly incisive literary analysis, mainly pictorial. Never could one suspect how wide is the gulf between post-War England and the 1850-70 s. Actually I was under the firm impression that the pictorial examples

were all comic ones. They are not. They are just reprints of perfectly serious contemporary Victorian descriptive drawings. It needs more than the queer-looking sartorial and barbering fashions to explain this delusion. Our whole angle of life has utterly changed. “The only traces of Victorianisb left in the front window of English life,” says the author, “are our English Sunday in the towns, some mildly snobbish hierarchies in the countryside, a Gladstonian unction among elder statesmen, and the Church’s outlook on divorce.” SPREADING THE LIGHT Perhaps the most bizarre instance of Tiur twentieth-century divorce from Victorianism, given in this literary cav-

alcade, is one concerned with the ma-chine-gun. General Sir lan Hamilton, in our own epoch, has called the ma-chine-gun one of the twin inventions of the Evil One. He was writing from Gallipoli after the epic of the beaches. In “Our Fathers” there is an extract, with illustrating woodcut, from a perfectly serious ancl solemn newspaper report. The newspaper cutting describes the new maxim gun, its weight, rate of fire, and other technical details. The illustration shows H. M. Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” celebrity., manipulating the gun with the inventor. Hiram Maxim, looking proudly on. The newspaper cutting proceeds: “The explorer, Mr H. M. Stanley, visited Dulwich to examine the gun, and, after firing 333 shots in half a minute, said:

‘lt is a fine weapon, and will be invaluable in subduing the heathen’.” We have at all events shed that form of religious fervour.