VICTORIAN AGE'S GREATNESS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23351, 17 November 1937, Page 9

VICTORIAN AGE'S GREATNESS

•m Advice to societies formed for the study of English literature that they should not disregard the works of the great authors of the nineteenth cen tury was given by Dr W. R. Inge, president of the English Association, in an address to the Johnson Society of London. Dr Inge said thai all those societies had one object in view—to keep alive the memory and tradition of what was perhaps the most glorious literature in the world except possibly that of Greece, and to prevent it from being forgotten and neglected as it might be, for education was very defective in that way. However much they might love the literature of the eighteenth century, and whatever misguided admiration they might have for the productions of the modernists, his advice to them was hot to disregard the literature of the last century The Victorian age was probably the very greatest in English literature. The great Victorian novelists had a nobleness which was lamentably wanting now.