Read about the Victorians and Victorian Britain. Decide what words should be used in the gaps 1-15. ONLY ONE WORD in each gap. -- Revitalizing the Victorians We tend 1. .......... think we know the Victorians: sombre, sanctimonous and easily scandalised, constrained by tight corsets and stiff upper-lips; their Britain one of smog, slums and dark Satanic mills, reigned over by a mournful sovereign. It’s how we see them in Charles Dickens novels, Sunday-night dramas and sepia-tinted photographs of our stern, unsmiling ancestors. But a fascinating new exhibition opening at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum this autumn, Colour Revolution, wants us to think again – to see the Victorians not in the monochrome misery of our imagening, but in the vivid multi-colour of their reality. „We’ve got bright purple shoes, bright pink and orange striped socks for men… and this beautiful lady’s day dress that, when you see it in the daylight, is like electric purple, a colour we don’t associate 2. .......... nice young ladies,” reveals curator Matthew Winterbottom. In fact, the many and varied pieces the Ashmolean have assembled, 3. .......... items of dress to jewellery, home decor and art, are in such bright, eye-popping shades, that once you’ve seen them, to call the Victorians dour and dull, and their Britain bleak, would be little short of a blatant lie. So why do we? „It’s the Victorian 4. .......... who help propagate this idea,” Mathhew explains, acknowledging that Dickens, and his depictions of polluted cities, child labour and lives of distressing poverty, probably had more to do with our enduring image of his era than anyone else. „We tend to take the popular 19th-century literature absolutely at 5. .......... value, but they are exaggerated descriptions,” he points out. Indeed, Dickens’ express purpose in using his stories to shine a spotlight on social deprivation was to push his comfortable, middle-class readership into supporting reform. There certainly were filthy slums and dire poverty, but as Matthew adds, „not all of life was like that.” Our perception of the period stretching from Queen Victoria’s accession 6. .......... the throne in 1837 to her death in 1901 has 7. .......... skewed by other things, too – those sepia photographs, for instance, which give us 8. .......... feel for the vibrant colours that lay behind the camera; and the fading of once rich or flamboyant interior schemes, now lacking much of their original impact, if they haven’t been lost completely. The Ashmolean’s exhibition provides something of a reality check, revealing that if you found yourself transported back in time to a Victorian city, the scene confronting you would be ablaze with colour – thanks largely to the invention of the first synthetic dyes, commercially available from the 1850s, making colour accessible to the masses. From the advertising posters on the walls and products in the shop windows, to women’s dresses and the wallpaper in their sitting rooms, Victorian Britain was bright. So 9. .......... so that some foreign visitors cringed. One, observing ladies’ gowns in „really fericious violet, purple or poppy red silks, grass-green dresses decorated with flowers, azure blue scarves and dresses of purple silk, very shiny so that they reflect the light dazzlingly” was revolted. „The glare and glitter is brutal”, he declared. Looking back from the 21st century at the violently colourful fashion, you might well be of a similar mind. But you won’t be able to think of the Victorian period as dark and dingy again. All of which prompts us to ask: are there other misconceptions about the age that we ought to leave behind? Most definitely, it turns out. Queen Victoria may have spent the second half of her life garbed in black gowns like the one the Ashmolean has 10. .......... display, in mourning for her beloved husband Prince albert, but, say her biographers, she was not the miserable monarch we are too apt to think her. It’s doubtful that she ever uttered the immortal words „we are not amused” – in fact, she usually was. Her lively sense of humour never left her, and the Queen enjoyed all kinds of jokes, even risqué ones. Her courtiers and grandchildren alike record innumerable occasions when she laughed „till she was red in the face and even till she cried”. The stiff, unsmiling photographs of her as a rotund, middle-aged widow have a lot to answer 11. .......... But we should be wary of assuming that a stern face on any Victorain sitter says something about their personality or past sorrows, for historians point out that studio photography simply inherited its etiquette from painted portraiture, where the tradition was for subjects to adopt a serious expression. Early on, it was a matter of practicality, too, as shots couldn’t be snapped in an instant, and fixedly holding a grin in place was not much fun. Actually, far from being mirthless, ou 19th-century forebears knew how to enjoy themselves – and thanks to new laws on working hours and statutory holidays, many had more leisure time to fill than 12. .......... before. Cast off your mental images of prim and proper Victorians gathered around the piano, and public commitments to temperance; and think instead of Saturday nights spent in crowded gin palaces, tucking 13. .......... curry and enjoying raucous sing-alongs in music halls, where patrons would also roar with laughter and delight at everything from cross-dressing comedians to contortionists and tightrope walkers. Think of rowdy football matches, and the thrills and spills of theme parks. An early form of log-flume was lauded in 1899 as an opportunity for punters to „indulge in the British pastime of shouting” – hardly suggestive of a strait-laced, laughter-less generation. As for their supposed prudishness, that, too, is something of a myth. There’s absolutely no evidence the Victorians shrouded their table or piano legs for the sake of modesty – though they believed the puritanical Americans did, and scoffed 14. .......... them for it! In fact, dig deeper into Victorian Britain and you have to challenge all sorts of preconceptions. The era saw the election to Parliament of the first MP with Asian heritage, Indian-born university professor Dadabhai Naoroji, who stood for the Liberal party with the support of Florence Nightingale. It saw the ordination of the first black Anglican bishop, Samuel Crowther. And it boasted some successful female businesswomen: from the Marchioness of Londonderry, masterminding the expansion of her coal empire in northern England, to Lady Charlotte Guest, running her late husband’s vast ironworks in Wales. „Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence,” Dickens’ sinister lawyer Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, and when it comes to his age, it’s 15. .......... time we heeded his advice. The Ashmolean exhibition is the ideal place to start.
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