The fashionable substitute for belief
 

I was a little perplexed to read the other day that St. Bartholomews Church in Snuffy Errod held a flower festival last week.

Nothing strange in that, I hear you say, and ordinarily I would agree with you. Were it not for the fact that among the Aisle displays of horticultural dexterity which interpreted the works of C.S.Lewis (Narnia) Paul Bunyan (Pilgrims Progress) and Dickens (Christmas Carol) was an entry celebrating the work of that well known son of the church Oscar Wilde.

Yes, that's right, the same chap who was condemned to two years imprisonment with hard labour for having the temerity to be honest in public about his emotions. The same chap who was, no doubt, condemned from the pulpit in the very same church where this tribute stood. How times change

Two films, A west end Musical and more biographies than you can shake a stick at, every word still in print a century after your death. Pace Oscar, you will never be forgotten.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Mabe society is like the humble daisy opening and closing depending on the season light and warmth. We came out of the dark into the light but soon could be back in the dark again.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Maybe, Spuggie, Maybe. But not if I have anything to do with it!

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Oscar Wilde was his own worst enemy. If he hadn't taken the bait and took the Marquis of Queensberry to court for leaving a note at his club, which was addressed to Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite [sic], he would have been able to carry on with his life untouched and feted by a society that worshipped success. The same couldn't be said for the ordinary people who had a similar orientation but who were regularly gaoled, and before that hung for the same 'crime'.

Was the display made up of green carnations?

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

I don't honestly know, I only read about it. But it would be nice to think that it was.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Interesting dilemma. But wasn't there a case in the papers recently that touched on this very subject???

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Lewis Carrol was a man of dubious morals, but it doesn't diminish from his skill as a writer of great children's books.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Apparently his interest in Alice Liddell, the model for Alice through the Looking Glass, was rather a strange one, and so were the photographs he took of her posed semi naked.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Of course not - Jonathan King wrote some good songs and Gary Glitter was popular as well. The fact that they are both disgusting perverts doesn't detract from the contributions they made to music, but I bet they don't sell much of it any more

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

No one knows. They are quite ethereal, but by today's way of thinking rather odd to say the least.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Lewis Carrol was certainly an oddity. His relationship with the Liddel Family was equally odd. This much was recognised by Mrs Liddel who actually forbade Dodgson (Carrol) from seing her daughters, though this was after the publication of Alice in Wonderland. To know what Mrs Liddel made of Dodgsons behaviour, one would have to think like a Victorian upper middle-class matron.

The Victorian moral landscape is complex and often contradictory. What was unacceptable in public was often de-riguer in private life and their attitudes towards the expression of both sexuality and the emotions was so far removed from what we now expect as the norm as to make analysis and understanding nigh on impossible. Similarly their attitude towards, and the values they placed on, children was often shockingly different to to our own.

Did Dodgson harbour peadophilliac fantasies about Alice? Did he ever act out those fantasies? We will probably never know, since his neice edited and excised large portions of his diaries after his death.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief