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
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Yes Willow, not on line it was in the Sunday Times magazine years ago, but they must be still out there.

She was half dressed and draped in chiffon with a little posy of flowers and a garland. If someone took photographs of my neice like that, even if he was a Reverend, I'd be straight on the phone to the police.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

She looked about six at the time, and although she was posed artfully in a garden and a studio, she was semi naked, with her bottom half drapen in transparent chiffon.

By today's standards they would be unacceptable. They make the sick American child beauty pagents look tame.:(

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

I agree that they are sick rindy. Why would you want to do that to your little girl?

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

No even by Victorian standards apparently, eyebrows were raised about the sensuality of the photograhs and his obsession with the child, which as you said ceased when she reached puberty.

These weren't innocent 'kid on a rug' photographs that most of us had to endure, and are brought out to tease us later, they are as disturbing as the sexualisation of the American child beauty contests, were girls aged as young as three are made up to look like grown women and paraded in bathing suits.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

If you do a search on Google images for Alice Liddell, it does bring up some of the photograhs but not the mose provocative ones.

I worked on the film 'Dreamchild', with Coral Brown playing the part of the adult Alice Liddell. She certainly had an interesting and colourful life.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Well l dressed her, she wasn't a friend........more of her skivvy, though she was very nice and I loved her in 'The Killing of Sister George.'

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Funnily enough, she sat for another set of photographs by Dodgson when she was in her early twenties (1870), very prim and proper. She also sat for Julia Margaret Cameron.

Interesting thread wander, but this thread was originally about dear Oscar.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Blimey who needs the web when a-bob is on hand. Got to hand it to you thats some going.

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief
 

Not really.

A spray of green carnations, perhaps a copy of De Profundis draped in a bit of lavender silk in a Church window= change in attitudes. End of.:)

He was dearer to me than you though. I have vivid recollections of meeting him in a house of ill repute whilst I was delivering a telegram. Or perhaps my pills need changing again. ;)

Re: The fashionable substitute for belief