The lecturer who mentioned this was fond of quoting such a verdict of Vanity Fair. It said, in so many words, that Thackeray's libel against womankind in the book was not Becky Sharp but Amelia Sedley, because she was so wet.
More support for my argument that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we imagine.
We have the picture we do of 19th-century England because we are so influenced by Edwardian writers who, so modern and liberated themselves, were keen to make fun of their parents and grandparents.
The 1950s have suffered in the same way. The writers who came after them were nearly as modern and liberated as the Edwardians and so were equally anxious to blacken the name of their forebears.
I thought of this when I went to the British Newspaper Archive to look what reviewers made of The Intruder, the film I blogged about the other day, when it came out in 1953.
M.H. of the Picturegoer (24 October 1953) began his review:
Hold your groans about yet another war film. This one really is different. The war flashbacks are just the frame for an enthralling postwar story about an ex-soldier who goes to the dogs.
What turns a good combat-man into a bitter delinquent? Colonel Jack Hawkins makes it his conscience-stricken duty to find out.
And to make sure you had got the message, M.H. concluded:
If you're tired of war films, this is the one to kill the yawns.
And M.H. was not the only critic to comment on how few women there are in the film, though the brief turns by Susan Shaw and Dora Bryan are both excellent to my later eyes.
But the good news is that you can judge The Intruder for yourself. Talking Pictures TV is showing the film again at 2210 on Thursday 11 January.
I like your point about the self valorisation of 'liberated' generations drawing unfavourable contrasts with their parents. I think it goes into the 1960s, too. My own observation about the post-war generation which came to young adulthood in the late '60s/early '70s is that what made them really 'liberated' was not so much their own revolutionary initiative, but they had been brought up by parents who had gone through the Second World War, which made them quietly (but less demonstratively) more socially relaxed. The MPs who passed the socially progressive legislation of the 1960s and 70s tended to be part of this WWII cohort, too.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I have a strong sense that the Fifties were a more interesting decade than we give them credit for.
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