The urgency and persuasiveness that things Victorian have achieved in the general imagination and public taste must be a matter of interest to every-one concerned with letters, the theater, fashions, decorations, architecture, and antiquities generally and their influence on the immediate present. The last several years have witnessed in America such a reversion to Victorianism expressed through so many mediums that it would seem to be a good deal more than a fad which might manifest itself in a momentary style of women's dress or a fugitive fashion in novels. The vogue is universal; it embraces almost all forms of artistic and creative expression, and it has been of considerable duration. No single whim or momentary popular success could account for its dimensions, and the obvious explanation is that people everywhere are sorry they ever got out of the Victorian way of life and habit of thinking and damn well wish they could, in some degree, recapture them.
As a result, the triple-decker romantic novel with a period background, one of the best recognized of all hallmarks of Victorian taste, is available by the score, and no publisher will contemplate a spring or fall list without one. Victorian styles in women's clothes manifest themselves to whatever degree the style arbiters in the field feel it is safe to leave themselves open to their absurdities, and the hoop skirt, bustle, tippet, and such extremes may be achieved any moment. Muffs, puffed sleeves, pancake and sailor hats, and, of course, long skirts are a modern constant after years in the discard. Victorian houses, where they can be found in good neighborhood and states of repair, are seldom even advertised, so great is the demand, and Victorian furniture of all sorts and all decades from the incredible curlicues and cumbersome pieces of the forties to the beautiful adaptations known as modern Victorian are the best movers in any decorating shop from Boston to San Francisco.
With this background, New York first-nighters would be surprised if, during a given theater season, they didn't insinuate themselves into their seats to watch the curtain go up on some scene, musical, historical, comical, tragical, laid either in the United States or England during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century and awash, therefore, with Victorian atmosphere of one decade or another. The trend started a number of years back with the very arche-type of Victorian plays, Victoria Regina, and the last couple of seasons have seen the period flower in such costume pieces in various categories of entertainment as Up in Central Park, Strange Bedfellows, Lady Windermere's Fan, The Heiress, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Earlier there were Life with Father, Charley's Aunt, Harriet, Bloomer Girl, Another Part of the Forest, I Remember Mama, and probably a number of others unserved by memory at the moment.
It has been a field day for stage designers and costumers whose properties have been plush and ormolu, antimacassars and Prince Albert coats, love seats, coal-oil student lamps, hansom carriages, frilly parasols, flowered waistcoats, and Anne of Austria coiffures. Professional Victorians like Cecil Beaton have romped happily through crystal and crinolines, and amateur Victorians like Dorothy Kilgallen, the nonstop columnist and feature writer, have indulged a fine fancy for stuffed canaries sous cloche, potted palms, and other theatrical properties purchased when they are no longer in requisition by Broadway producers. From the closing of Strange Bedfellows Miss Kilgallen salvaged a fine circular lounge with tufted cushions and a forest of rubber plants growing up out of the center, that had ornamented the stage set representing a Nob Hill senator's mansion in the San Francisco nineties. It is useless for this department to pretend that it, too, did not have its eye on this decorative triumph, but was inopportunely out of town when the show closed.
If anyone imagines that the Victorian party, so far as Broadway is concerned, is over, he has another think coming, for at least three nineteenth-century shows are opening out of town as this is being written, and heaven knows how many more in script form are in producers' offices or in process of writing. They are Life with Mother, Where's Charley?, a musical version of Charley's Aunt with Ray Bolger, and The Leading Lady, which promises to be a fine thing by Ruth Gordon and which concerns itself with the American theater scene in the nineties.
It's a brave era and no mistake among the purveyors of stage sets which include in their economy crystal lighting fixtures in the grand manner and period-design telephones for comedy scenes.
Every so often there raises its silly old head the controversy about the origin of the cocktail. You know, the barmaid stuck a feather in the glass or somebody remarked that it was hotter than a Mexican volcano named Xochtil. More instructive, this department believes, is the story of the rise to popularity of the short mixed drink and its achievement of social respectability. The fact of the matter is that the cocktail first achieved a widespread vogue as, of all things, an after-breakfast drink. So help us, the original cocktail hour was about ten in the morning during the sixties and seventies of the last century, when businessmen in downtown New York discovered they were not going to last until lunchtime and clapped on their square bowlers with the conventional excuse that they were just going across the street to chat with Jay Gould or around the corner to the Subtreasury on business. They made a beeline for the then functioning equivalent of Farrish's or Whyte's and, after hoisting two or three with friends, also absent from their desks on urgent matters of commerce or finance, were able to deal suitably with the morning mail.
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