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Saturday, May 26, 2012

VICTORIA's CHILDREN : skygods versus earthlings

      Queen Victoria's long reign is frequently divided into two periods.
       The Early Victorian Age was from 1837 when she became Queen until 1870 and the end of her 10 years of mourning over the death of her husband Albert.
       1870 is generally regarded as both  the low point - and turning point - of her popularity.

      Because in the second period, Victoria I became uniquely popular world wide.
      So while this period from 1870 to her death in 1901, is usually labelled as The Late Victorian Age, it doesn't represent a diminishment of the age.
      Rather - and rather ironically - it came to represent what we think of today as characteristic of the most exuberant form of Victorianism.
    Part of the reasons for that characteristic exuberant flavour was the astonishing technological breakthroughs made in the 1870s and 1880s in many different areas of daily life.
    It was Queen Victoria's unfailing optimism and unflagging interest in new inventions that made these potentially-disturbing new machines socially respectable in this extremely carefully cosseted age.
   SVE is particularly interested in the scientists and technologists of this late victorian period, the generation born between 1870 and 1901, Victoria's children :  *skygod technology versus earthling science* .
    As I like to say, SVE is all about those scientists born after the birth of the dynamo and dead before the birth of disco : the men and a few women who ran our world between 1939-1945, if not before that, and who dominated intellectually until the mid-1960s ...

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