VICTORIANS LIVE: Introduction

Extract

For this issue, Victorians Live takes a global perspective on the afterlife of the Victorians. Using a fine nineteenth-century phrase, Margaret Harris writes of “Victorian Vestiges” in Australia. Carole Silver describes the mix of concealment and display in South Africa's dealing with its Victorian heritage. My essay on a recent American exhibition of the work of Morris & Co. shows the influence of this representative Victorian in California, as filtered through the collection of Henry Huntington for his Library in southern California and with additions for this show by contemporary California collectors. That Morris continues to live into our time is vividly shown in the venues of his global exhibitions, in Australia in a converted nineteenth-century powerhouse, at Yale in the modernist masterpiece of the twentieth-century architect, Louis Kahn.