The Green Carnation

[elaby]

I've been reading The Green Carnation, a book that was originally published anonymously in 1894 and which is about characters who are essentially Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. According to Wikipedia, the book was scandalous, but as far as I've read, I'm not really sure why. Unless being a veiled fictional story about a living person is scandalous. Anyway, so far, it's pretty much one of those Victorian novels where people sit around and expound about their opinions on life, the universe, and everything. While this is intellectually stimulating, it's only entertaining if you're in the right mood. I have been, luckily :)

Lord Reggie, the Lord Alfred Douglas character, has only once so far reminded me of me, but it was in a very funny passage. Mrs. Windsor (the "she" in the first line), at whose cottage the main characters are staying, thinks that Lord Reggie is going to propose to another of the guests.

"Something has happened," she thought. "Can Reggie have said anything already?"

She walked into the breakfast-room, where she found Lord Reggie alone.

He was holding up a table-spoon filled with marmalade to catch the light from a stray sunbeam that filtered in through the drawn blinds, and wore a rapt look, a "caught up" look, as Mrs. Windsor would have expressed it.

"Good morning," he said softly. "Is not this marmalade Godlike? This marvellous, clear, amber glow, amber with a touch of red in it, almost makes me believe in an after life. Surely, surely marmalade can never die!"

"I must have been mistaken," Mrs. Windsor thought, as she expressed her sense of the eternity of jams in general in suitable language.

*giggles*

Comments

[janeturenne.livejournal.com]

Gawd, I love the Victorians so much! "Suitable language" for expressing "the eternity of jams"...adorable!

[elaby.livejournal.com]

ME TOO, I tell you what. They just talk the best way ever.

[elaineofshalott]

Hahahahaha, amazing. I seem to recall another Victorian character from a different book, expounding upon the way a rose may be a suggestion of the existence of the divine. Perhaps both characters were taking the same drugs. ;)

[elaby.livejournal.com]

*cackles* You know, I think you're onto something XD

[coastal-spirit.livejournal.com]

That does, indeed, sound like something you'd do and say. *huggles*

[elaby.livejournal.com]

:3 *glomps* I giggled when I read it, thinking that marmalade is probably very pretty in the sunlight like that!