YGS Lecture: The Georgian Revival in Victorian Britain: Thackeray, Rossetti, and Millais

Join us on Saturday 14 November as Professor Liz Prettejohn (University of York) discusses the Georgian revival in Victorian Britain.

In early Victorian Britain, Georgian style was held in low esteem, much as the Victorian visual arts were themselves reviled in the early modernist period. Towards the middle of Victoria’s reign, however, there was a notable revival of interest in the visual arts of the eighteenth century, as what had previously seemed merely old and dowdy came instead to look charmingly ‘old-fashioned’. The nineteenth century was notoriously an age of historical revivals, but the enthusiasm for Georgian visual culture was something different, as fashions in dress and interior decoration responded to the new fascination: people wished not merely to know more about their Georgian ancestors, but to live the Georgian life by immersing themselves in the visual world of ‘one hundred years ago’.

This lecture will explore how writers such…