The Other Time : Use of the Victorian Past in William Plomer's 'Double Lives'

In the space of time between the 1920s and the 1960s the Victorian era stopped being threatening and gradually became something viewed with fondness in England. References to the Victorian past in Double Lives are on the boundary between a cosy turn towards gentrification and a bleak recognition or unknowing reproduction of a world of decay and absence that needs understanding in relation to artistic Modernism. Plomer's account of the relations between different generations in the same family has surprising affinities with relations detectable between colonised people and colonisers.