The triumph of natural penicillin : Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark II

MkII : WWII moral battle over penicillin

Unabashedly I intend my first book, on the unexpected WWII success of the humble little natural penicillin team against the massed forces of artificial penicillin, to be a sentimental work in the full Victorian sense of the word.

110 years before "The Locomotion" , Little Eva Mk I, caused a commotion

Think of it as a new version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, updated 100 years, with Henry Dawson's dying efforts (like that of  Little Eva) moving the unregenerate heart* of Topsy ("John L" Smith) to finally do the world-saving good that only he could do , against the pressures of the Simon Legree-like evil figure of Howard Florey.....

* Hat tip to Jane Tompkins (in her book Sensational Designs) for indirectly suggesting the role of Little Eva for Doctor Dawson.

WWII : Jazz Agers pulled the trigger but Victorians pointed the gun

They pulled WWII's trigger, but didn't aim gun

It is true that most of the people that actually, physically, pulled the triggers in WWII were kids of the Jazz Age, born roughly between the Fall of 1916 and the Fall of 1929. Equally true, and rarely acknowledged then or today, is that most of the people pointing those guns were born in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).

Petain, the supreme leader of Vichy France, pour exemple , was born in 1856 ---- a full sixty years before the start of the Jazz Age. In today's France, he'd be an old age pensioner when that Age began!

Then, as now, men aged roughly between fifty and seventy five ruled all aspects of the world as business CEOs, senior government advisors, defence departments chiefs, media barons or simply as owners of most of the wealth.

Jazz Agers pulled WWII's triggers, but those guns pointed by men with High Victorian Age values...

In WWII terms, the men who started and ran the war were men born in the late Victoria Age. Already fully mature young men, in other words, with a full set of Victorian value, when the Victorian Age faded away in the Great War trenches of Western Europe.

But like silent Shingle viruses inside our bodies, they carried on emanating those Victorian values, under the very noses of the new Jazz Age, until these young Victorian men of 1916 died off as very old Victorian men in the 1960s.

Cut to today and the battle over climate change : young versus old ways of thinking about science and humanity's limits.

Rupert Murdoch, for example, was born in early 1931 and his headmasters were themselves fully mature "Victorian Age" young men when Queen Victoria died 30 years earlier in early 1901.

That is to say that we must never ever forget that the elderly climate deniers of today were educated by teachers themselves raised in the "there are no limits to Man's abilities" values of optimistic Victorian Scientism......

Forgotten by design : Victorians loved Sentimentality as much as Social Darwinism

Victorian Values ???

Thanks to libertarians like Thatcher, Reagan and their rich friends who own big media , most people today regard the Victorians as being obsessed with the values of social darwinism : law of the jungle, might is right, god-on-side-of-big-battalions, survival of the fit, red in tooth and claw , things they claim we have forgotten.

But there is no sign, in fact, that these values are not at least as popular today, as in the good Queen's day.

But what has been forgotten, in fact, is that Victorians (or at least many Victorian women) were opposed to social darwinism and took a "Sentimentalist" view of the value of life, human and non-human.

After all, it was the age of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of Little Nell and of Beautiful Joe ( to use an example particularly close to my home.)

Thomas Moore, the Sentimentalist, was at least as popular as Charles Darwin, the Utilitarian, in their day.

Victorian values ( both set of Victorian values) hung on in the late autumn of Victorianism : those years between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the early 1970s, when Victorian Modernity aka Scientism, still held full sway.

It is often forgotten that Victoria herself was raised as a pre-Victorian and that in fact , the truest Victorians were those who knew no other age (say those born between about 1840 and 1900).

People who were fully grown young people when Victoria died did not die with her as if in some immense funeral pyre, but instead lived on  as full-Victorians, until their own deaths in the 1960s.

Jazz Age kids fought & died in WWII ,yes, but Victorians ran it..

Henry Dawson (1896) and Howard Florey (1898) were both fully Victorian figures: the first representing pre-Great War sentimentality to its fullest, the latter a Social Darwinian from birth till death.

Their monumental clash between 1940 till 1945 was thus a clash of differing Victorian values ---- during the years of WWII --- a time that is incorrectly thought to be well past the Victorian Age.

Florey the Skygod ; Dawson the earthling.

I - on the other hand -will argue with my dying breath that the Victorian Age died with the death of the last Victorian , not at all with the death of the Queen herself....