The Victorians had what they called a cult of Beauty, with a capital B. While they watched industrialism make their world increasingly drab and polluted, the rationalism that promoted it moved them steadily further away from the otherworldly cults proffered by religion. Lacking cult films to go to, or an Internet to feed them cult celebrities, what they had left to worship was Beauty. Poets sang to it; painters—academic or pre-Raphaelite—struggled to embody it on canvas; William Morris revolutionized home décor by marketing it. Rationalist men, maneuvering freely among the less mentionable parts of the world, might scoff at Beauty, but respectable women flocked to its shrines. (Things were somewhat different in Paris—but... More >>>