SHOPPE FEATURES VICTORIAN MORALITY

(Ouray) Along with the ice cream cones, the horseback strolls and the jeep rides this mountain town is offering something truly unique this season…a taste of what it was really like back then. Victorian morals.

Although alive and well in places like Latin America this vague moral code has fallen from favor up North  Clashes with latter day puritans, the emergence of a consumer  middle class and purges peppered with guilt have all but driven this method of living from whispers in the hallway to denials in the alley.

The shoppe itself, aptly called Prince Albert’s Emporium, is named after the husband of Queen Victoria. In it the history buff will find flags from the Opium War, portraits of the queen, works by such great novelists as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Williams Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Sean O’Casey are there too.

 The most fascinating items on display include a cuckoo clock once owned by Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone’s first real estate license. Proprietors Judy and Ed Balfour, along with their cousin the Marquis of Salisbury say the shoppe is doing well with most requests having to do with the surprising social structure of the time.

“The Victorians were very good at towing the line during the day and letting it all hang out after dark,” said Balfour. “The same gentleman who wouldn’t think of going to town without a tie and walking stick had a mistress in the closet. Victorian ladies, who believed chalk-white skin to be a sign of affluence and station might spend the entire afternoon immersed in novels like William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair which satirized English society life.”

“When winter comes we head to Rio de Janeiro,” he said, “where we operate our other business, Ferdinand and Isabella’s Boutique, which focuses on the social mores attached to the Spanish Inquisition. 

“In South America, where Victorian thinking is a day to day occurrence, we had to think of something out of the mainstream. Judy and I think we’ve hit a home run with all the heresy accessories, replica torture chambers, a wide assortment of hair shirts, and gifts of intolerance masked as nationalism. One particularly interesting treasure is a copy of the first Index Librium Prohibitorum translated into Yiddish. We think both stores promote the idea that no matter how hard society demands we play it straight there is always room for a little fun.”

– Jack Spratt

“Democracy and stupidity just don’t mix.”  – Alex Hamilton