“[Harold Acton] was accommodated in his college, Christ Church, not in the ‘coveted rooms in Tom Quad, Peckwater or Canterbury’, but in the “grimly Victorian Gothic’ Meadow Building, erected to the designs of the Ruskinian architects Thomas Deane & Son in 1863. From this he took his inspiration. ‘I painted my rooms lemon yellow and filled them with Victorian bric-a-brac - artificial flowers and fruit and lumps of glass, a collection of paperweights imprisoning bubbles that never broke and flowers that never faded.’ Acton was soon imitated - both in life and in literature. Around him gathered acolytes such as Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Osbert Lancaster and Henry Yorke. In literature his rooms were memorialised as those occupied by Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), rooms which contained ‘a strange jumble of objects - a harmonium in a gothic case, an elephant’s foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit, two disproportionately large Sevres vases’.”
- The Victorians since 1901: histories, representations and revisions
by Miles Taylor, Michael Wolff