Subtitled “the art of revival”, the “Victoriana” exhibition at London’s Guildhall Art Gallery (until 8 December) makes no mention of the nineteenth century’s refashioning of Gothic, Classical and Renaissance architecture and design. Instead it is devoted to the work of modern artists who have been inspired, sometimes loosely, by Victorian themes or, as the accompanying information panels too often put it, “obsessions”.The result is rather like an over-stuffed parlour. There is nothing here on architecture and little on industry – the subject of religion, or even of religious doubt, is a gaping void. It is the clutter and bric-a-brac, the Grand Guignol aspect of the nineteenth-century aesthetic that seems most to appeal to the artists e