A bassinette (generally spelled ‘bassinet’) was an oblong wicker basket with a hood at one end, used as a cradle or a pram. Virginia Woolf has them decorating a statue with out-of-control Victorian ornamentation.
Crystal Palace was a real glass palace, built by the Victorians for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Â To give you an idea of their sense of proportion, half the vast building was dedicated to show-casing undoubted Victorian brilliance, and the other half to show-casing whatever the rest of the world could come up with to compete. Â Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930s and I knew a man who as a boy saw great globs of molten glass land in his garden as the thing exploded into flame.
‘Draped about a vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were widow’s weeds and bridal veils; hooked on to other excrescences were crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets…’
Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. Rachel Bowlby, Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992, p. 222 and note on p. 334
