The Eighteen Nineties

The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson

The Eighteen Nineties* (1913), Holbrook Jackson's critical history of the decade, argues that the period was neither purely decadent nor simply frivolous but a genuine cultural renaissance driven by two intertwined impulses: an aesthetic revolt toward artifice, sensation, and "fine shades" of style, and a parallel surge of social idealism—socialism, feminism, and reform—both expressions of a society testing the limits of convention as the century closed. Jackson opens by examining the era's obsessive self-awareness, epitomized by the catchphrases "fin de siècle" and "New" (New Woman, New Hedonism, New Drama), which were applied to everything from marriage to bicycling. He traces the decade's restless experimentalism—new restaurants, cycling crazes, popular songs like "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"—as symptomatic of a society shaking off Victorian solemnity, while noting continuities with the socially earnest 1880s (dock strikes, the Fabian Society, the birth of the Independent Labour Party). A central chapter distinguishes the decade's three main currents: the so-called Decadence, a new "Sense of Fact" in realist literature, and a Transcendental social idealism—currents that overlapped constantly rather than existing as separate camps. He surveys the extraordinary crop of literary talent the Nineties either launched or reinvigorated (Kipling, Wells, Shaw, Yeats, Barrie, Conrad, Gissing, Moore, Hardy's late masterpieces) and the flourishing of periodicals—above all *The Yellow Book* and *The Savoy*—as the chief organs of the "new" writing, alongside publishers John Lane, Elkin Mathews, and Leonard Smithers. Jackson devotes extended attention to Oscar Wilde as the decade's central and most misunderstood figure: a dandy of intellect who converted personality itself into an art form, rising from mocked aesthete to triumphant playwright (*Lady Windermere's Fan*, *A Woman of No Importance*, *An Ideal Husband*, *The Importance of Being Earnest*) before his 1895 trial and imprisonment shattered public tolerance for the whole movement almost overnight. He reads Wilde's late works—*De Profundis*, *The Ballad of Reading Gaol*—as revealing a suppressed moral seriousness beneath the poses. Equally prominent is Aubrey Beardsley, presented as decadence's purest and most temporally bound artist: a self-taught draughtsman whose black-and-white art fused Japanese line, Burne-Jones's languor, and Watteau's rococo into something wholly new, deliberately artificial rather than naturalistic, and inseparable from literary and morbid influences rather than direct observation of life. Jackson stresses Beardsley's personal charm and courage in illness, his deathbed Catholic conversion, and his anguished last request that his more explicit drawings be destroyed—complicating any simple reading of him as a cynical provocateur. The book explores decadence itself as a psychological and stylistic phenomenon: perversity, artificiality, egoism, and curiosity, traced to French sources (Gautier, Baudelaire, the Goncourts, Huysmans's *À Rebours*) and misapplied borrowings from Walter Pater's "Conclusion" to *The Renaissance* and, later, Nietzsche. Jackson insists this was less senile exhaustion than surfeit-driven hunger for new sensation, essentially a demand for expanded consciousness and personal power rather than mere degeneration—citing Ernest Dowson's "Cynara" as its emblematic lyric of insatiable, guilty desire. He surveys satirical responses (*The Green Carnation*, *The Autobiography of a Boy*) that mocked decadent affectation even as they registered its cultural weight, and pairs Wilde/Beardsley's individualist "art of shocking" with a second, socially motivated strain of provocation from Shaw, Grant Allen, and others influenced by Ibsen, aimed at jolting bourgeois morality toward reform. A striking passage catalogs how many of the decade's iconic figures died young—Beardsley, Dowson, Wilde, Crackanthorpe, Johnson—reinforcing the sense of the Nineties as a compressed, burning moment. Countering the popular image of the era as mere aesthetic self-indulgence, Jackson highlights its urban "New Urbanity"—poets like Symons, Le Gallienne, Davidson, and above all Max Beerbohm celebrating city and artificiality as legitimate subjects, with Beerbohm epitomizing civilized, ironic dandyism of temperament rather than dress, and functioning as the decade's benign comic conscience. Jackson also charts the Celtic, Scottish, and Welsh literary revivals (Yeats, Fiona Macleod/William Sharp) as parallel regional expressions of the same restless creative energy, alongside a genuine sociological awakening (Charles Booth's poverty surveys, the Fabians, the Webbs). The narrative's turning point is 1895: Wilde's downfall coincides with the ascendance of jingoistic imperialism (the Jameson Raid, the Daily Mail, the Boer War), which Jackson treats as decadence's mirror-image collapse—both movements nihilistic when severed from the era's genuine social-reform current. He closes this stretch of analysis by proposing that decadence was ultimately a form of "soul-sickness" cured only by mysticism, situating the period's aesthetic extremity as a necessary, if excessive, phase in a broader spiritual and cultural regeneration rather than simple cultural decline.

By Holbrook Jackson · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary History, Cultural History, Art History · 21 chapters · 109,147 words

First lines

In the year 1895 Max Beerbohm announced, how whimsically and how ironically it is not necessary to consider, that he felt himself a trifle outmoded. "I belong to the Beardsley period," he said. The Eighteen Nineties were then at their meridian; but it was already the afternoon of the Beardsley period. That very year Aubrey Beardsley's strange black and white masses and strong delicate lines disappeared from _The Yellow Book_, and he only contributed to the first few numbers of _The Savoy_, which began in 1896. Fatal disease was overtaking him, and remorse. Aubrey Beardsley actually abandoned his period in the evening of its brief day, and when he died, in 1898, the Beardsley period had almost become a memory. But, after all, Aubrey Beardsley was but an incident of the Eighteen Nineties, and only relatively a significant incident. He was but one expression of _fin de siècle_ daring, of a bizarre and often exotic courage, prevalent at the time and connected but indirectly, and often negatively, with some of the most vital movements of a decade which was singularly rich in ideas, personal genius and social will. Aubrey Beardsley crowded the vision of the period by the peculiarity of his art rather than by any need there was of that art to make the period complete. He was, therefore, not a necessity of the Eighteen Nineties, although his appearance in the decade was inevitable; indeed he was so essentially _fin de siècle_ that one can say of him with more confidence than of any other artist of the decade that his appearance at any other time would have been inopportune.

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1890s · Victorian era · fin de siècle · literary history · cultural history · aestheticism · decadence · modernism · British culture · art history · poetry · drama

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