Introduction

Abstract

The year 1895 marked a watershed moment for late-Victorian literature and culture. Events such as the trial and incarceration of Oscar Wilde and the publication in English translation of Max Nordau’s controversial treatise, Degeneration, epitomized the febrile cultural and social atmosphere in Britain that prevailed as the nineteenth century began to give way to the twentieth. 1895 was a momentous year: amongst the many significant events, it saw the deaths of T. H. Huxley, Louis Pasteur and Alexandre Dumas, and the births of J. Edgar Hoover, Max Horkheimer and F. R. Leavis, and in Paris on 28 December the Lumière brothers premiered their first moving picture. The fin de siècle was, above all, a time beset by doubts in the public consciousness: about social stability; about the endurance of the human race and the planet; about religion; and about the British Empire. The period around 1895 also witnessed the English novel undergoing radical shifts in perspective, in form, and in content, anticipating the modernist novel of the twentieth century.