‘Keynotes’ of Decadence, 1894–95

Abstract

Whereas the introduction of Decadence to popular genres had provoked no critical outrage in the cases of John Davidson’s North Wall or Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore’s Comedy of Masks, this same combination elicited virulent attacks by early 1895. Something had happened between the publication of Dowson and Moore’s novel at the end of 1893 and the beginning of 1895 to prompt the emergence of an aggressive counter-Decadent discourse. That something was the launching of the Keynotes series and the Yellow Book, both issued from the Bodley Head in 1894. Though, as I have suggested throughout this study, Decadence had been explored in the 1880s and early 1890s in a wide variety of fiction and periodicals, it was through the efforts of publisher Lane that Decadence found its most visible ‘public forum’.¹ While neither the books in the Keynotes series nor the Yellow Book ever achieved sales figures nearing those of large commercial publishers and popular periodicals, the notoriety surrounding them garnered them much attention in the popular press. In 1894 and 1895, Punch, for example, satirized Bodley Head books, the Yellow Book, and the New Woman and Decadent writers associated with them, ensuring that, even had one not read these publications, one knew what they were like. Soon, Decadence superseded other literary controversies in the public’s attention and the Bodley Head and the Yellow Book became synonymous with this literary movement.