London in the 1890s: a cultural history

Abstract

The London of the 1890s was a place of great change, when the seeds of modernism were sown and figures such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Beardsley, Kipling, Gladstone, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, among others, initiated the movements and debates, the great shifts in behaviour and thought, that created the world we know now. Karl Beckson shows in this broad cultural history how outcries against obscene art and behaviour; anxiety about national decline in the face of emerging superpowers; bitter debate about women's roles and behaviour; fear of a dangerous underclass festering in the urban slums; misgivings about the price of progress; multicultural enthusiasms; and vogues for a new age of mysticism and the occult all contributed to the decline of Victorian values and repression, and the emergence of a more modern and equal society.

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