Jackson's Nineties

 I spent much of the train journey to and fro Worthing reading Holbrook Jackson's The 1890s (a book I mentioned briefly here). Jackson – writer, journalist, publisher and bibliophile – is all but forgotten today, but, to judge by The 1890s, he is well worth a look. It's a notably well written and insightful survey of a fascinating decade, tracing the many, often contradictory forces at work, from the Aesthetic movement (more of an 1880s phenomenon) and the Decadence (owing so much to France) to movements for social reform, and – both potent forces – patriotism and imperialism. And it's a decade that, with remarkable symmetry, breaks into two halves in its middle year, with the calamitous trial and downfall of Oscar Wilde.
  The early chapters on the leading artistic magazines of the period, notably The Yellow Book and The Savoy, are interesting, but contain rather too many lists of contributors, many of whom are quite forgotten now, even if their names were still alive in 1913 when The 1890s was published. Jackson gets into his stride with the chapters devoted to individual writers, beginning with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley: each of those chapters is a brilliant evocation and a judicious study of its subject. Slow reader that I am, I've only just got to the chapter on Max Beerbohm, which I expect to be every bit as good. 
  Talking of Oscar Wilde, I learn from The 1890s that his last published work was the second of two letters he wrote to The Daily Chronicle about the terrible conditions in English prisons. It begins
'SIR – I understand that the Home Secretary's Prison Reform Bill is to be read this week for the first or second time, and as your journal has been the one paper in England that has taken a real and vital interest in this important question, I hope that you will allow me, as one who has had long personal experience of life in an English gaol, to point out what reforms in our present stupid and barbarous system are urgently necessary.' 
Wilde sent this letter from the Villa Bourget in the sleepy coastal village of Berneval-sur-Mer, outside Dieppe, where he also wrote 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' and thought about writing a new play, to be called Ahab and Jezebel – but he never got round to it, so that second letter to The Daily Chronicle was the last thing he published. According to Jackson, it was printed under the heading 'Don't Read This if you Want to be Happy Today' – a headline that could be reused on a grand scale in today's papers, and indeed could serve as the masthead motto of at least one.