The Fin de Siècle: 1890s & Late Victorian Culture

“Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world wide web. Conceptualizing expositions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities constitutes a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed in the European metropolis around 1900.” ~Amazon description for Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.

I look forward to this book (coming out in August, 2010). A review should be forthcoming…

projectgutenberg:

Pan stalked into the library and choosing, cat-like, the one spot he should have kept away from, curled up on a handsome book that was lying open on the table and forgot his troubles in sleep.

- Elizabeth Bonsall (illustrator) and Mabel Humphrey, The Book of the Cat (1903) [full text]

Another book to add to the must-read list: The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France - 1885 to World War I.

The front cover of “Our Village” by Miss Mitford; it is a dark greenish colour with gold flowers and gilt lettering.

(via: fuckyeahvictorians:yama-bato)

Cover of Kate Greenaway’s almanack for 1892.

“Kate Greenaway (Catherine Greenaway) (London, 17 March 1846 – 6 November 1901) was an English children’s book illustrator and writer. Her first book, Under The Window (1879), a collection of simple, perfectly idyllic verses about children, was a best-seller.

The Kate Greenaway Medal, established in her honour in 1955, is awarded annually by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK to an illustrator of children’s books. Her paintings were reproduced by chromoxylography, by which the colours were printed from hand-engraved wood blocks by the firm of Edmund Evans. Through the 1880s and 90s, in popularity her only rivals in the field of children’s book illustration were Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, himself also the eponym of a highly-regarded prize medal.

“Kate Greenaway” children, all of them little girls and boys too young to be put in trousers, according to the conventions of the time, were dressed in her own versions of late eighteenth century and Regency fashions: smock-frocks and skeleton suits for boys, high-waisted pinafores and dresses with mobcaps and straw bonnets for girls. The influence of children’s clothes in portraits by British painter John Hoppner (1758–1810) may have provided her some inspiration.

Liberty’s of London adapted Kate Greenaway’s drawings as designs for actual children’s clothes. A full generation of mothers in the liberal-minded “artistic” British circles who called themselves “The Souls” and embraced the Arts and Crafts movement dressed their daughters in Kate Greenaway pantaloons and bonnets in the 1880s and ’90s.” (via)

(via:turnofthecentury)

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) (via thewham)

A question for all of my wonderful new readers/followers...

Who is your favorite author (or literary work) from the late nineteenth century? I would love to know!

10 Must-Read Literary Works of the Decadent Movement:

Or, What Every Modern Decadent Should Have on Their Bookshelf:

Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle De Maupin: A Romance of Love and Passion (1887); novel, 1835.
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Classic Reprint); poetry, 1857.
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo; novel, 1862.
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques; short stories, 1874.
Emile Zola, Nana (Oxford World’s Classics); novel, 1879.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours) (Penguin Classics); novel, 1884.
Richard Krafft-Ebbing, Psychopathia Sexualis; psychology (not technically “literary,” I suppose), 1886.
Rachilde, Monsieur Venus: Roman Materialiste (Texts and Translations) (French Edition); novel, 1889.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; novel, 1891.
Oscar Wilde; Salome: illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley; drama, 1894.

This could easily be a much longer list! What would be on your list?

“Late hours and anxious pursuits exhaust the nervous system and produce disease and premature death. Therefore, the hours of labor and study should be short.”