In 1895 Max Nordau's Degeneration was translated and presented to an English readership. Opening with an attack on wealth and luxury, it seems at first to echo a familiar liberal assault on aristocratic decadence. But Nordau's tone soon changes, and for the most part Degeneration forms a long diatribe against 'the new aesthetic tendencies' in contemporary art, in particular mysticism, Impressionism and Symbolism, encompassing the writings of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Ruskin, Zola, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, the music of Wagner, and the art of Burne-Jones and D. G. Rossetti. In a sweeping overview that reproduces the 'hysteria' that he claimed to see all around him, Nordau insists that the work of modern artists displays all the symptoms of morbidmental pathology. It is they who are both causes and symptoms of contemporary decline and who need, like criminals and the insane, to be studied in the light of the developing disciplines of psychology, psychiatry and criminology.

Between January and May in the same year, H. G. Wells's story The Time Machine appeared as a monthly serial in the New Review. It too paints a stark picture of universal decline. But Wells sets the 'dusk of nations' far into the future, and uses the possibilities of both science and fiction to speculate on scenarios beyond the boundaries of the present. The laboratory dissolves as the time machine accelerates into the future, and the process of evolution is imaginatively speeded up.