In the 1869 preface to a Book of Wonderful Characters; Memoirs and Anecdotes of Remarkable and Eccentric Persons in All Ages and Countries, an unnamed editor made two claims for the significance of the work. First, the biographies of individuals ‘possessing an eccentricity of character’ had, he wrote, ‘been in all times eagerly sought after by the curious inquirer into human nature’. Eccentricity was a perennially fascinating subject. Second, though, ‘a great change … in the manners and customs of the people of England’ had in recent years rendered the subject of eccentricity yet more acutely interesting: ‘We have nearly lost all, and are daily losing what little remains of, our individuality’, he wrote with alarm; ‘all people and all places seem now to be alike’. This mid-Victorian writer was not alone in fearing himself to be living in an age of decline, as far as eccentricity was concerned. A decade previously, in what is now probably the most frequently cited nineteenth-century dictum on eccentricity, the philosopher John Stuart Mill warned:

Mill's primary concern in his treatise On Liberty (1859) was the extent to which power could rightly be exerted over members of a civilized society; the demise of eccentricity, in his opinion, was a symptom of the tyranny of public opinion being allowed to interfere unjustifiably with the liberty of individuals. The editor of the Book of Wonderful Characters, taking a different angle, blamed the material fruits of the modern industrial age: the railways, the steam press, technologies of mass production.