Colour-coding the Fin de Siècle: the Yellow Book

It may be different in palaeontology or geology, but in the Humanities periodisation is far from an exact science. When asked to do the impossible, and pinpoint the exact moment when a cultural-historical era ends and another begins, literature scholars often resort to quoting Virginia Woolf. In her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), Woolf ironically remarked that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’, separating the new Georgians from the old Edwardians. She was being that specific because she wanted to draw attention to what she called the inevitably ‘arbitrary’ character of historical periodisation: distinguishing distinct eras relies on decisions that can always be called into question, but we cannot do without some compartmentalisation of successive realities if we want to make sense of the unwieldy mass of time that is human history. Even mere decades have gathered associations that have become so fixed to them as to become proverbial, such as ‘the Sixties’ or ‘the Noughties’, although contradictory connotations inevitably operate side by side.

It seems no coincidence that from around the time when Woolf said that ‘human nature changed’, so around 1910, the decade between December 1889 and January 1900 began to be treated as a distinct cultural epoch, known as ‘the Nineties’ for short. A forward-looking Georgian generation was gaining confidence to disown the legacy of the Victorian age and become fully-fledged modernists, but realised that too many literary, artistic and philosophical phenomena in the final years of the nineteenth century did not fit their clichéd view of the Victorian age, by then increasingly dismissed as having mainly produced literature and art that reflected its sexual repression and social conformism. Holbrook Jackson delivered an enduringly relevant study of the period with his The Eighteen Nineties (1911), and defends there his choice to discuss this discrete period by stating that it had ‘already become a distinctive epoch in the minds of those who concern themselves with art and literature’. The popular image of the Nineties dates back to the last few years before the First World War.