As we have noted in the previous chapter, until the Yellow Book after the redundancy of Beardsley started inviting artistic groups specifi- cally from outside London to furnish its designs and illustrations, lay readers might have been excused for thinking avant-garde art and literature was the monopoly of the British capital. All the little magazines that we have so far discussed, including even the OCM, were published in London. This is in keeping with the standard view of the British avant-garde during the 1890s, which has been studied mainly as a metropolitan phenomenon. Most of the pioneering authors whom the poets and artists in the 1890s little magazines looked to as examples had also been based in the metropolitan centres of their day, where Baudelaire's Parisian flâneur took ‘a bath in the multitudes’ or D. G. Rossetti has his lyrical subject meet the prostitute ‘Jenny’ one Saturday night at the London Haymarket. When they wrote about contemporaneous settings, the earliest British Aestheticist poets and artists often sought out controversial social issues that ‘our learned London children know’ (in Rossetti's cynical phrase from the same poem) and that Victorian orthodoxy would only permit to be referenced with explicit disapproval. Among the allegedly décadentes French inspirations of the 1890s, Naturalist novelists, while specialising in filth and depravity, usually focused on smaller towns or rural settings, and because of the focus on the abject nature of these scenes there is no element of justification, nor an implied incentive to emulate the debased characters. Somehow, the urban setting of much Parnassian and Symbolist literature facilitated a coexistence of antinomian morals and attractive bohemian urbanity. The same applies to associated styles in painting and illustration of this period.

In the 1890s several of the British artists and authors pigeonholed as Decadent copied from these their frank depictions of urban squalor that could be read as glorifying immorality, an interpretation encouraged by alleged Decadents themselves. When Beardsley or Walter Sickert depicted scenes of libertinism and intemperance in the Yellow Book and the Savoy, they played to a middle-class anxiety about life in the continually expanding city that already went back at least a hundred years.