‘Cedo junioribus.’ In the introspective month of December of the year 1896, not even two years after making his debut, the essayist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm announced that he would ‘withdraw in favour of the younger’ and retire from the literary scene. With the rising publisher John Lane at the Bodley Head, he published his Works of Max Beerbohm, consisting of seven essays that had originally appeared in artistic-literary periodicals such as the Yellow Book and the Savoy, that are categorised in the academic discipline of periodical studies as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and limited audience. The epilogue to this valedictory collection was a short piece entitled ‘Diminuendo’ that appeared simultaneously in the annual Pageant under the title ‘Be It Cosiness’. Now that ‘the tumult of [his] disillusioning was past’, having reached the ripe age of twenty-three, the author felt that he should look back upon his aesthetic education. With a grand gesture he yielded the stage (for a few months anyway) to ‘younger men, with months of activity before them, with fresher schemes and notions, with newer enthusiasm’. The illusion that he had given up was the possibility of an integration of medium and message, form and content, ethics and aesthetics, that would be necessary to produce what has come to be known as the ‘Total Work of Art’. This book tells the story of how during the Fin de Siècle this ideal shaped the British avant-garde journals that are the first examples of the still thriving genre of the little magazine, and why understanding the motivations behind it is key to grasping the often puzzling diversity of the schools and movements that are nowadays grouped together as Aestheticism.

In his abdication speech, Beerbohm reminisces about his arrival as a student in Oxford in the autumn of 1890, eager to attend the lectures of the legendary Walter Pater, but being laughed at by his assigned tutor when he declared the wish. The keen fresher soon understood the cause for this hilarity when he ran into the Aesthete don in the local Ryman’s, consuming in his ‘gem-like flame’ a portfolio of prints: