In the middle of the final decade of the 19th century, Britain was the most powerful and richest nation on earth, with the largest empire ever known. The nation might be thought to have had nothing of which to be frightened, yet frightened it was.
Many Britons of the time were steeped in an education in Latin and Greek in the classical tradition, so they knew what happened to great empires: they decline and fall. This was the atmosphere addressed by the Yellow Book, the most innovative journal of art and literature of the period, published between 1894 and 1897. It’s a topic I explore in my new book, Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives.
