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Paperback – 148 x 210 mm – 318 pages

Ten illustrations in black and white

ISBN 9781843680734

The definitive book on this fascinating period, for the first time in paperback.

‘It is’, said Oscar Wilde, ‘personalities not principles that move the Age’. And this was never more true than of the artistic world of the 1890s, over which Wilde himself presided. The decadent twilight of the Victorian age remains one of the most vivid periods of English culture.

It was an age of artistic self-consciousness, during which writers and painters believed that they had to create not only their works but also their personae. In Passionate Attitudes Matthew Sturgis examines the ways in which ambitious poets, penurious painters, canny publishers, and a controversialist press all conspired in this double task, forging both the myth and fact of the decadent fin-de-siècle.

Beside such compelling luminaries as Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, Sturgis records a host of lesser lights: Arthur Symons, the poet of the music halls, who divided his energies between promoting Verlaine and chasing after chorus girls; Ernest Dowson, the demoralised Romantic of the Rhymers Club; Count Erik Stenbock, who kept a snake up his sleeve and went mad; John Gray who may have been the model for Wilde’s ‘Dorian’; John Lane who published most of their books; and Ada Leverson who satirized most their manners.

When it first appeared, in 1995, Passionate Attitudes was hailed as a brilliant, useful and richly amusing introduction to the 1890s; it has since proved indispensable for anyone interested in the period. Out of print for several years, this is its first appearance in paperback.

Matthew Sturgis is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Aubrey Beardsley (Harper Collins, 1998, and Pallas Athene, 2011) and Walter Sickert (Harper Collins, 2005).

By far the best and most comprehensive introduction to the 1890s, a period of unprecedented growth and experiment in art and literature. Matthew Sturgis casts his net wide to celebrate not only the major figures but to rediscover the extraordinary number of minor writers and artists who flourished at the end of the 19th century
Michael Seeney, editor of Intentions, the newsletter of the Oscar Wilde Society

Deft and intriguing
David Profumo, Literary Review

Compelling and racy
Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times