To live in the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other sources. Conscious of personal and social decadence, hopeful of renovation, people transfer their mood to the decade, the illusory dead weight of an old century behind them, and before them the perhaps equally illusory promises of a new one. In the arts these ages of transition tend to breed avant-gardes to whom contempt for the past is a necessary condition of radical innovation, an old calendar thrown out as the new one is hung up. Yet when we look back at such movements, themselves now parts of the past they mistrusted, we see them differently: harbingers of the new, no doubt, but mired still in the tradition they thought to displace.

Interest in the English 1890s has naturally been growing of late. Richard Ellmann’s biography looked forward, emphasising the importance of Wilde as the martyred prophet of a new dispensation. Others have preferred to look back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John Stokes is synchronic and aims to show how the arts were related to other aspects of the life of their own time, fixing on certain ‘topics and texts’ – the New Journalism, the New Art Criticism, the Music Hall, prisons, ‘the suicide craze’.

The result is a good book that could be added to, for it is fairly short and doesn’t, of course, cover all the angles. Stokes’s account, borrowed from contemporary press reports, of an Empire ballet celebrating the contemporary press, provides an apt overture to a study of the interpenetration of journalism and the arts. Journalists – including the likes of Shaw and Wilde – enjoyed controversy about spiritual crisis, decadence, declining morality, patriotism and so on; and editors rigged their correspondence columns to start new controversies. Wilde was not alone in being ‘adept at finding himself drawn, protestingly, into epistolary debate’. By an extension of these methods, newspapers found it possible ‘to instigate the events they subsequently reported’. The new power of the papers also created Gissing’s New Grub Street. They were execrated as open sewers, and this at a time when the split between the popular press and the ‘respectable’ papers was much less marked than it was to become.

Much has been written about the cult of music hall, and of ballet girls, in this period, but Stokes, avoiding old-fashioned chatter about the dancer and the poetic image, studies the Empire Music Hall as a social institution, harried by prudes and a salacious press pretending to high moral standards. When the Empire licence was renewed only on condition that it abolished its Promenade, where people drank, smoked and picked up girls or boys, the Daily Telegraph published 170 letters on the subject in a single week. The Empire closed, but not for long. It was inextricably mingled with the web of metropolitan culture, with Sickert and Symons, Yeats, Walkley and even Shaw; also with sex and drink. The peculiar character of music-hall entertainment – a mixture of singing, dancing, stand-up comics, acrobats – derived, it seems, from an Act of 1843, which decreed that licensees must choose between the right to serve drink and the right to put on full-length plays. The halls being therefore essentially taverns, it was unreasonable to ban drink at the Empire. Now that the music hall has disappeared, the pubs and clubs have taken over some of its functions.