Decadence in the Shadow of the Wilde Trials and Beyond

Abstract

In the autumn of 1895, despite the hostile climate for Decadence in the wake of the Wilde trials, Arthur Machen began work on The Hill of Dreams (written 1895–97; published 1907). He was determined to write an artistic novel, one that would not be governed by the demands of the marketplace. In this respect, he produced a novel that accorded with Symons’s 1893 characterization of high art Decadence as the ‘morbid subtlety of analysis … and curiosity of form’, and as ‘a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’.¹ These elements made the novel unpublishable when it was written, though Machen did try to place it. His failure in this regard supports what I have argued throughout and what Havelock Ellis sensed in 1889: Britain was simply not receptive to Decadence in the terms in which so many of the writers I have been discussing wanted to pursue it as a literary form.