The Eighteen Nineties

Often dismissed as merely decadent--which was indeed one aspect of the period--the 1890s were in many ways the threshold to the modern era. The range of talents that flowered in this period is truly remarkable: Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, James McNeil Whistler, H.G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, to name only a few.