Nicholas Freeman’s book is an in-depth exploration of a single year in the Victorian fin de siècle. The book contains detailed accounts of seemingly every aspect of Victorian culture: sport, theater, gender roles, politics, murder cases, and literature. 1895 is a highly accessible book, written with a verve and grace that belies the immense research that was no doubt required to produce it.

Citing Douglas Jerrold, Freeman modestly characterizes his book project as “a touch and go chronicle” (6) of that year. The book’s four chapters are structured as seasonal tales, beginning in mid-September 1894 and closing with December 31, 1895. The challenge of writing a study of this type is to communicate an understanding of the period, while avoiding inundating readers with facts. Despite the wide range of topics treated in the book, holistic pictures of events inevitably emerge from the details. The controversial New Woman, the changing fortunes of British Aestheticism, the slow-motion train wreck of Lord Roseberry’s ministry, standing in here for the fate of mid-Victorian liberalism in modernity, are the feature stories of 1895; these narratives gradually come into a rewarding wide-angle view. Tracing a single narrative over the course of subsequent chapters inevitably heightens the dramatic impact of the individual stories Freeman relates.

Given that each chapter explores a wide range of events, chapter summaries cannot provide an adequate picture of the contents of 1895. I will focus instead on some of the interesting, broader patterns elucidated by Freeman’s particular way of narrating history. Over the course of the book, fin de siècle Aestheticism is represented from myriad angles: as misogynist discourse (most of Arthur Symons’s London Nights [1895]), a protest against the capitalist fetish of production (Symons and Aubrey Beardsley as tourist-exiles in Dieppe), and a savvy effort to “brand” high art (in the pages of the Aesthete journal The Savoy). Freeman frequently interrupts his narrative of the year with stories about the accounts of the carnivalesque image of politics and newspaper headlines of the day offered by music hall singers and comedians. In so doing, Freeman both sketches a class-segregated society and provides a glimpse of the cultural ties that allowed Britons to imagine their place in a community that transcended class.

Among other things, 1895 details the prevalence of the trope of contagion in the media discourse of the day. Advocates of traditional morality typically invested books with a unique agency. Bad role models not only had the capacity to contaminate and ruin; they were believed to have the power to transform those who came under their spell into their own malignant image. No wonder that Trilby (1895), George Du Maurier’s novel about the fearful power unscrupulous individuals could exert on vulnerable minds, connected so deeply with contemporaries. It was Wilde’s tragic fate to become a lightning rod for a host of anxieties regarding social and sexual dissidence. Freeman quotes a cultural critic in Blackwood’s who seems to speak for the Establishment in laying the blame for anticonventional behavior squarely at the writer’s feet: “Whence, then, sprang the foolish fear of being natural. … [It] was Oscar Wilde who infected us with our dread of the conventional” (141). Wilde’s trajectory from media darling to social outcast and prisoner inevitably becomes 1895’s central story or, at least, the book’s salient example of the price paid by those who exerted a “bad” influence.

1895 should be of special interest to literary scholars and historians of British aestheticism. Freeman offers valuable insights into the careers of Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and other figures associated with the Decadent movement. Arthur Symons emerges as a crucial figure: a poet, critic, and, perhaps most important, a tireless polemicist for Aestheticism as well as French culture more generally. Symons also embodied all the contradictions of his artistic cadre, combining a love of the demimonde with a sophisticated understanding of literary history, not to mention a poetic formalism put in the service of a lurid, frequently misogynist content. Freeman’s account of the decampment of most of the central figures of the Aesthete movement to Dieppe in the immediate aftermath of Wilde’s trial illuminates a neglected aspect of Aestheticism. Symons and Beardsley were immediately drawn to Dieppe’s leisure industry, especially the gaming tables and other games of chance to be had in the fishing town’s casinos. The eagerness with which Symons and Beardsley embraced the opportunity to “play the leisured connoisseur” amounts, in John Stokes’s words, to the “[insistence] upon [the] freedom to linger, to ignore regulated time” (quoted on 166). Freeman’s chronicle of Englishmen in Dieppe offers a salutatory reminder of literary Decadence’s avant-garde character. Along with the Aesthete fascination with form as distancing strategy, there was also the contradictory impulse to integrate art and everyday life. Whatever their considerable differences between the Aesthetes and the socialists and feminists of the day, they remained closer to socialists and feminists than to the moral traditionalists of the day in their shared opposition to established hierarchy.

The book’s underlying assumption is that 1895 is uniquely significant for the ways it anticipates modernity despite its continuity with the mid-Victorian period. Freeman’s map highlights literature of the period and how it was received. Still, scholars of literary form will likely find the survey of literature here somewhat incomplete. In one of the longest sustained readings of a literary text in 1895, Freeman considers An Ideal Husband (1895) in order to elaborate an expansive interpretation of Wilde’s art. Freeman explores the contradictory status of the Wildean epigram, simultaneously a critical commentary on commodity logic and the ideal commodity. He also has intriguing things to say about the complex dynamic of confession underlying the play, Wilde’s unique talent for making his personal life public in his play text while at the same time deflecting incriminating facts (here Freeman draws heavily on the Wilde criticism of Kerry Powell and Regenia Gagnier). Mostly, Freeman chooses to view novels through the lens of contemporary reviewers. By doing so, he overlooks what some literary scholars might believe is the more significant history, of how novels speak to each other. It may finally matter more to the history of the novel that Virginia Woolf read and revered Thomas Hardy than that Edmund Gosse remarked in 1895 that Jude the Obscure (1895) was “ruined” by the author’s bitterness.

Freeman’s vivid, intelligent sketches of the emerging industry of professional sports are among the most entertaining and informative interludes in his book. His own study is implicated in professionalism in another way. The litmus test of professionalism for the historian is the ability to produce thick, deep synchronic stories that demonstrate the writer’s mastery of the field: the thicker, the better. Over and over, Freeman demonstrates his mastery of the Victorian archive; he seems familiar with every correspondence-to-the-editor page in every major newspaper of the period in regard to all of the many media controversies of the year. The value of 1895 is that, for all Freeman’s scrupulous attention to detail, the writer’s deft touch with his materials ensures that this history remains a “touch and go chronicle.”