When did decaditis first strike? When did people begin to think that slicing the past up into periods of ten years was a useful thing to do? Historians used to deal in reigns and centuries, and it had long been agreed that these might have their own distinctive flavour, including the one that you happened to be living in - Tennyson in 1846 referred, ironically, to 'a noble 19th-centuryism'. But, as far as I can see, the 1890s was the first tenner to be identified, and quite quickly identified, as having its own inimitable aroma. Eddie Marsh, writing of Rupert Brooke in 1918, says 'he entertained a culte for the literature that is now called "ninetyish" - Pater, Wilde and Dowson.'

LRB 16 November 2006 | PDF Download