ABSTRACT
Politics might initially seem an unproductive point from which to view the Fin De Siècle. The copious secondary literature suggests that literary modernism, artistic innovation, cultural decadence, metropolitan mores or socio-biology would offer a sharper perspective. The broad trend of Fin-De-Siècle debate led towards a broader conception of the public zone but as that last example suggests, what was involved was sometimes a more complex readjustment of the private/public boundary. Darwinism, Allen argued, had provoked a ‘mental upheaval’, a ‘final manifestation of innumerable energies which have long been silently agitating the souls of nations in their profoundest depths’. In 1900, Ellis published The Nineteenth Century. A Dialogue in Utopia, a reflection on where the ‘New Spirit’ was leading. The form is a dialogue between an omniscient protagonist and an interlocutor asking naive questions. The subject matter is the nineteenth century as it might be viewed from a serene, far distant future.
