ABSTRACT
There are characters in Dickens that clearly predict the condition of fin-de-siecle decadence. I am thinking in particular of James Steerforth in David Copperfield, James Harthouse in Hard Times and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's last completed novel, though another obvious, if limited, example would be Jack Maldon, also in David Copperfield, a summary figure aptly described by John Lucas as signifying 'essential triviality and predatory sexual instinct'.1 In his essay of 1893 on 'The Decadent Movement in Literature', Arthur Symons, one of its leading lights, termed the phenomenon an 'interesting disease' typical of an over-luxurious civilization, whose symptoms were 'an intense selfconsciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity'.2 These qualities or these defects - the ambivalence of 'decadence' makes it impossible to say which - are all, up to a point and at some stage, manifest in Dickens's conceptions. Above all, we are aware of a 'perversity' that is at once inward and active in the fields of conduct and relationships.
