The Decadent Movement

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.

The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.

With

Neil Sammells Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University

Kate Hext Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter

And

Alex Murray Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.2	There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our
0:10.8	programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time. I hope you
0:15.1	enjoy the programs. Hello in the 1890s the decadent movement flickered with a
0:19.7	bright green flame in British culture with Oscar Wilde at its heart. The decadence
0:25.2	rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose and
0:29.4	valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art's sake.
0:36.0	Wild Aubrey Beardsley and others provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy,
0:41.0	and the movement was soon snuffed out.
0:43.6	Yet its influence has been felt ever since.
0:46.5	We've meant to discuss the decadent movement in Britain are Alex Murray, senior lecturer in English at
0:51.3	Queens University of Belfast,
0:53.4	Kate Hex, Senior Lecture in English Literature,
0:55.9	the University of Exeter, and Neil Sammels,
0:58.3	Professor of English and Irish Literature,
1:00.7	and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Chancellor at Bath Spa University.
1:04.0	Neil Sammels, there are several influences behind this movement.
1:07.0	Can you tell us first about what's been going on in France in particular?
1:10.6	I think it's impossible to imagine English decadence developing without the really profound influence of Charles Baudelaire.
1:19.0	He's central to the development of a particular sensibility, a sensibility which prizes the gifted
1:27.4	individual, the extraordinary individual, the artist, standing out against what he regarded as the common herd and the filthy modern tide,
	...

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