The Naughty Nineties by Angus Wilson

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket: Very Good. 1976. Book Club Associates. 1st Edition. Heavily illustrated.

A taste for extravagance and lavish living, the vougues of the prince of whales and the marlborough house set, the smart set, the fast set, the decadent set, and the avant-garde - these were just some of the features of the general naughtiness that appeared on the surface of social life in the 1890s. Regency rakishness, middle-class Bohemianism, the cult of unregenerate 'manliness' these were others. And over and all there hovered the aesthetic genius of Beadsley and Moris, the Savoy Hotel, the palace of Mammon, who were a roll-call of naught nineties' society from Lord Randolph Churchill to Oscar Wilde. In words and picutres Angus Wilson brilliantly portrays the mood and tempo of that scintillating age of pleasure-seekers.