1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain by Nicholas Freeman (review)

What’s in a year? Nicholas Freeman’s book 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain stretches the boundaries by including the fall of 1894 in chronicling the events that shaped Victorian perceptions of 1895. The main story of the book, and the reason for looking back upon the previous year, is the persecution of Oscar Wilde by the father of his friend Alfred Douglas, leading up to the notorious libel trial in early April 1895, its public aftermath, and Wilde’s subsequent imprisonment. But Freeman’s book is not a systematic study of Wilde’s public persona. Neither is it an analysis of the constitutive role of the media in framing the drama. It is rather an attempt to provide a close context for the drama—and its many political and moral resonances—by describing the stream of everyday and unexpected events that coincided with the trials.

Using newspapers as its primary source, Freeman’s book is also rich in recording football results and changes in the weather. We learn of the record-low temperatures in the winter of 1894 to 1895 with frozen seas and Arctic conditions in Liverpool harbor. The outbreak of a devastating flu epidemic in February killed people from all walks of life. Horrible crimes and individual tragedies are related, as are London’s theatre premieres, among them The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) that opened at St. James’s theatre in February to excellent reviews. Many of the events that Freeman records were front-page news and provide the reader with a sense of the social rhythms and temporalities that the press brought to public life in the 1890s. Indeed, Freeman’s way of juxtaposing stories of murder and sports, weather reports, and conservative outrage against same-sex desire follows the example of the medium itself.

For anyone familiar with the cultural stereotypes employed by the media in the 1890s, much of this is recognizable. The New Woman was a staple in the press in the mid-1890s, as was the novel vehicle she supposedly used: the bicycle. Some of the recurring events and topics in Freeman’s material were reported in a similar way in many other countries and cities, but some were more local (such as football results from the Midlands). However, as the study focuses exclusively on a British context, and follows the principle explained in the introduction of letting “the people of 1895 speak for themselves as much as possible,” there is no attempt toward a comparative analysis in a transmedial and transnational perspective (2). Indeed, the exploration of the ways in which this particular view of 1895 is historically and geographically situated is more or less absent.

Freeman has organized his material in a clear and accessible way, offering both general and specialized audiences a panoramic and highly readable view of the mix of high and low culture that filled Victorian newspapers. One of the advantages of focusing on one year is that it effectively reminds the reader of the closeness among aspects of Victorian culture that are most often treated separately. Many of the events and themes that the book touches upon are well covered in fin-de-siècle scholarship, but the author has chosen not to engage in too much scholarly debate. This omission is motivated by the chronicle-like form of the book, but it means that the material collected for the book is not exploited fully. Working on vast amounts of newspaper material runs the risk of being led astray by anecdotes. But Freeman is wise enough not to get stuck in details and singular events for too long.

The introduction declares that the book is “a study of a year” rather than a detailed study of one or two of the era’s key events (2). But what does that mean? Surely, it was no accident that this particular year...