![]() The fin-de-siècle was a great era of monsters: Mr. I wanted to write a novel set in that era-a novel about monsters. In Austria, Freud was discovering the unconscious, and in England itself, Hardy and Wilde were inventing what would become literary modernism. The Kodak was starting to capture reality as it had never been captured before, to fix the moment on film. Omnibuses were being replaced by electric trams, and London’s streets would soon be free of the horse-dung that had clogged them for centuries. Women were adopting rational dress and agitating for the vote. It was the time before everything changed, but change was already in the sooty London air. I was in London to research a particular time: the fin-de-siècle, that transitional period between the 19th and 20th centuries with the suspiciously French name. ![]() You experience all the Londons that have existed, superimposed as in a palimpsest. As you walk through the city, you move through different eras: there is the house where Dickens lived, the hospital where Keats received his medical training, Shakespeare’s theater. ![]()
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