Ripe was the Drowsy Hour

"In 1895, as Oscar Wilde sat in Holloway Prison awaiting trial on charges of sodomy, Punch ingenuously wondered whether Art has "a mission that may not be named with 'scarlet sins' to enervate the age." The age dealt with that mission by naming it aestheticism, impressionalism, decadence, symbolism, and various other labels none entirely satisfactory, all displaying certain characteristics of the nervous sensibilities of those who sought in art, as Walter Pater suggested, a sort of cloistered refuge from a certain vulgarity in the outside world. J.E. Chamberlin's brilliant study is about that mission - as it was perceived both by its missionaries and by those uncomfortable with its implications. In Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour, Chamberlin focuses on Wilde, and on the personalities and events that defined his world. His study moves outward to include the culture and society of the time, and inward to suggest some of the motivations behind individual beliefs and commitments. The world of Oscar Wilde, which included such luminaries as Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Sarah Bernhardt D'Oyly Carte, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, James Whistler, and W.B. Yeats, was an inseparable part of the intellectual dilemmas, social confusions, and aesthetic turmoils of the age. The fascination with he perverse and the paradoxical, with images of sinister charm and metaphors of splendid artificiality, with the complex interrelationships between sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, and beauty and truth, are Chamberlin's subjects in this engrossing and important work" - Publisher.