The year 2009 was one of centenaries: Darwin and Tennyson, Handel, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Purcell: all were explored and feted. But there are others, less noticed now: Edward FitzGerald is one and, some way behind him, two writers — sometime friends — who died within weeks of each other in 1909, Algernon Swinburne (10 April) and George Meredith (18 May). Perhaps the rather faded reputations of those last three may suggest that we have lost touch with the extravagance and extremes that mattered so much in the latter part of the nineteenth century and that opened the way to modernism. In this chapter I shall explore a few of the paradoxical relations between systems and extravagance in later Victorian thinking and fiction. Just as the sublime is key to Romantic sensibility, extravagance is its transformed equivalent in subsequent generations.

In our culture, music has become astonishingly more available than it ever was in history before. All four centennial composers are heard daily in homes as well as in the concert hall. They are heard not in adaptations for the piano (as so often in the Victorian period) but in full orchestra, pouring out of speakers, or straight into our ears, downloaded. Music is scattered abroad, as snack music in lifts and restaurants, as extraordinarily exact re-imaginings of how the works would first have sounded with their original instruments. Literature, on the other hand, though opened up on the Internet, does not have quite that capacity to perform in public.