The starting point for this book is 1872, where, in the middle of the first of four Liberal administrations under Prime Minister William Gladstone, Victorian poetry can be said to enter its ‘late’ phase. It is a peculiar time, because it is in these final decades of the age, partly mediated through the loss of Dickens in 1870, John Stuart Mill in 1873, and, subsequently, the deaths of Browning in 1889, Tennyson in 1892, and Ruskin, Wilde, and Nietzsche in 1900 that the idea of what it is to be ‘Victorian’ begins to take shape. Interpretations of the period are complicated further by the ‘apocalyptic paradigm’ of the fin-de-siècle: suggesting patterns of disclosure, of revelation. Yet as the century turned, many of these patterns remain, in the Kermodian sense, ‘disconfirmed’. In 1900 alone Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks, Henry James abandoned the novel he would never finish in order to start work on The Ambassadors, and Conrad's Lord Jim appeared. Husserl published his Logic, and Russell, Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. The same year, the decadent poet Richard Le Gallienne repudiated Catholicism in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Beautiful Life of Rome’—a gesture less radical than ritualistic, as many late-Victorian moments are—symbolising decades of nineteenth-century religious crisis still unresolved. 1900 may be the terminus for this anthology, but it figures an ending less finished than burnished.