Medical writers, as the physician Clifford Allbutt observed in 1895, were likewise concerned that the British population was ‘drooping with the century’ that the energies of the population were being depleted as a result of the vast and rapid social and technological changes that had characterised the nineteenth century. When a man says that one knows that Life has exhausted him.” (The British Library) “Life is a great disappointment.” “Ah, my dear,” cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, “don’t tell me that you have exhausted Life. “I wish it were fin du globe,” said Dorian, with a sigh. Majeska illustration (1930) to Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): “Fin de siècle,” murmured Lord Henry. In British culture too, the critic John Addington Symonds diagnosed a pervasive ‘world-fatigue penetrated deep into our spirit.’ Fatigue took its place alongside those other fin-de-siècle ( fin-de-Seekleham) signifiers – decline, degeneration and decadence – with which historians of late-nineteenth century Britain are familiar.
By the end of the century, in the words of Conservative politician Joseph Chamberlain, the nation had become a ‘Weary Titan’, overburdened by its vast colonial possessions and struggling to match the energy and dynamism of its international rivals. In an influential article of 1871, the historian James Froude painted a picture of an England overcome by ‘lethargy’, the political and racial ‘vigor’ of its people teetering on the brink of ‘exhaustion’. Across a diversity of texts, metaphors of fatigue were used to signify political decline, social regression, and cultural deterioration. Traill, who fittingly died himself in 1900, was not alone in associating the end of the nineteenth century with exhaustion. By the time it is over, however, Seekleham has already succumbed to his exhaustion, disappearing to make way for the new-born Twentieth Century. Finally, as the clock strikes midnight, they all join in an ‘Ode to the Spirit of Decadence’. "It was not that he had attained to a greater age than his ancestors … it was that his life, as measured by exciting and consequently fatiguing experiences, had already far exceeded most of theirs".Īs he reaches his final minutes, our dying century is joined at his bedside by a choir of Decadents, who sing ‘in praise of exhaustion, and disillusion, and failure, and emptiness, and weariness’.
Far from mourning his impending death, however, Seekleham greets it with a weary resignation, even relief: on the 31st December 1900, Traill’s story finds Old Seekleham – an ungainly pun on the Latin saeculum (century) – with just half an hour to live. In the prologue to his 1892 short story, ‘Number Twenty’, the English satirist Henry Duff Traill personifies the nineteenth century as an exhausted, dying old man. He is also one of the organisers of History Acts. This is a guest post by Steffan Blayney, a PhD student in history at Birkbeck, University of London researhcing fatigue, the science of work, and the working body in Britain c.1870-1939.
0 kommentar(er)
