# data[].attributes.body
The last decades of the reign saw a disintegration of the middle ground of readership. Writers went along with or rose above a broadening mass market, as did Hardy and James respectively. These were major talents, but it was a period of transition without a central figure, although Wilde briefly took centre stage in a revival of literary theatre.

# data[].attributes.body
The two decades of 1880-1900, with the next decade, lie between the middle Victorian uplands and the peaks of modernism. For a long time, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf hid their predecessors. If literary history is written by the victors, as with the Romantics and the Renaissance humanists, a longer view can bring revision. As the Modernist revolution revolves into the distance, and dust settle.

# data[].attributes.body
Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900), son of a famous Dublin surgeon, had gone from Trinity College to Oxford, then to London, to publicize aestheticism.
A brilliant talker, he put his art into his lifestyle. Fascinating as Wilde’s act is, his writing looks thin when compared with that of the comparably flamboyant Byron. Serious emotion comes out as sickly sentiment in his early poems and fiction, and in The Ballad of Reading Jail (1898) and De Profundis (1905), written after his fall. (Lord Queensbury had accused Wilde of homosexual practices, a serious legal offence - Wilde was sleeping with Queensbury’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas.

# data[].attributes.body
Wilde is a brilliantly provocative critic, but his distinction lies in his comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, staged in 1892-5. The last has been rated the best English comedy since Sheridan, Goldsmith or even Congreve, and is more quoted than any play not by Shakespeare. Only Bernard Shaw was unamused.

# data[].attributes.body
The art of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was his poetry, but after his marriage he put it aside to earn a living as a novelist. He finished with fiction in Jude the Obscure (1896). The six novels listed after Under the Greenwood Tree are considered major,  but there are fine things in the three Romances; the classes are not exclusive. A Pair of Blue Eyes was the favourite of the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922); it also provides a background to the poems Hardy wrote after his wife’s death.

# data[].attributes.body
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an honest if perverse man who made the most of his talent, contributing to British cultural life long and vigorously. In 1876, with his music-teacher mother, he came to London from Dublin, where he had been a clerk for seven years. He worked long as a critic of music and then of drama, a champion of Wagner and Ibsen.
Shaw used the theatre as a tool of social reform, presenting situations which challenged conventional attitudes, directing a stream of ideas at audiences, provoking while entertaining. The published plays have long argumentative prefaces and lengthy stage directions.

# data[].attributes.body
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was once famous enough to be known as RLS, but his work faded, leaving an adventurous legend. He sailed much in childhood — his Edinburgh family built lighthouses — and, despite weak health, travelled far from Scotland, dying in Samoa. He wrote plays, travel, a historical novel and A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), with much else that has dated. Still vivid are his full-length romances, begun in Bournemouth: Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) with its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and, more seriously engaging with the past, Weir of Hermiston (1896), unfinished. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) makes a bonny film, but, like the horror of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1879), disappoints adult re-reading.

# data[].attributes.body
Hardy lived much of his life out of doors. Improbable or coincidental scenes can be visualised because he has made sure we see them clearly, often setting them against natural backgrounds. He places human figures against a world which has been inhabited for immense periods of time. In his tragic novels he endows his puppets with nobility, consciously following Greek models.

# data[].attributes.body
George Moore (1852-1933) wrote much and variously. A major figure in Anglo-Irish literature, he is noted here for pioneering French fictional styles in English, and remembered chiefly for Esther Waters (1894), a novel in the naturalist manner of Emile Zola, combining a clinical physical realism deriving from natural science with a pathos lacking in glamour. Esther is a religious girl driven from home to work in a racing stable; she becomes pregnant, and endures many ordeals.

# data[].attributes.body
The perfection of genre for a middlebrow market had begun with Dickens’s friend, Wilkie Collins (1824-89), who made a career out of a new kind of minor fiction in The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1865). These detective novels combine murder mystery with problem-solving in a kind of parlour Gothic. In true Gothic novels, such as Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg or Wuthering Heights, horror and the problems of interpretation are infinite. Dickens’s last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished) would have transmuted the detective story.

# data[].attributes.body
Hardy’s assault on Victorian morality was anticipated by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), the author of E.rewhon (1873), a dystopian novel. Butler was a professional heretic, attacking the Resurrection (Darwin applauded), Canadian prudery (Montreal would not exhibit naked statues), Darwinian evolution (Butler preferred Lamarck’s theory), and the Homeric problem (The Authoress of the Odyssey, 1897). His heartlessly entertaining satirical novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903), is based on his own upbringing in a clerical family.