Rome, London, and Condemning the Metropolitan Male

Abstract

This chapter explores the possibilities that ancient Rome afforded to writers of the fin de siècle for exploring the nature of the London metropolis, which was at once the glittering capital of empire and a site of overcrowding, disease, and perceived degeneration. Through an examination of contemporary journalism, literature, and the late Victorian popular theatre phenomenon of the toga play, it traces the growing anxieties among conservative critics like Max Nordau about the moral and physical condition of the London metropolitan male, who became increasingly linked with narratives of decline and fall and with Rome’s more corrupt emperors.