A Child of the Age

by Francis Adams, Aubrey Beardsley (Illustrator)

A reprint of the 1894 edition, with Aubrey Beardsley illustrations.

244 pages

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Francis William Lauderdale Adams was born in Malta and educated mostly in England and later in France. He emigrated to Australia to improve his health in 1884, and soon became a committed republican, writing for the Bulletin as well as William Lane's Left-wing paper, The Boomerang. A collection of radical poetry, Songs of the Army of the Night, was published in 1888. But he also published across a range of popular genres; his first novel was a work of crime fiction, Madeline Brown's Murderer, published in Melbourne in 1887. Adams is also remembered for his social sketches and his journalism. Living in Margate, England, Adams became increasingly ill with tuberculosis and throat cancer. He shot himself with a pistol, with his wife close by.

Note: Not to be confused with Francis Adams (1796 – 26 February 1861)

Reviews

[Surreysmum · Rating 1 out of 5]

[These notes were made in 1982:]. I read this in the 1977 Garland reprint of the original 1894 edition. Despite the Beardsley title-page and the lilac-scented dedication, there is little of what we think of as "decadent" in this novel. It is a rather unpleasant first-person portrait of a selfish man who discovers - too late, of course - that he is in love with the woman he has been living with and not with an ideal woman hovering on the edges of his life. There are some rather interesting schoolboy scenes - in the course of which, however, it dawns on the trusting reader that the narrator/protagonist whom she was quite willing to like is actually being portrayed in some rather nasty colours. The language is a little difficult - occasionally convoluted, occasionally elliptical - but never passionately adjectival as in the decadent prose poems. Our "hero" is "Leicester", the mistress "Rosebud" and the ideal woman "Rayne." Fond as I usually am of the excesses of the '90s, I must say this one left a sensation of mild disgust.