The interesting thing is that Lovecraft’s new Decadent aesthetic fitted very well with a tendency he had long exhibited, and one that linked him significantly to the intelligentsia of his time: scorn of the nineteenth century. The little boy who had insensibly absorbed the prose and poetry of the Augustans and found only tedium in the great nineteenth-century authors (Dickens is despised for maudlin sentimentality, and Thackeray “induceth drowsiness”[63]) found himself entirely in sympathy with the repudiation of Victorianism that many of the poets and critics of the late nineteenth and early
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