The scandal associated with the opening of Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters by the Post Office, on the orders of the government, fuelled a series of debates in the cockpit of the House of Commons. Those outside the House relied upon press reports on the debates for information, reports that included accounts of private letters and secret dispatches being brandished as evidence by both the home secretary, Sir James Graham, and his opponents. Two open letters to newspaper editors – Carlyle’s of June 1844 and Mazzini’s of February 1845 – were influential in their commentary upon the central themes of political honour and public morality. And Sir James Graham, leading statesman and devout evangelical, was humiliated when the ‘Grahamizing’ of letters became a craze, encouraged by Punch. But the general public remained on the outside, looking in upon the parliamentary hurly-burly.

This chapter examines the main trends in the international parodies of Ibsen from the late 1880s and ’90s, both those intended primarily for print and for the stage. Proceeding from Margaret Rose’s model of parody as ‘comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material’, the chapter examines the parodic treatments of Ibsen as a retrospective measure of his reception context: where his contemporaries in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and Germany saw him crossing the lines of conventional drama, lines that the respondents either were invested in defending or simply calling attention to in order to understand through parodic distortion the contributions Ibsen was making. Two areas that provoked repeated parodic treatment had to do with varying international perceptions of the dramas’ cultural specificity and their generic indeterminacy.

This chapter examines the often vexed relationship between literary Decadence and the media in Britain. While writers such as Wilde may have espoused elitist doctrines, they relied on print media to publish, popularize and denigrate their work. Decadence was then caught up in a complex web of financial, cultural and political forces that demanded it engage with the mass media it ostensibly despised. The chapter begins with a study of avant-garde publishing, beginning with the Century Guild Hobby Horse before moving on to those flagship Decadent periodicals The Yellow Book and The Savoy, examining how these outlets negotiated, with varying success, a competitive marketplace. In opposition to these self-consciously elite productions, the chapter places the relentless mockery of Decadence in publications like Punch, where figures such as Wilde and Beardsley were regularly parodied. Yet Decadent writers often published in conservative newspapers and journals, with figures such as Ada Leverson lampooning her friends. The vituperative attack and the sharply observed satire were an essential part of a literary marketplace in which Decadence, all too briefly, thrived.