This is a book about loss and the stories it generates. In the last years of the nineteenth century English writing was especially rich in such stories. Across disciplines and genres are heard the same anxieties concerning the collapse of culture, the weakening of national might, the possibly fatal decay – physical, moral, spiritual, creative – of the Anglo–Saxon “race” as a whole. A sense of abiding loss is familiar enough in many periods (our own included), but the idioms used to express that sense will always be historically specific. So too will be the ways in which such perceptions are cast into narrative, into stories a culture tells itself in order to account for its troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties.