Since the dissolution of the monolithic reading public that dominated the Victorian literary marketplace – that marketplace as represented by the triple-decker novel and the lending libraries that supported it – it has been common to frame the literary and artistic discussion as art versus commerce. Until relatively recently, literary scholars and historians have posited an almost Manichean dualism between the dark forces of popular and mass literature against the Modernist purity of art for art's sake. This critical dualism echoes the contemporary attitudes of Modernist writers like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others toward the mass reading public. The almost paranoid fear of ordinary people among these apostles of high modernism has been ably critiqued by, for example, John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses and Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. The myth of starving artists protecting their literary integrity against the demands of venal editors and an indifferent, uneducated public has also been undermined by studies such as Joyce Wexler's Who Paid for Modernism? and Peter McDonald's British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914.

What these and similar studies have demonstrated is that the once-simple distinction of art versus commerce, of purist authors versus philistine audiences, disguises the multiple conflicts, tensions and controversies of the early Modernist period. These crosscurrents have been most famously dramatized in the art for art's sake controversies and scandals of the 1890s and in their effects on the literary marketplace and in the psyches of authors, editors, critics and readers, and in turn revealed by a complicated set of ideas, emotions, prejudices and practices that are reflected in the lives of authors and the works they produced and published. Among the many crosscurrents of the tumultuous decades of the 1880–1950 period were the disruptions of the Boer War, followed by the catastrophe of two World Wars; the rising tide of newly educated ‘mass’ audiences; the sometimes brutal and always divisive conflicts of the women's movement; the concurrent claims of the working classes and their demands for economic justice; and the conservative reaction against the rising tide of democracy.