Whimsy, detachment, sympathy, tenderness, satire, humor, and occasionally cynicism--these are the lenses through which George Slythe Street viewed the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods in stories, novels, essays, and plays. His distinctive style propelled him to the forefront of the literary world during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, but his fame had diminished greatly by 1936, the year of his death. For most of the twentieth century Street's work has been neglected, which is both unfortunate and surprising, given his skill and association with other writers, especially W. E. Henley and Max Beerbohm.

Street deftly satirized his age, attacking snobbery, hypocrisy, vulgarity, and pretentiousness at all levels of society, especially among the aesthetes and the upper class. As he decried the encroaching noisiness, crassness, and mediocrity of his own day, he idealized the past, particularly the eighteenth century, in elegantly restrained prose. Many of his...