Nineteenth Century
The pessimistic element was available in Schopenhauer's philosophy and Matthew Arnold's cultural criticism. The tide of Whiggish optimism (exemplified by Macaulay) receded somewhat in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.
Classical culture, based on traditional classical scholarship in Latin and Greek literature, had itself been under attack externally for two generations or more by 1900, and had produced in Nietzsche, a model pessimistic thinker.
The increasing availability of information of world events during this period, led to increased despondence and consultants such as Marcus Buckle vocalised this as a general feeling of doom.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Pessimism
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake ... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“Posterity—the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism—grows ever harder to conceive.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)