Enoch Soames

A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties

Downloads: Under 100
Pages: 29

Download

About this book

The narrator looks for Enoch Soames in the index of a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties and finds that the name is absent. The narrator regards the omission as a record of Soames’s failure to impress himself on his decade and suspects that nobody else noticed it. The narrator describes a friendship with Rothenstein that grew warmer and more valued with every passing year.

Soames imagines the museum and its reading-room remaining accessible to readers a hundred years hence, despite his own absence. Soames answers a question about what he has minded with neglect and failure, while the narrator attempts to distinguish neglect from failure.

About the author

Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was an English essayist, caricaturist, and parodist, one of the defining wits of the 1890s and a contributor to The Yellow Book. Celebrated for his elegant satire and drawings of famous contemporaries, he also wrote the comic novel Zuleika Dobson.