Doomed Decadence: A Cultural History of Absinthe in London

The Last Tuesday Society is pleased to invite you to join us on Monday 4th March as author Phil Baker explores the Cultural History of Absinthe & the Green Fairy's influence over Britain's most debauched absintheurs.

No drink, not even gin in Hogarth’s London, has ever had such a bad reputation as absinthe.

Phil Baker will offer a cultural history of absinthe, from its modest origins as a herbal tonic through its luxuriantly morbid heyday in the late nineteenth century and the world of the fin-de-siecle. Along with the story on the continent, reaching a peak of notoriety with the 1905 Absinthe Murders, he will look at the history of absinthe in London within the culture of 1890s decadence and beyond, with absinthe drinkers including Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, and the doomed poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson.

Phil Baker is a writer and reformed absinthe drinker based in London, with an interest in the literary and magical culture of the 1890s. As well as absinthe, he has written books on Austin Osman Spare, William S Burroughs, Dennis Wheatley and Samuel Beckett, and more recently co-edited Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer. He is currently researching the life of Allan Bennett, the Golden Dawn occultist and early British Buddhist.

Doors open at 7:30pm, talk scheduled to start at 8:00pm.