The dark mews of Arthur Machen’s 1890’s London as depicted in “The Great God Pan” (cover by Aubrey Beardsley, btw) reminds me of RL Stevenson’s 1886 London in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” — same sense of menace underlying the city of dreadful night — but while Stevenson’s hidden depths are mainly psychological, Machen’s (like the magical worlds of Yeats) are geographical and cultural — the pagan Welsh mythos layered over but not extirpated by Roman “civilization.” I don’t know how much of a sense of Machen’s Wales is still alive in Caerlon on Usk today (I visited the town in the 1980's — you could still get a sense of the mystic by walking around the countryside), but the sense of wonder from that world still lives on in “Things Far and Near” and “Far Off Things” (nice appreciation at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10734172/The-Alphabet-Library-F-is-for-Far-Off-Things-by-Arthur-Machen.html ), as well as in the novel “The Hill of Dreams” (all available on Project Gutenberg). Bonus: Machen is one of the great prose stylists of the English language.

Thank you for the lovely literary journey, which captured an era that is both bygone and timeless.