Of all the verses written during the summer of 1897 to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the only ones delivered personally into sovereign hands were those of Alfred Austin, Britain's poet laureate. The 1880s and 1890s marked the culmination of a century-long resurgence of interest in parabolic forms of narrative: folktales, fairy tales, myths, romances, ballads, sagas, allegories. John Lane's mass-market elitism opened up new opportunities for certain classes of finde- sièclewriter. The Yellow Book marketed itself as England's definitive avant-garde periodical, and it quickly became associated in the public mind with poetic movements such as aestheticism, symbolism, and decadence. Membership in the infamous National Vigilance Association, organized in 1885 to root out public vice, was largely male. The “Black Sunday” riots in Trafalgar Square in February 1886 led to a ban on public meetings in the square and provoked socialist groups to plan a larger demonstration for November 1887.