Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties

by Max Beerbohm

"Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties" by Sir Max Beerbohm is a short story published in 1916. This comic tragedy blends fantasy and time travel as Beerbohm narrates his supposed memories of an obscure poet from the 1890s. The fictional Enoch Soames, desperate to know his literary legacy, makes a fateful bargain with the Devil to visit the future and discover posterity's judgment of his work. What he finds there proves both ironic and devastating, leading to an unexpected revelation about his very existence.