On or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that.

Virginia Woolf makes this claim in an essay on modern fiction and the changing social and artistic climate of the early twentieth century. Writing in the late 1920s, she looks back to “December 1910” as a symbolic turning point—associated with the rise of Post‑Impressionism in London (notably the exhibitions organized by Roger Fry) and with broader shifts in manners, class relations, sexuality, and domestic life. Woolf’s point is not that a single event instantly transformed society, but that around this moment the assumptions governing everyday relationships and the representation of inner life began to alter, prompting new literary forms better suited to modern consciousness.

The passage argues that “human character” is historically contingent: when social relations and sensibilities change, art must change with them. Woolf rejects a neat, observable “before/after” model (like noticing a rose bloom) and instead describes a gradual but profound reorientation in how people think, feel, and relate—especially across lines of class, gender, and intimacy. Implicitly, she is defending modernist experimentation: if character itself is perceived differently, then the old realist conventions for depicting it (fixed types, external description, tidy plots) become inadequate. The remark is both diagnosis and manifesto, linking aesthetic innovation to shifts in lived experience.

1) “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”
2) “In or about December 1910, human character changed.”