I'm writing a book that takes place in 1893, and I want one of the more scholarly characters to be familiar with Nietzsche, who had been publishing very recently. But I also want to be accurate with how his works were perceived at the time, since there's a lot of baggage with him and Nihilism in the modern zeitgeist. What was the general reaction to his writing in the time period when it was published?
It depends where your book is set and what languages the characters speak. Much of Nietzsche's work was not published in English until the early 20th century. H.L. Mencken wrote one of the first books on Nietzsche that was published in the United States, entitled simply The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. So in 1893, to be familiar with Nietzsche, assuming your characters are speaking English, would require that your scholarly character be fluent in German (not implausible for the time period) AND interested in avant-garde political philosophy.
In the 1890s, German-speaking intellectuals seem to have viewed Nietzsche's work as "left-wing" and affiliated with anarchism and anti-nationalism, however odd that may seem to us today. The identification of the Nietzscheian Ubermensch with a racial idea of superiority was largely a post-WWI development, in my understanding.
The Mencken book mentioned above is actually a pretty good source for understanding how WASP-y intellectual in the United States tried to grapple with Nihilsm and it's proponents at a time when anarchism was still seen as a dangerous terrorist movement. That said, I'm not exactly an expert on Nihilistic philosophy, and there's been a lot of debate over how warmly Nietzsche was viewed by other left-wing German intellectuals contemporaneously.