The Dandy — Ellen Moers

Ellen Moers, in this fascinating study, has traced the development of dandyism as a social and literary phenomenon, from its origins with Beau Brummell in Regency England to its brilliant decadence in the yellow nineties. Beau Brummell's outrageous pose dominated court and high society circles in his day; his legacy was a literary ideal that lasted out the nineteenth century; and his style in dress exerts an influence to this day. With lesser dandies of his era he inspired the personal affectations and the Silver-Fork fiction of Bulwer and Disraeli. His followers, descending upon Paris after Waterloo, appalled and then dazzled the French, whose own generation of dandies entered the novels of Balzac and Stendhal. And from France to England in 1830, the dandy returned in the person of Count D' Orsay, whose individual dandyism left its mark on the late novels (and late waistcoats) of Charles Dickens--and whose personal life provided the anti-dandiacals with a startling example of what they were against. Banished by Carlyle's fulminations and by the Victorian reaction against all things Regency, dandyism survived in England in an underworld of nostalgia,and in France in the anti-bourgeois revolt of Barbey and Baudelaire. It returned openly to England in the nineties and expired in the blaze of publicity surrounding Oscar Wilde.What remained for Max Beerbohm was to write a satirical postscript to a century posing for a purpose. With many delightful illustrations.