Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian

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Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Disability
Prideef
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Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away (1857)
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That this particular constitutional state is a
degeneration and that it is frequently
associated, both in individual and in family,
with other degenerate conditions, such as idiocy,
insanity, deaf-mutism, cancer, drunkenness,
epilepsy, and crime, it is now my business to
prove. (p.197) tuberculosis in the parent not
only deepens to scrofula in the child, but to
that lowest of all types of humanity, the
scrofulous idiot (p. 205) S. A. K. Strahan,
Marriage and Disease A Study of Heredity and the
More Important Family Degenerations (London, 1892)
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Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898)
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I am now eighteen years old, with a vile
constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long
red hair, a shuffling gait and a
stoop Beardsley to A. W. King, July 1891
Beardsley c. 1890 (aged 18)
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Beardsley by Jacques Emile Blanche, and
caricatured as Alan Roy in Punch (both 1895)
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I shall not live much longer than did
Keats. Beardsley to Penrhyn Stanlaws in 1894
John Keats (1795-1821)
Beardsley by Walter Sickert (1894)
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although he looked haggard and pale, as victims
of consumption generally do, I found in Mr
Beardsley an excellent talker, concise and to the
point, interested in everything, listening
eagerly, and, although his slight stoop and frail
physique betrayed the invalid, entering into
every point with considerable keenness. Mr
Beardsley, when I saw him, was faultlessly
dressed How can a man die better than by doing
what he wants to do most! he adds with a laugh.
Arthur Lawrences interview with Beardsley in The
Idler (1897)
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The whole thing has charm, but it is undoubtedly
the charm of degeneration and decay. These
things do not belong to the sane in body or mind,
and they do not find their out-and-out admirers
in men of robust intellect, or of wholly healthy
moral tone Public Opinion (1893)
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A Footnote, by Beardsley (1896)
The power of transgression always originates at
the moment when the derided object
uncharacteristically embraces its deviance as a
value. In perversely championing the terms of
their own stigmatization, marginal peoples alarm
the dominant culture with a seeming canniness
over the terms of their own subjugation.
Mitchell Snyder (2001), pp.208-9
Beardsley by Frederick Evans (1893)
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No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay
hostile, criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a
personal remark . As to my uncleanliness, I do
my best for it in my morning bath, and if he
really has any doubts as to my sex, he may come
and see me take it. Beardsley to the editor of
St Pauls (1894)
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