chapter 20

Dandyism and late Victorian masculinity

James Eli Adams

No author in the history of literature in English has been more prominent

as a visual icon, both in life and afterwards, than Oscar Wilde. That
visibility is both a testament to and a source of Wilde’s power, almost
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from his first appearance in England, to startle and unsettle. As he

constantly solicited attention, presenting himself as a spectacle and turning
those who observed him into spectators of a performance, Wilde fore-
grounded a number of the concerns that would figure centrally in his
writings: the meanings and uses of aesthetic form, the psychology of the
spectator, the play of surface and depth, the nature of personal identity, the
relations of art and the artist to everyday life. More immediately, however,
Wilde’s self-presentation was an ongoing disturbance to prevailing norms
of masculinity. In cultivating life itself as an aesthetic achievement, Wilde
rejuvenated the stance of the dandy, which had long vexed the middle-class
imagination as an emblem of idle, unproductive existence, and thus of
effeminacy. But Wilde’s dandyism also elicited a more unsettling prospect:
that masculine identity might not be a stable ground for secure moral
judgement, but instead might be a mode of performance, a set of social
scripts to be perpetually enacted and revised.1
The notion that every self is a performing self may be common among
social scientists today, but it was deeply disturbing to most Victorians.
Most obviously, Wilde’s theatricality rebuked models of masculine integ-
rity that had gained currency over the course of the nineteenth century, as
an emergent middle class defined its claims to social and moral authority in
resistance to broadly aristocratic norms. An aristocratic ethos had not
merely tolerated but had encouraged an elegant theatricality in daily life,
pausing only to laugh at exorbitance (as in the Restoration fop). But in the
late eighteenth century, under the conjoint influences of evangelical piety
and romantic ideals of ‘deep’ selfhood, such theatricality began to seem a
Copyright 2013. Cambridge University Press.

mark of superficiality. It was increasingly seen as the index of a social order

founded on inherited rank, kinship and wealth, which were signalled by
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 Dandyism and late Victorian masculinity 221
externals that had no necessary connection with moral character.
An emergent middle-class discourse (derived from broadly puritan trad-
ition) celebrated by contrast a masculinity associated above all with
industry and self-discipline, and with it varieties of self-determination that
might confound conventional social hierarchy and traditional networks of
patronage and recognition. Manly ‘character’ thus became associated
with inner moral being, whose confident possession would be confirmed
by obliviousness to outward regard. One index of this shift was an increas-
ingly sober and self-effacing norm of male attire, characterized by dark,
loose-fitting clothing that extinguished any display of individuality – dress
‘so sombre, so depressing’, as Lord Henry complains in The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), that ‘[s]in is the only real colour-element left in
modern life’.2
The consequent suspicion of theatricality found a lightning rod with the
emergence of the dandy in the early part of the nineteenth century. During
the Regency, the character of Beau Brummell in particular came to incar-
nate a mode of sublime indifference to an emergent utilitarian ethos;
for Brummell, labour was sublimed in the fine art of dressing well and
contemplating society with an exacting eye to form. For most middle-class
writers, this seemed an insulting resurrection of a discredited aristocracy,
an icon of parasitic idleness and superficial pleasures disdainful of common
human struggle. But the most famous attack, in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus,
captured a paradox informing ‘the dandiacal body’: the dandy solicited the
recognition of the very society he professed to despise.3 This notion would
have been anathema to Brummell: ‘one of the severest mortifications
which a gentleman could incur,’ Brummell believed, ‘was to attract obser-
vation in the street by his outward appearance’.4 Such ‘mortification’
captures the stigma of effeminacy, the affiliation of the dandy with
a traditionally feminine dependence on external regard. But this was a
dependence Wilde openly embraced, with dazzling, provocative and
ultimately disastrous results.
The dandy seemed an aping of aristocratic life, but the stance
appealed most powerfully to those of humbler origins (like Brummell
himself).5 Young men on the make, particularly young men with literary
aspirations, saw in dandyism a mode of self-fashioning that might capture
the public eye far more readily than the obscure labours of authorship.
Thus Disraeli, Dickens and Bulwer all were widely remarked as young
dandies: ‘That egregious young coxcomb Disraeli was here,’ wrote an
aggrieved Lady Morgan in 1833, ‘outraging the privilege a young man has
of being absurd’.6 In this aggressive self-fashioning, however, the dandy

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 222 James Eli Adams
strikingly resembled another masculine icon that might seem its antithesis:
the self-made man.
Although the self-made man was an apotheosis of the Victorian ‘gospel
of work’, the ideal also represented a fantasy of perfect autonomy, of a self-
determined character and distinction untrammelled by the constraints of
parentage and poverty. Thus the young, orphaned protagonist of John
Halifax, Gentleman, Dinah Mulock (Craik)’s best-seller of 1856, announces
himself as ‘a person of independent property, which consists of my head
and my two hands’.7 Not even the self-made man could remain oblivious
to social regard, however; economic life remained deeply dependent on
standards of character embodied in the honorific ‘gentleman’, not merely
as an index of social prestige, but as grounds for credit and collaboration in
an increasingly volatile marketplace. This is one facet of the paradox
that Max Weber elicited in his studies of Protestantism: even the ‘inner-
worldly’ ascetic who wishes to ground his life in a divine calling must
nonetheless prove himself in the eyes of the world.8 Ironically, then, as the
ideal of the gentleman was pried away from inherited rank to be grounded
in moral character – as it became, that is, a distinction one could earn
rather than simply be born to – the norm became more anxious, and more
overtly bound up with the solicitation of external regard. Thus Victorian
guides to gentlemanly behaviour stressed, in Michael Curtin’s words, ‘an
application of the discipline of civilization to every motion and activity’.9
And middle-class masculinity thereby became more deeply implicated in
the logic of the dandy, as Carlyle had described it. Hence the dandy has
a prominence in Victorian literature that outstrips its actual presence
in everyday life: like the fallen woman, another exorbitant figure in the
Victorian cultural imaginary, the dandy is a symptom of instability
within Victorian gender norms – in this case, the persistent shadow of a
feminizing theatricality that the ideal of the Victorian gentleman had
ostensibly cast out.
The rise of the dandy, then, was less an aping of the aristocracy than an
early mark of its decline, which emerged along with the new models of
middle-class manhood to which it served as an ironic double. Of all
nineteenth-century commentators, Baudelaire grasped this dynamic most
trenchantly: ‘Dandyism,’ he wrote in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863),
‘appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all
powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall’; it is the
dream of ‘a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it
will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the
divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow’.10 It is not hard

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 Dandyism and late Victorian masculinity 223
to see the appeal of such a fantasy to a young, middle-class Irishman at
Oxford in the mid-1870s, where it became both a claim to attention and a
resistance to economic rationality. As Wilde later wrote of the criminal-
artist Thomas Wainewright, ‘The young dandy sought to be somebody,
rather than to do anything.’11
In the 1870s, however, dandies were a good deal scarcer on the ground
in England than they had been in the 1820s, the heyday of Wainewright.
The social history behind this change is complex, centrally bound up with
the intervening expansion of the British economy, which generated
an increasingly large population laying claim to middle-class standing.
With this expansion of wealth, the dandy was reconfigured to address
status anxieties concerned less with the aristocracy than with increasingly
intricate divisions and nuances of social standing among the middle classes.
Hence, for example, the flowering of the ‘gent’, typically a young man of
dubious means and background who aspired to distinguish himself from
the lower orders by mimicking the dress and attitude of his superiors – an
effect often evoked as a comically inept dandyism. Thackeray became the
laureate of the gent, whose lack of authority was signalled by diminutive
size and surname (Titmouse, Titmarsh, Tittlebat), but Dickens offered
variations on the theme in the likes of ‘Chick’ Smallweed in Bleak House.
Later in the period, versions of the trope were reconfigured as the more
assured and socially liminal ‘swell’ of music hall performance, such as
‘Champagne Charlie’.
Dickens, however, turned his fiercest satire against more overtly aristo-
cratic figures, for whom dress is less important than a cynical idleness long
associated with the dandy. Harthouse in Hard Times (1854) epitomizes the
suspect qualities: a ‘certain air of exhaustion . . . in part arising from
excessive summer, and in part from excessive gentility. For it was to be
seen with half an eye that he was a thorough gentleman, made to the
model of the time; weary of everything, and putting no more faith in
anything than Lucifer.’12 A related suspicion of detachment from product-
ive labour informs the wealthy parvenus of mysterious origins who prolifer-
ate in mid-Victorian novels: Trollope’s Melmotte, George Eliot’s
Bulstrode, Dickens’s Merdle and (aptly named) Veneerings. In a world
of ever-greater social mobility, such portraits suggest, especially adept
performers might conjure up wholly fictitious identities aimed at the
anxious credulity of those seeking to bolster their own social standing.
Once again the dandy is unnervingly akin to the self-made man.
Unlike Brummell, Wilde built his early career on outlandish costume,
which was clearly designed to rivet the public gaze. The knee breeches,

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 224 James Eli Adams
‘cello’ coat, and ‘little Lord Fauntleroy’ outfits of the American tour
all represented a marked departure from the subdued elegance of the
Brummellesque dandy. (And from Wilde’s own image at Oxford,
where he was photographed sporting the checked suit and bowler hat of
the young ‘swell’.13) Indeed, to some historians of fashion, such ‘aesthetic’
dress was inimical to dandyism, which James Laver argues was more
faithfully represented by Whistler.14 Still, reaction to Wilde’s costume
echoed the backlash against dandyism fifty years earlier, although
the dominant note in initial responses (most notably Gilbert and
Sullivan’s Patience) was laughter, parody and burlesque rather than the
biting satire of Sartor Resartus. Wilde’s extravagance seemed more singular,
and his aestheticism more exotic, than had Brummell’s urbane elegance.
But Wilde also emerged in a world in which masculinity itself was
becoming more manifold, splintering into an array of competing types.
The most important of these masculine norms was a broadly ‘muscular’
manhood, which emerged in the 1850s. Initially dubbed ‘muscular
Christianity’, this new model began to take shape in the writings of the
clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley, who was reacting against the
charismatic but austere piety of John Henry Newman, which celebrated
(among other ideals) a revival of celibacy in the priesthood. In response to
what seemed an emasculation of faith – Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua
was prompted by Kingsley’s 1864 sneer that Catholic priests were lacking
in ‘brute male force’ – Kingsley celebrated a piety grounded in the
physically vigorous male body. But what originated largely as a deeply
personal sexual anxiety resonated more broadly in the wake of two national
crises: the Crimean War of 1854–6 and the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857
(Figure 27). Both of these events energized calls for a more robust and
forceful Britain, to which Kingsley contributed with his best-selling novel
Westward Ho! (1855), a work he called ‘a most bloodthirsty book – just
what the times require’.15
The new ‘muscular’ masculinity informed increasingly bellicose apolo-
gies for empire and the men who administered it, but it also came to
animate the dramatic expansion of late Victorian interest in sport, which
grew into what has been called the ‘cult of athleticism’. The proliferation
of professional leagues, such as the Football Association, dates from the
1880s, but an earlier and arguably more far-reaching development was
the installation of physical skill and organized sport at the heart of the
public school ethos. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ (‘a sound mind in a sound
body’) became a central adage of elite Victorian education, most famously
celebrated in Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857),

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 Dandyism and late Victorian masculinity 225

Figure 27 A Bovril advertisement in the Illustrated London News, 2 February 1901,

captures the prominence of sporting and military manhood at the time.

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 226 James Eli Adams
which inaugurated the genre of the ‘school story’. Through this
conjunction, sport became the foundation of a manhood that received
its sternest test on the field of battle. The close association of manhood
with athleticism and martial heroism flourished throughout the remainder
of the century (to be extinguished only with the carnage of World War I).
The bond is epitomized in Henry Newbolt’s lyric, ‘Vita Lampada’ (1898),
in which English soldiers are rescued from disaster when ‘the voice of a
schoolboy rallies the ranks – / Play up! Play up! And play the game!’
Conversely, the education in which games figured so centrally came to
seem a concerted preparation for imperial rule. ‘If asked what our muscular
Christianity has done,’ one late Victorian schoolmaster pronounced,
‘we point to the British empire.’16
The convergence of ‘the games ethic’ and imperialism created new
iconographies of masculinity starkly at odds with Wilde’s. By the 1880s
‘men in black’ were still prominent, from the burgeoning professions to
the humbler ranks of clerkship, but they were increasingly jostled by men
in pith helmets and khaki, on the one hand, or in athletic attire, both of
which gave new emphasis to the muscular body. Wilde’s aestheticist stance
was a travesty of both images: tellingly, one of the earliest visual parodies
shows a rather Ruskinian Wilde standing plaintively in Oxford’s Christ
Church Meadow amid a horde of athletes dashing to the boat races nearby
(Figure 28).17 By the end of the decade, however, that discord came to
seem more troublesome, even threatening. Athleticism and the celebration
of physical vitality made the male body itself an index of morality, and in
turn brought morality and masculinity under the aegis of an increasingly
normative medical science. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ took on newly
prescriptive force amid expanding typologies of a manifold ‘deviance’
popularized by the likes of Cesare Lombroso and Francis Galton.
A departure from conventional masculinity became more than a moral
or social failing; it could seem an affront to nature. Within this framework,
the Wildean dandy could become an icon of a ‘decadence’ not merely
cultural but biological.
Ironically, the threat became more unsettling after Wilde renounced
the extravagance of his ‘aesthetic’ phase and assumed a restrained style of
dress more in keeping with upper-class norms. Wilde thereby aligned
himself with a more traditional dandyism, but also a style that was coming
into wider visibility in the 1880s, as ‘a more popular, generalized celebra-
tion of urban leisured masculinity’, ranging from the music halls to the
clubs of Pall Mall.18 As varieties of dandyism became more common,
Wilde’s version became more disturbing, seemingly more contagious,

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 Dandyism and late Victorian masculinity 227

Figure 28 In ‘Aesthetics vs Athletics’ (Punch, 1881), a rather Ruskinian Wilde is swarmed

by a group of athletes in what seems to be Christ Church meadow.

particularly as early suspicions of his ‘effeminacy’ became more pointedly

associated with homosexuality. The so-called ‘Labouchere amendment’
to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized any
act of ‘gross indecency’ between two men, put new pressures on Wildean
theatricality, but it also gave new force to modes of obliquity and insinu-
ation. With his return to a more traditional dandyism, decorum magnified
the power of detail. Thus Robert Hitchens scored a succès de scandale
with The Green Carnation (1894), a novel whose title emblem, sported by a
very Wildean dandy, became a clear index of same-sex desire.
The dandy’s stance thus lay at the heart of Wilde’s downfall, as provo-
cation, as evidence and as afterlife. Tellingly, the ordeal began with the
Marquess of Queensberry’s scrawled innuendo, ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing
somdomite’ [sic] – as if the act of performance, of posing, were as much an
offence as the sexuality.19 Ultimately, they came to seem inseparable.
Newspaper accounts turned the courtroom into a Wildean theatre, in
which he repeatedly summoned up the dandy’s elegant insouciance. Thus
the Echo, for example, remarked on Wilde’s ‘indolent lolling’, ‘polished
paradoxes’, ‘careless nonchalance’, and ‘utter contempt for all things

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 228 James Eli Adams
mundane’.20 Of course the prosecution aimed to explode the theatricality,
to fix Wilde’s ‘posing’ in a secure typology of deviance. And its success in
that regard was far-reaching. The trials destroyed Wilde’s career, but
in the process Wilde’s ‘effeminate’ dandyism was installed in the
popular imagination as the distinguishing mark of homosexual identity.21
The persistence of that association is testimony to the power of
dandyism itself.

Notes
1 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1959) is the classic analysis of social life as a dramaturgic process.
2 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar
Wilde, Volume III: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed.
Joseph Bristow (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 192.
3 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and Heroes and Hero-worship (London:
Everyman, 1906), pp. 205–7.
4 Cited in Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 34.
5 Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public
(Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 67–73.
6 Cited in Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature
(London: Constable, 1983), p. 195.
7 Dinah Mulock (Craik), John Halifax, Gentleman (1856; Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview, 2005), p. 40.
8 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 290–1.
9 Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners
(New York: Garland, 1987), p. 116.
10 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed.
Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1985), p. 34.
11 Oscar Wilde, ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde,
Volume IV: Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions and the Soul of Man, ed.
Josephine M. Guy (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 108.
12 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 91.
13 Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Commercial Culture in
Britain, 1860–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), p. 145.
14 James Laver, Dandies (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), pp. 87–94.
15 Charles Kingsley, The Life and Works of Charles Kingsley, vol. ii (London:
Macmillan, 1902), p. 179.
16 Cited in J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986), p. 148.
17 Joseph Bristow, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Wilde Writings:
Contextual Conditions (University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 12.

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 Dandyism and late Victorian masculinity 229
18 Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion, and City
Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 172.
19 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 438.
20 Cited in Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse
on Male Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 174.
21 Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer
Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

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