Abstract
Even if religious and Romantic cultural stereotypes were not inherently dehumanising, could they be chosen or rejected freely? Were dying consumptives—physically, financially, and socially dependent on their families and religious ministers—ever pressured to conform to those ideals of pious resignation? Was a consumptive’s ingratitude or impiety ever accepted, or their protest acknowledged?
This chapter begins to explore these questions by analysing life-writing about two consumptive artists at opposite ends of the nineteenth century: poet John Keats (1795–1821) and artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898). Both died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, and Beardsley was frequently compared with Keats. Whether he welcomed this comparison is another matter entirely.
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Notes
- 1.
See Jeffrey Meyers, Disease and the Novel: 1880–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 12.
- 2.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 38.
- 3.
Victorian novels with consumptive deaths are too numerous to list here, but famous examples include Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1857); George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876); Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854–1855); Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Ellen Wood, East Lynne (1861). Texts in which consumptive characters survive to the end are much rarer: in addition to Harraden’sShips That Pass in the Night, examined in Chap. 6, one might consider André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902), and Anton Chekhov’s wonderful novella The Story of a Nobody (1893), in which the consumptive narrator is also a secret agent/assassin, and single father of an adopted baby girl.
- 4.
Kelly, ‘Negative Attributes of Self’, p. 91.
- 5.
Kent, ‘Disabled Women’, p. 62; Holmes, Fictions, p. ix; Klages, Woeful Afflictions, p. 2.
- 6.
Some of the following sections on Keats and Beardsley appeared previously in Alexandra Tankard, ‘“If I am not grotesque I am nothing”: Aubrey Beardsley and Disabled Identities in Conflict’, in Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 93–108. Permission from Palgrave Macmillan.
- 7.
The fact that Smike’s illness does not manifest itself fully until later in the novel is not particularly significant in terms of characterisation; as discussed in Chap. 2, in the nineteenth century it was commonly held that there was a special type of person whose physical and temperamental make-up destined them to become consumptive.
- 8.
Shakespeare, ‘Cultural Representation of Disabled People’, p. 223.
- 9.
Klages, Woeful Afflictions, p. 23.
- 10.
Holmes, Fictions, p. 120.
- 11.
David B. Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 193, discussing Jay M. Weiss, ‘Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease’, Scientific American, 226 (1972), pp. 104–113.
- 12.
Lawlor, Consumption, pp. 35–37.
- 13.
See Pat Jalland, ‘Victorian Death and Its Decline 1850–1918’, in Death in England: An Illustrated History, ed. by Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 230–255 (pp. 232–233).
- 14.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 36. See Frawley, Invalidism, pp. 162–168, and Bailin, Sickroom, p. 3, on the marginalisation of biomedical discourse in these deathbed/sickroom texts.
- 15.
Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 80.
- 16.
The essay in question is Susannah B. Mintz’s ‘Illness, Disability, and Recognition in Jane Eyre’, in The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, and Disability, ed. by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2012), pp. 129–149.
- 17.
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855), ed. by Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 101–102; Holmes, Fictions, p. 29.
- 18.
Mintz, “Illness’, pp. 132–133.
- 19.
Laurence Lerner, Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), p. 138.
- 20.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of JohnKeats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion etc. (1821), in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 970–971 (p. 970).
- 21.
Motion, Keats, p. 355, repeats Charles Cowden Clark’s anecdote of Keats beating a butcher’s boy he found hurting a kitten, and places this incident as late as February or March 1819.
- 22.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 115. See also pp. 53–58 on George Cheyne in early 1700s; pp. 114–115, on John Brown’s Elementa Medicinae (1770). Dormandy’s White Death is an excellent resource on famous consumptives (or people supposed to be consumptive) in the arts including writers Molière (1622–1673), Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Emily Brontë (1818–1848), Anne Brontë (1820–1849), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), and George Orwell (1903–1950); philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and John Locke (1632–1704); artists Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828), and Amadeo Modigliani (1880–1920); composers Niccolò Paganini (1784–1840) and Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849); and early French film-director Jean Vigo (1905–1934).
- 23.
Congreve, Consumption, p. 2.
- 24.
Congreve, Consumption, p. 3.
- 25.
See Williams and Williams, Pulmonary Consumption, pp. 7–8.
- 26.
Lewis J. Moorman, MD, Tuberculosis and Genius (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1940), p. xvii, quoting the London Correspondent of JAMA (June 1932). See Moorman, Tuberculosis, pp. xviii–xiv, p. 248 and pp. 254–256 on Keats. René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (1952; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), an influential twentieth-century social history of TB, gives some credence to the mythical ‘toxin’.
- 27.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1914; London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 331–332.
- 28.
Quoted in Dormandy, White Death, p. 290.
- 29.
Wittkower, A Psychiatrist, pp. 46–47. See also Paul Mayho, The Tuberculosis Survival Handbook, 2nd edn (Weybridge, Surrey, and West Palm Beach, Florida: Merit Publishing International, 2006), p. 51.
- 30.
Mitchell and Snyder, ‘Representation’, p. 208.
- 31.
See Lawlor, Consumption, pp. 98–107 on Sterne, and pp. 127–137 on Kirk White. See also Henry Kirk White, ‘Written in the Prospect of Death’, in The Poetical Works of Henry Kirk White (1803–1806; repr. Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints, 2007), pp. 113–115.
- 32.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 134, remarks of early criticism of Michael Bruce (1746–1767), Henry Kirk White, and John Keats that ‘[t]he struggle for power over these narratives of illness gained a new dimension in the new role of the literary critic, who often had the upper hand in his ability to convey opinions about a poet to the ever-increasing literary public […] at the cost of contradicting the messages sent by the poets themselves’.
- 33.
Charles Armitage Brown, Life of John Keats (written but unpublished 1837; published Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 52, and 90 points out that, after John’s death, his brother George, and several nephews and nieces also died of consumption. The fact that Keats may have carried asymptomatic latent TB for many years is not relevant to this study of disabled identity. His sore throat is probably also irrelevant. Clark, Treatise, p. 146, reported that some patients notice symptoms of tubercular laryngitis before preceding lung disease becomes evident, but in conversation (1st February 2008), Professor Peter Davies, editor of Clinical Tuberculosis (2003), suggested that a diagnosis of tubercular laryngitis in Keats’ case would be extremely unlikely: this is usually an end-of-life TB complication rather than an early manifestation. More pertinently, Keats’ letters do not indicate that he regarded his sore throat as tubercular.
- 34.
See Brown, Life, p. 64. In cases of pulmonary tuberculosis, massive lung haemorrhage or haemoptysis generally occurs in advanced disease with open lung cavities. See Dormandy, White Death, pp. 221–222. Perhaps because it can occur in other diseases, Laënnec, Treatise, pp. 60–68, does not regard haemoptysis as a definitive sign of pulmonary tuberculosis.
- 35.
Joseph Severn, ‘On the Adversities of Keats’s Fame’ (1861), in Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2005) pp. 609–622 (p. 612; p. 611).
- 36.
Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 501.
- 37.
Keats to Fanny Keats (6th July 1819), in John Keats, Letters, ed. by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 399 (subsequently referenced as Letters JK), p. 266.
- 38.
Keats to Mrs Samuel Brawne (c.24th October 1820), in Letters JK, p. 395.
- 39.
Keats to James Rice (14–16th February 1820), in Letters JK, p. 359.
- 40.
Keats to Fanny Brawne (1 March (?) 1820), Letters JK, p. 365.
- 41.
Keats to Fanny Brawne (c. March 1820), Letters JK, p. 367. Keats was only 5′ ¾″ tall. Jennifer Davis Michael, ‘Pectoriloquy: The Narrative of Consumption in the Letters of Keats’, European Romantic Review, 6 (1995), pp. 38–56 (p. 53) observes that, in Keats’ later letters, ‘it is more and more the disease that speaks, not the patient or even the self-diagnosing physician. It is thus not only the author, but his authority that is consumed, and even the products of his authorship.’
- 42.
Keats, quoted by Severn in letter to Taylor (5th January 1822), in Severn, Letters, p. 190.
- 43.
Keats to Brown (30th November 1820), Letters JK, p. 398.
- 44.
William Henry Marquess, Lives of the Poet: The First Century of Keats Biography (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), p. 66.
- 45.
Leigh Hunt, ‘Mr Keats’ (1828), in Selected Writings, ed. by David Jesson Dibley (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990), pp. 104–110 (p. 109).
- 46.
Hunt quoted (without full reference) in William Michael Rossetti, Life of John Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 103.
- 47.
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (written 1819, published in Lamia etc in 1820), in Complete Poems, p. 346, iii, l. 6.
- 48.
William John Courthope, ‘Keats’s Place in English Poetry’, National Review, 10: 55 (September 1887), pp. 11–24 (p. 16); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 2nd June 2017]. See also Bruce Hayley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 46, and Matthew Arnold, ‘John Keats’ (1880) in English Literature and Irish Politics, Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 9, ed. by R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), pp. 205–216 (p. 208).
- 49.
Klages, Woeful, pp. 1–2.
- 50.
Severn to Taylor (24th December 1820), in Joseph Severn, Letters and Memoirs, ed. by Grant F. Scott (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 116–120 (pp. 116–117).
- 51.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Tomb of Keats’, in A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies, ed. by E.V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1919), pp. 1–4 (first publ. in Irish Monthly (July 1887)) likens Keats to Saint Sebastian in a particularly homoerotic variation on Brown and Severn’s theme.
- 52.
Brown, Life, p. 89.
- 53.
Brown, Life, p. 91; Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), II, p. 105. Andrew Motion’s novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) invents an alternative life for Keats after 1821.
- 54.
Lawlor, Consumption, p. 134.
- 55.
Keats to Clark, later author of Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (1835), quoted by Severn in letter to John Taylor (6th March 1821), in Letters JK, p. 138.
- 56.
Haldane MacFall, Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Works (London: Bodley Head, 1928), pp. xiii–xiv. See also ‘The Keats Memorial’, Saturday Review, 78 (21st July 1894), p. 66; https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 2nd June 2017].
- 57.
Joseph Pennell, Aubrey Beardsley and Other Men of Letters (Philadelphia: Privately Printed for the Pennell Club, 1924), p. 45. See also Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, (1913; London: The Cresset Library, 1988), p. 114, claiming comparison.
- 58.
Penrhyn Stanlaws, ‘Some Personal Recollections of Aubrey Beardsley’, The Book Buyer (October 1898), pp. 212–214 (p. 212).
- 59.
Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1998) is a superb account of Beardsley’s life and work, and remarkable for its delicate handling of complex questions surrounding Beardsley’s disability and sexuality.
- 60.
Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 161; see also p. 186 on degeneration.
- 61.
See Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 58–59 on Beardsley’s attempts as an impressionable teenager to ‘assimilate them to his vision of himself and his alarming condition’.
- 62.
See Linda Walsh, ‘Subjects, Society, Style: Changing Evaluations of Watteau and His Art’, in Art and Its Histories: The Changing Status of the Artist, ed. by Emma Barker, Nick Webb, and Kim Woods (New Haven; London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999), pp. 220–248; Louisa E. Jones, Pierrot-Watteau: A Nineteenth Century Myth, études littéraires françaises, 32 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1984).
- 63.
O’Sullivan, Aspects, p. 130.
- 64.
See Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ‘90s (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926), p. 139; Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 38–39. R.K.R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 80, quotes Arthur Symons in 1896 comparing Dowson to Keats.
- 65.
O’Sullivan, Aspects, pp. 127–128.
- 66.
O’Sullivan, Aspects, pp. 129–130.
- 67.
Again, Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, gives an excellent account of Beardsley’s lifelong illness.
- 68.
Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells and Dominic Davies, The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (London and New York: Cassell, 1996), p. 51.
- 69.
Motion, Keats, p. 33; 98; Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 33, points out that Beardsley sat only one external exam and ‘achieved a disappointing “Third Class” pass’.
- 70.
A.W. King, An Aubrey Beardsley Lecture, ed. by R.A. Walker (London: R.A. Walker, 1924), p. 26. Beardsley’s headmaster at Brighton Grammar School even ‘hesitated to receive a boy whose physique and nervous temperament and special intellectual bent might not profit by the routine of class work and discipline of a large public school’. See Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 29, quoting ‘Aubrey Beardsley in Memoriam’, Westminster Budget, 25th March 1898, p. 10.
- 71.
He had brief (though seemingly friendly) associations with prostitutes. See Beardsley to Smithers (c.10th April 1896), Letters AB, p. 124, on ‘Rayon’ and ‘Yvonne’.
- 72.
Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley (London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1898), pp. 14–15.
- 73.
Beardsley to H.C.J. Pollitt (7th June 1896), Letters AB, p. 136. Beardsley rarely uses the word ‘consumptive’, much less ‘tuberculosis’, but he describes biomedical disease symptoms in ways that make the diagnosis obvious.
- 74.
See Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 335, quoting John Rothenstein, The Life and Death of Charles Conder (1938), pp. 135–136: when Beardsley accidentally drank from Decadent artist Charles Conder’s glass, Conder (1868–1910) ‘with an involuntary gesture of revulsion […], carefully wiped the rim’. This hurtful gesture apparently ‘shocked the party’ with whom they were dining, which suggests that Conder’s behaviour was regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Writing to Julian Sampson (22nd March 1897), Letters AB, p. 282, Beardsley refers to ‘bacilli’ involved in his disease, but does not mention contagion. On children visiting, see Beardsley to John Gray and Raffalovich (25th December 1896), Letters AB, pp. 232–233, and Ellen Agnus Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ [1920], in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. by R.A. Walker (London: Bodley Head, 1949), p. 80.
- 75.
Beardsley to Raffalovich (13th December 1897), Letters AB, pp. 406–407.
- 76.
Beardsley to Raffalovich (11th January 1898), Letters AB, p. 423.
- 77.
Gill, ‘Disability’, p. 188.
- 78.
William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 1872–1900 (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), p. 180.
- 79.
Arthur H. Lawrence, ‘Mr Aubrey Beardsley and His Work’, Idler, 11 (March 1897), pp. 188–202 (pp. 198–200) https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017].
- 80.
See O’Sullivan, Aspects, pp. 127–128.
- 81.
See Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 184, discussing The Globe and The Pelican, 21st April 1894.
- 82.
‘The Literary Advantages of Weak Health’, Spectator, 20th October 1894, p. 521.
- 83.
Max Beerbohm, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ (1898), in The Incomparable Max: A Selection (London: Heinemann, 1962), pp. 85–93 (p. 90).
- 84.
George Gordon Byron, Don Juan (c.1823–24), Canto XI, in The Major Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 725.
- 85.
Beardsley to St Paul’s (28th June 1895), in Letters AB, p. 92. Beardsley and MacFall later became friends, and MacFall wrote Beardsley’s first full-length biography in 1928.
- 86.
Mitchell and Snyder, ‘Representation’, pp. 208–209.
- 87.
Stanlaws, ‘Some Personal Recollections’, p. 213.
- 88.
Ellen Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, p. 80.
- 89.
MacFall to H.A. Payne (31st March 1898), East Sussex Archives, Payne Correspondence, E/SC/214/59/2.
- 90.
Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (London: John Lane, 1909), p. 19.
- 91.
Ellen Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, p. 80. Fellow consumptive Henry Harland, in ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Academy, 1388 (10th December 1898), pp. 437–438, https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 5th August 2017], emphasises Beardsley’s charming boyishness—in this case to deny critical accusations of the wicked, corrupt personality supposedly evinced in his work.
- 92.
Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 22–23.
- 93.
Beardsley to Smithers (26th September 1896), Letters AB, p. 171.
- 94.
This volume, and Beardsley’s completeness, are discussed in Tankard, ‘“If I am not grotesque I am nothing”’.
- 95.
Beerbohm, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, p. 85.
- 96.
D.S. MacColl, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ [1898], in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. by R.A. Walker (London: Bodley Head, 1949), pp. 17–36 (p. 26); King, Aubrey Beardsley Lecture, p. 38.
- 97.
Ellen Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, p. 80.
- 98.
Jack Smithers, The Early Life and Vicissitudes of Jack Smithers (London, 1939), pp. 38–40, quoted in Stanley Weintraub, Aubrey Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), p. 176.
- 99.
For example, Mark Bryant’s compendium of mini-biographies, Private Lives (London: Cassell & Co., 2001), p. 30, states that ‘Beardsley may have been homosexual but was more likely a virgin throughout his life’. Beardsley to Leonard Smithers (13th February 1897), Letters AB, p. 251, suggests that he was not a virgin.
- 100.
Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 320–321. John Rothenstein, The Artists of the 1890’s (London: Routledge, 1928), gives an interesting account of the Decadents’ fashionable infatuation with Roman Catholicism, but Matthew Sturgis, Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 283, observes of Beardsley’s combination of irreverence and piety that ‘it is, of course, tempting to regard one of these poses as somehow truer and more sincere than the other, but both were deliberate and dramatic, and both, one suspects, were sincerely believed in during the moment of their expression’.
- 101.
Beardsley to Smithers (7th March 1898), Letters AB, p. 439.
- 102.
Ellen Beardsley to J.M. Dent (c.13th March 1898), Leeds University Brotherton Library, Elliot Collection: MS Beardsley.
- 103.
Ellen Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, p. 78.
- 104.
Ellen Beardsley to J.M. Dent.
- 105.
Correspondent D.H. [surname illegible] to H.A. Payne (26th September 1909), East Sussex Archives, Payne Correspondence: E/SC/214/59/2.
- 106.
John Gray, ‘Introduction’ to The Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1904), pp. v–ix (pp. vii–viii). Gray was the companion of Beardsley’s patron Raffalovich and encouraged Beardsley’s conversion; Gray later became a priest.
- 107.
Frawley, Invalidism, p. 27.
- 108.
‘Publisher’s Advertisement’ and Keats’ response (1820), in John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. by John Barnard, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 514.
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Tankard, A. (2018). Victimhood and Death: Consumptive Stereotypes in Fiction and Non-fiction. In: Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71446-2_3
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