Abstract
Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) died of consumption at the age of twenty-five. Although many contemporaries rushed to eulogise Beardsley’s short, sickly life and premature death as a tragedy, Beardsley’s artistic persona is an unmistakeable example of what modern disability activist Tom Shakespeare calls a ‘celebration of difference’.1 Beardsley was keen to acknowledge his disease openly, publishing portraits and self-portraits that not only expose his genuine physical frailty, but also project an image of the consumptive artist as a monstrous, subversive, and playfully sexual being rather than a miserable patient.
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Notes
Tom Shakespeare, ‘Disability, Identity, Difference’ in Colin Barnes, and Geof Mercer (eds.), Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996), p. 106.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Representation and its Discontents: the Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film’ in Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, Michael Bury (eds.), Handbook of Disability Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), pp. 208–9.
According to Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term in 1883, ‘Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.’ Francis Galton, ‘Eugenics: its Definition, Scope and Aims’ in Essays in Eugenics (1909; Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2004), p. 42.
George Thomas Congreve, On Consumption of the Lungs, or Decline; and its Successful Treatment (1881; London: Published by the author and Elliot Stock, enlarged edition c. 1887) p. 2.
In 1976 the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) defined disability as ‘the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities’. Quoted in Colin Barnes ‘A Legacy of Oppression: A History of Disability in Western Culture’ in Len Barton and Mike Oliver (eds.) Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future, (1988; Leeds: Disability Press, 1997), p. 4.
Beardsley to Leonard Smithers, 31 May 1897 in The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good (1878–1898; Oxford: Plantin Publishers, 1990, 2nd edn.), p. 328. Subsequently Letters AB. Beardsley’s mother complained that in their hotel ‘There is of course no lift, so he has to be carried upstairs for fear of haemonhage, and this is rather a nuisance’. Mrs E. A. Beardsley to Robert Ross, 22 March 1897 in Margery Ross (ed.), Robert Ross, Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 47.
A. W. King, An Aubrey Beardsley Lecture, ed. by R. A. Walker (London: R.A. Walker, 1924)
Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 211.
See Catherine Arnold, Necropolis: London and its Dead (2006; London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. 215
F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, author of Endymion, Hyperion etc., in Romanticism: an Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (1821; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 970.
Leigh Hunt, ‘Mr Keats’ in Selected Writings, ed. David Jesson Dibley (1828; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990), p. 109.
Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, (London: Edward Moxon, 1848) V. 2, p. 105.
Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1936), p. 30.
J. Edward Squire, M.D., The Hygienic Prevention of Consumption (London: Charles Griffin and Company Ltd., 1893), p. 23.
S. A. K. Strahan, Marriage and Disease: A Study of Heredity and the More Important Family Degenerations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1892), p. 197.
D. S. MacColl, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. R. A. Walker (c.1920; London: Bodley Head, 1949), p. 31.
Beardsley interviewed in Arthur H. Lawrence, ‘Mr Aubrey Beardsley and His Work’, The Idler, 11 (March 1897), 188–202
Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: the Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 134.
Ellen Agnus Beardsley, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ in A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. R. A. Walker (c.1920; London: Bodley Head, 1949), p. 80.
Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (London: John Lane, 1909), pp. 22–3.
La Gallienne, The Romantic’90s, p. 110, quoted in Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: the Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 38–9.
Sturgis, p. 201. According to Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 22
See Liz Crow, ‘Including All Our Lives: renewing the social model of disability’ in Exploring the Divide (1996), pp. 55–73. Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells and Dominic Davies in The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (London and New York: Cassell, 1996)
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Tankard, A. (2010). ‘If I am not Grotesque I am Nothing’: Aubrey Beardsley and Disabled Identities in Conflict. In: Birch, D., Llewellyn, M. (eds) Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277212_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277212_7
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