Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at the British Library

PART TWO

Charles Dickens is the perfect figure to usher us into the Victorian world, and into the dark, narrow and crowded streets of the rapidly expanding, noisily industrial capital. A clip of the recent BBC adaptation of Bleak House, with Gillian Anderson as a ghostly Lady Dedlock, shows us the scene in which Jo the crossing sweeper takes her to the gates of the paupers’ cemetery. The bones lie on the surface in some parts, and Jo remarks of the man she is searching for (known only as ‘Nemo’ at this point) that ‘they put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to get it in. I could unkiver it, with my broom, if the gate was open’. He then excitedly points out a rat, which runs into the ground to feast. This depiction of the bodies of the dead protruding from their shallow graves, seen through the eyes of a streetchild for whom it is wholly unremarkable, is a grim Gothic touch which Dickens drew from factual observation. Victorian London was, for many, a Gothic city, but one marked by poverty and squalor rather than elegantly decaying castles and crypts. A staggered pile of booklets on display were a reminder of the part published format of the book, episodically issued in 1852. The public would devour the story in monthly instalments, eager to discover what happened next.

Woman in Black - Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House

Gothic had become a flavour or shade which could be added to the kind of multilayered work of which Dickens was a master. It might be associated with a a particular character, plot strand or setting. It was a transferable style which could be employed in a variety of contexts. Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories as well, including The Signalman, an enduring classic of the subgenre, and the collaborative collection The Haunted House, whose framing story (written by Dickens) introducing separate tales anticipates the Amicus portmanteau films of the 1960s and 70s. It was a form which would become increasingly popular as the Victorian period progressed. It was an era much preoccupied with mortality and the memorialisation of the dead. The great necropolises which were built on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding urban centres were themselves like miniature cities of the dead. They would prove ideal Gothic locations, particularly as the years added attractive layers of gentle ruination and ivy entanglement. For Dickens, the Gothic could also encompass an element of social comment or psychological portraiture. The graveyard in Bleak House is disturbing for its exposure of appalling poverty as much as the rat-gnawed bones of the dead. Lady Dedlock drifting blankly through Chesney Wold and Miss Havisham presiding over the cobweb-strewn Satis House in Great Expectations are both spectres prematurely haunting their decaying homes. They are portraits of mental and moral paralysis.

For Dickens, the true Gothic locale was not a remote, ruined abbey or centuries old castle but the dark alleys and dilapidated houses of London. Its gaslit Gothic atmosphere is perfectly captured in the engravings Gustav Doré produced for the book London, A Pilgrimage, a journalistic record of travels through the city which highlighted the huge gulf between the rich and poor. Plates depicting the rookery of Bluegate Fields, the night-time pavement sellers of Harrow Alley in Houndsditch, the ragged wraiths working in the Lambeth gasworks and the mazes of back to back terraces in the sooty shadow of arcing railway viaducts are densely shaded with an almost palpable darkness.

The Gothic followed in the wake of mass migrations from field to factory and relocated to the city. Urban Gothic was formed in the choking fogs of London; fogs like those described in the opening scenes of Bleak House, in which Dickens imagined the possibility of encountering ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. The primeval swamp seeps through into the streets of the modern city. Urban Gothic bred its own monsters and mythologies which were promulgated in the rough pages of the Penny Dreadfuls and Penny Bloods. These episodic works featured sensational cover illustrations which dramatically depicted scenes of horror and bloodshed. Precursors of the EC comics of the 50s, their potential effect on the minds of the masses who read them occasionally troubled the moral guardians of Victoria’s realm. But they generally fell so far below the literary lighthouse beam that they escaped any real censure. The dreadfuls introduced the likes of Varney the Vampire, with his impulsive thirst for blood; Sweeney Todd, the demon barber and fresh meat merchant; and Spring Heeled Jack, a proto-supervillain who could effortlessly leap over the rooftops of London, and who gradually morphed into an enigmatic superhero in the Batman mould. A copy of The Mysteries of London by George WM Reynolds was also on display, explicitly inviting the reader imagine their city as a labyrinth of hidden terrors, lurking and ready to spring. The prolific Reynolds also wrote an early werewolf tale with his 1846-7 series Wagner the Were-Wolf. Some of Dave McKean’s original full-colour illustrations for the Batman story Arkham Asylum were displayed as an example of a modern version of the urban Gothic of the Penny Dreadfuls.

Harry Clarke's illustration for Poe's William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe was a central (perhaps THE central) figure in mid-19th century Gothic literature, and his morbid sensibility spread like an enervating virus, distilling fever dreams from the unconscious underworld of a motley spectrum of writers and artists, from French Decadents through Edwardian illustrators of children’s books to subversive Surrealists. One of Poe’s letters was on display, allowing us to inspect his neat handwriting and feel a sense of communion with the man who wrote it. Truth to tell, it doesn’t provide a very edifying portrait. Addressed to Fanny Osgood, one of a series of women with whom he became obsessed in his short lifetime, and whose patronage and hospitality he frequently called upon, its fulsome and fawning praise of her literary efforts is embarrassingly transparent in its bid for her favour. Poe’s influence on the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination is clearly visible in the illustrations from various editions of his work. On display here were Edmund Dulac’s plate for The Raven, Harry Clarke’s for William Wilson, Arthur Rackham’s for The Oval Portrait and John Buckland Wright’s woodcut for The Tell-Tale Heart. Presiding over this gloomy Poe corner was the magisterial voice of James Mason, narrating the expressionistic 1953 animated interpretation of The Tell-Tale Heart, with designs by Warner Bros. background artist Paul Julian, who would, appropriately enough, go on to work with Roger Corman. Mason explains his actions in a patient and scrupulously rational manner: ‘it was his eye, yes, that eye. His eye, staring, milky white film. The eye, everywhere in everything. Of course I had to get rid of the eye’.

Aubrey Beardsley's illustration for The Masque of the Red Death

Poe’s work certainly informed the Yellow Book Decadance of the fin de siecle period, the dying days of the Victorian period. A copy of the Yellow Book was on display here. And indeed its cover was an exquisite shade of yellow, an instantly distinctive object to be seen with tucked under your arm, connoting an all-embracing aesthetic worldview. One of Aubrey Beardsley’s Poe illustrations was also on display, a depiction of a scene from The Masque of the Red Death, full of leering, deformed grotesques and limp, opiated beauties. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was presented as the emblematic story from this movement, a self-reflexive myth for, and about, its participants. It’s a mythic encapsulation of the cost of the pursuit of excess and all-consuming sensual indulgence cast in Gothic form. The figurative is made manifest and hidden away in the attic. Wilde was the public spokesman for the Aesthetic movement (French-style Decadence in all but name). His elegant dandyism and elevation of the passing witticism into an exquisitely crafted artform promoted the idea of art as an all-encompassing worldview, affecting mannerisms and modes of dress as much as any actual creative artefact which might be produced in time remaining. This was a philosophy which would resonate throughout the 20th century, finding expression in the theatricality of latter day Goths as well as the self-reflective (or obsessed) art of the likes of Gilbert and George and a number of the YBAs. Indeed, there were some works by the Chapman Brothers later in the exhibition. Wilde’s own penchant for the Gothic, as well as his conflation of life and art, were displayed in the calling cards he had printed after he emerged from Reading Gaol. He cloaked himself in the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, adopted from Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer. Wilde thereby cast himself as the cursed exile who had made an ill-advised pact with the Devil and is now fated to tread a lonely, immortal path through the world.

Richard Mansfield as Jekyll...and Hyde

Another key work of the late Victorian period was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, originally published in 1886 as a Shilling Shocker (a complete work as opposed to the Penny Dreadful’s serialisations – hence the slightly inflated price and altered alliteration). Stevenson’s story is a subtly suggestive study of the duality inherent in the human psyche, its terrors remaining relatively subdued. It was the hugely successful theatrical production of 1887, written by JR Sullivan and starring Richard Mansfield in the twinned title role(s), which changed the tone of the story, and set the pattern for future adaptations. The bifurcation into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ selves, or rather selves which suppressed the desire for sensual pleasure and gave it full, destructive reign. Jekyll and Hyde became another myth of fin-de-siecle Decadence, a companion piece to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Richard Mansfield’s performance was particularly noted for its remarkable transformation scene, aided by theatrical lighting and make-up. A photograph displayed here gives us an idea of the thrills which the Victorian theatregoers would have experienced. Using the developing room magic or double exposure, we see the upright Dr Jekyll, face a saintly picture of benevolent intentions, transformed into the hunched, bestial figure of Hyde, hands clawed and poised to grab whatever they can grab a hold of. Hyde really does appear to be a shadow self in this photograph, a parthenogenetic homunculus tearing itself free from its noble progenitor.

The theatrical production of Jekyll and Hyde, which Stevenson professed to hate, was running at the time that the Jack the Ripper murders began to impinge on the public consciousness in 1888. The two became superimposed in the minds of many, Jack and Edward Hyde becoming mirrored selves. Theatrical fiction and factual speculation percolated together to form the beginnings of the potent myth which distilled the dark essence of late Victorian London. The city of terrible night, its narrow Whitechapel streets filled with the stench of poverty and despair. One of the most startling exhibits was a work of fiction purporting to be fact; another example of the fakery which seems to play such a prominent part in the history of Gothic (and which lives on in ‘found footage’ horror movies). A letter written in red ink boasting of murderous exploits and promising more horrors to come is signed Yours Truly Jack the Ripper (‘Don’t mind me giving the trade name’). Undoubtedly a hoax, it has nevertheless accumulated a certain amount of legendary cachet, being the first of a welter of such fevered missives, stoked by sensationalist newspaper reportage. Alan Moore, in his kaleidoscopic Ripper epic From Hell, has two journalists from the Daily Star compose the letter in a Wapping flat, giving the public a fiend whose luridly outlined exploits they can gorge themselves on (in the page of The Star, of course).

Robert Bloch’s story Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper draws on the letter’s signature, and imagines Jack as an immortal who surfaces in various eras to commit his ritualistic killings, which serve to keep him alive. The subsequent pairing in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology of Bloch’s A Toy for Juliette and Ellison’s own A Prowler In the City At the Edge of the World takes as its basis the way in which ‘Jack’ was transformed into an almost supernatural figure, an elusive trickster constantly eluding his pursuers with mocking ease. He was an inheritor of the powers of Spring Heeled Jack, and a precursor of the regrettable archetype of the superhuman serial killer in modern culture. Harlan Ellison reduces him to a pathetic puppet of greater, more debased forces at the end of his story, a conclusion which has considerable moral and allegorical force, and once more addresses the role of the media in creating and feeding an appetite for such atrocities.

Laird Cregar in the 1944 version of The Lodger

The Ripper murders, as filtered through Jekyll and Hyde and proto-tabloid journalism, gave rise to Belloc Lowndes’ 1911 novel The Lodger. The entrance of Ivor Novello’s titular character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 film version, face disguised beneath the mummifying wrap of a scarf , ragged wisps of illuminated fog dissipating behind him, is an electrifying expressionistic rendering of the mystery and fear fuelling the ever-expanding Ripper mythos. Actually, the 1944 version of The Lodger, with a mesmerising performance by Laird Cregar at its heart, better evokes the social gulfs within Victorian society which the Ripper murders so horrifically exposed. It’s also interesting to note the narrowing gap between literary source and cinematic adaptation. Only 38 years separate The Lodger from the Ripper murders and Richard Mansfield’s theatrical transformation into Hyde (and 32 from the 1920 John Barrymore film), the cinema from the music hall, the gas lamp from the electric light, the horse drawn Hackney cab from the motor car. They really do seem worlds apart.

First edition of Dracula in fin-de-siecle yellow book covers

The final work from the late Victorian period explored here is of such moment that it merited a whole room to itself. The visitor was obliged to make a detour from their natural winding progression through the exhibition’s dimly lit corridors, turning into this sealed off sepulchre which immediately felt like a sacred space. Indeed, so caught up was I in the cultural current leading me eagerly on from one thematic display to another that it wasn’t until I’d reached the end and exited into the light of the British Library’s lofty atrium that I paused and thought ‘hang on, there was something missing there’. Retracing my steps, I discovered the hidden sanctum which I’d initially passed by. The book in question is, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in 1897. Its influence on the horror genre and on popular culture in general is pervasive and profound, and anything in this compacted space could offer a partial survey at best. The literary exhibits were particularly fascinating. There was a pleasing congruity to the inclusion of some of the books which Stoker consulted in the British Library whilst researching the background of his story. Perhaps some of them were even the same copies.

Of particular significance was a book written by William Wilkinson, Esq., ‘Late British Consul Resident at Bukarest’, which blended colonial memoir, history lesson and traveller’s tales, and was given the fustily prosaic title An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia: With Various Political Observations Relating to Them. Stoker initially read this not at the British Library but in the subscription library in Whitby, the seaside town on the Yorkshire coast where he was staying for his summer holidays in 1890. The historical passages make reference to King Ladislas of Hungary forming an alliance with the Wallachian Voivode Dracula in 1444 to fight the Turks. It was in Whitby, therefore, that Stoker found the name for his vampire lord, although he would transform him from a prince (voivode) into a count. There was no such noble rank in Wallachia in the 15th century, but the baleful influence of Lord Byron together with the antics of his acolytes on the European continent had created an indelible impression. Vampires and Gothic villains in general had become strongly associated with dissipated Western European aristocrats.

The illustration included in the 1901 edition of Dracula

Stoker followed the established convention by ennobling his title character, even though he envisaged him as a stout military figure with a thick Central Eastern European moustache. This explicitly described appearance (roughly reproduced in the illustration in 1901 edition) would seldom be acknowledged in subsequent adaptations. Wilkinson also notes that Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. This could connote evil, although it could also use refer to the folk devil as a trickster figure. As such, it could be used in a complimentary sense as a badge of bravery or ingenuity in warfare or matters of state. Wallachia was also entirely separate from Transylvania, but such cavils are irrelevant. Dracula is not a historical novel, and the local colour and geographical detail Stoker derived from Wilkinson’s book and other accounts of the area provided a richly mysterious and haunted backdrop for Jonathan Harker’s arduous journey to Dracula’s castle and the final pursuit through the Transylvanian landscape. The mountainous and thickly forested world which he conjured up from his reading room travels was shrouded in fogs of superstition and venerable custom. Journeying there was akin to falling back in time to a pre-industrial era, leaving behind the nascent modernity of the late Victorian period in which electric lighting was already beginning to banish the shadows and returning to the Middle Ages. It was a reiteration of the Gothic’s abiding delight in resurrecting the spectres of primitive (and imaginary) histories which contrasted with the comforts of the present.

The demons of Lewtrenchard

Another book which Stoker consulted, Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and its People, contained fold-out maps (one of which was spread out here) which facilitated imaginary exploration, mental expeditions into the Carpathian Mountains via the Borgo Pass. Also on display was the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves, a collection of legend and lore which provided the inspiration for the wolves Dracula heralds as ‘the children of night’, and for his own transformation into a great hound which leaps onto the shore of Whitby from the deck of the wrecked Demeter. Baring-Gould was the parson of Lewtrenchard church, nestled in the shady valleys west of Dartmoor. In addition to collecting local folklore and folk music, he was a dedicated antiquarian, endeavouring to save the church furnishings and decorations of the Gothic period which other Victorian clergymen were busy discarding and destroying. His small church is a treasure house packed with objects rescued from diverse parts, restored and refitted. And hidden on the side of the pulpit facing the east wall are a pair of grinning demons carved from wood by the Pinwill sisters, Esther and Violet, in imitation of medieval originals. They would certainly not have looked out of place in Dracula’s castle.

More demons lodging in Lewtrenchard - call for the Rev. Sabine-Gould, demon hunter

Also included here was a manuscript Stoker wrote for a theatrical version of his novel. Scrappily assembled, with passages cut and pasted from the printed page, this was evidently dashed off with great haste. It was an exercise to establish theatrical copyright and prevent others from hijacking his ideas, distorting them and profiting from the thinly veiled results. Perhaps he had the success of JR Sullivan and Richard Mansfield’s Jekyll and Hyde in mind. It also suggested that Stoker was highly conscious of the fact that Dracula was a work which had the potential for broad popular appeal. The script formed the basis for a theatrical reading at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897, staged concurrently with the novel’s publication. Present in the select audience was Henry Irving, the actor-manager for whom Stoker acted as personal assistant and factotum in all things. Irving was an imposing figure, an archetypally demanding and egotistic theatrical, and a dominant force in Stoker’s life, source of both reverence and fear. Some have claimed him as a model for Dracula. Its certainly likely that some of his characteristics found there way into the portrayal of the commanding count. His approval or even mild encouragement was vital for Stoker; but all he received after the show was brusque brush-off. The self-absorbed Irving had no time to dispense the words of praise he demanded and required for himself.

Projected onto the back room of the Dracula room were scenes from the finale of FW Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, expressionist shadows taking on a life of their own, extending grasping claws ahead of the rodent-toothed creature casting them. Stoker’s worries about the unauthorised appropriation of his material seems to have been justified, since the German company who produced the picture, Prana Films, had made no effort to seek approval for their adaptation. The widowed Florence Stoker’s attempts to gain recompense merely resulted in the company going bust. In order to discourage further such incidences, she managed to get a court order requiring all copies to be destroyed. Fortunately, this celluloid auto-da-fé wasn’t altogether thorough in its execution, and surviving prints resurfaced in later years. As a result, we can still enjoy what has become established as an enduring classic of German expressionism and cinematic Gothic. Stoker’s character and vampiric lore would soon spread with the exponential infectiousness of a blood-borne virus, putting it well beyond any possibility of containment.

The exhibits here briefly sampled the cultural shadow cast by Dracula over the long decades of the 20th century. His looming presence was in some ways a counter-reaction to the forces of modernism and rapid technological progress; a renewed example of the Gothic finding inspiration and escape in a time of social transformation through the resurrection of the past. The character as Stoker envisaged him was eager to embrace the possibilities afforded by new technologies and economic channels. That was the reason for his move to England. But this is one of a number of the novel’s aspects (including his Eastern European military bearing) which have been abandoned in successive cinematic incarnations. Christopher Lee’s repeated pleas to the Hammer hierarchy to return to the book as a direct source fell on deaf ears.

Vampire - Edvard Munch

The female vampire had already found its way into the broader European literary and artistic stream as a symbolic character. In Baudelaire’s poem The Vampire it stands as a very French metaphor for the destructive nature of love, and the fear of the devouring woman. It was also a stock pre-Freudian fever dream figure in Symbolist art, an image to set alongside the many personifications of Death in chill Nordic and Baltic landscapes. Edvard Munch’s Vampire, aka Love and Pain (1894), could almost be an illustration for Baudelaire’s bitterly misogynistic poem. Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire was a rather surprising inclusion in the exhibition, serving as a representation of these literary adoptions, and another version of the vampire as belle dame sans merci. Appropriately enough, it was written in 1897, the year of Dracula’s publication. He’s certainly not somebody you’d associate with such Decadent company. But then he’s a writer to whom many misconceptions have become attached over the years. The printed poem was accompanied by an illustration by Philip ‘son of Sir Edward’ Burne-Jones, an explicitly erotic tableau which bears some relation to Fuseli’s Nightmare. It was this image which gave birth to the poem in Kipling’s imagination, an example of visual art exerting a direct influence upon literature.

Edward Gorey’s Dracula toy theatre brought his mordant drawings to marvellous pop-up life, and demonstrated the broadening appeal of the whole mythos. The sets are actually models for the stage designs he produced for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula. His lugubriously amusing figures prove eminently suitable to the novel’s characters and scenarios. A slight element of mockery is appropriate given their familiarity at this stage, but is obviated by the beauty and care with which they are drawn. And his Dracula has a moustache! A lovely artefact for Gothic children to exercise their morbid imaginations upon – the cardboard Lucy Westenra’s head can easily be stuck back on with sellotape.

It’s but a few short steps from here to Sesame Street’s delightfully numerate Count, the vegetarian vampire duck of Cosgrove-Hall’s Count Duckula and the vampire grandpas and uncles-next-door of The Munsters and Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga The latter features the wonderfully weird Uncle Festus Zlüdotny, whose spluttered speech-bubble utterances are rendered in the undecipherable symbols of a mysterious yet somehow inherently violent alphabet. A vampire slaying kit, with tools and substances covering most recommended means of undead extermination, was on display in its own standalone cabinet, its components housed in a neatly portable valise whose compartments concertinaed out with ingenious pragmatism. It had no apparent provenance, and its presence was therefore rather anomalous, but fun nevertheless.

Christopher Lee endures the Scars of Dracula

A design for Frank Langella’s Count in John Badham’s 1979 film of Dracula suggested future developments of the character, and of the vampire in general, as a romantic figure. The animalistic bloodsucking and viral furtherance of the undead plague were increasingly relegated to the background, incidental details eclipsed by the old fashioned seductions of the irresistible Heathcliff anti-hero. Alas, there was nothing here to match the display of Christopher Lee’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness costume in the BFI’s Gothic display a couple of years ago. Hammer was represented (and represented it simply HAD to be, of course) by more of Scott MacGregor’s set designs, this time for Scars of Dracula. Indisputably the nadir of Hammer’s Dracula cycle, and quite possibly of its Gothic output at large, the designs indicate just how far the studio (and director Roy Ward Baker) was prepared to go in its determination to keep up with contemporary trends and add new elements of explicit gore. In the bedroom set, a bloody corpse sprawls across the four-poster, severed body parts scattered to the side along with the saws and knives which have been used in this clumsy dissection. The echoes of the grim finale of Witchfinder General are all too evident. Perhaps thankfully, this scenario was never realised in the completed film. Christopher Lee’s Dracula merely leaps into the chamber and stabs Anoushka Hempel’s vampire seductress with a knife whose rubbery flexibility is all too plain. It’s a gratuitous scene which is as risible as it is illogical and inexplicable. MacGregor’s set for the castle roof is an atmospheric Gothic arena, a stage for dramatic confrontations. Sadly, the final realisation fell far short of his vision, the greatly reduced budgets of the 60s and 70s more than usually evident.

As with Frankenstein, Dracula made it through to the vinyl age too. Displayed here was the cover of the Studio2Stereo LP Dracula with Christopher Lee, a compilation of Hammer soundtracks. A real treat, this one, with James Bernard’s stirring score for the original Hammer Dracula set in context by Lee’s narration. It also features cues from Bernard’s score for She, as well as contemporary composer John McCabe’s music for the 1972 psycho-thriller Fear in the Night, Harry Robinson’s lushly romantic themes from The Vampire Lovers and extracts from David Whittaker’s score for the stylish Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, wittily scripted by the late Brian Clemens. The 70s provenance of the LP was clear from its use of a promo still from Dracula AD 1972 on the cover, Christopher Lee tucking into the jugular of poor old Caroline Munro.

Leaving the Dracula room, we also take our leave of the 19th century, and enter a new era in which the medium of cinema, with its large, darkened palaces, would prove a perfect site for the expansion of the shadow worlds of the Gothic. But those shadows often originated and drew their raw sustenance from the archetypal monsters, human and otherwise, which emerged from the gaslight illuminated fogs of the Victorian imagination.

The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART THREE


The latter part of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a new medium, photography, and this too was enthusiastically adopted by the Aesthetic movement, whose eclecticism readily absorbed anything which could be of use in creating their ideal world of beauty. The element of narcissism in Aestheticism also naturally responded to the allure of seeing itself reflected in the contrived mirror of the photographic portrait. The aesthetic photographic portrait was a popular and fashionable way of adopting the style for one immortalised moment. A temporary costume, a thoughtfully arranged pose and an appropriate backdrop served to put on the attitude; a bit of fancy dressing for fun, aping those for whom such details were the outward signs of a philosophy of life. Some of these are shown here, taken by such portrait photographers as David Wilkie Wynfield and Julia Margaret Cameron. Wynfield’s picture of the architect William Swinden Barber with a flower and a vaguely Eastern headdress, looking for all the world like a 1960s hippie, a Decadent Donovan. The part-time poseurs were exposed as bit part extras in comparison with the master of the self-publicising photographic portrait, however – Oscar Wilde. The series of twenty photos of Oscar taken by Napoleon Sarony in New York in January 1882 define the male Aesthetic look: the long hair, velvet smoking jacket, casual, lounging posture, and distanced gaze.

Wilde became a celebrated aesthete long before he produced artistic work of any great significance, although the construction of his persona could in itself be considered a sustained work of art, and a very successful one at that. He was also very generous and energetic in praising and promoting the art and artists which he admired, and the outlook of the Aesthetic Movement in general. His lecture tour of America and Canada in 1882 was a heroic odyssey in which he spread the gospel of beauty well beyond the usual metropolitan centres, venturing to the heartlands of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Omaha, and to the Southern states of Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray amounted to a manifesto for Aestheticism, whilst also, with its central conceit of the artistic portrait which absorbs the repugnance of the protagonist’s moral corruption, containing a warning about the dangers of self-absorption and disconnection from humanity in the pursuit of beauty and sensation. All of which suggests that Wilde was possessed of a healthy degree of self-awareness and an ability to face the inherent fatuity of the dazzling demi-monde in which he shone with such stellar fusion. The novel begins with a series of epigrammatic declarations, which brook no refutation and which articulate the Aesthetic creed: ‘the artist is the creator of beautiful things’; ‘those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For them there is hope’. He dismisses the ‘fleshly school’ attacks by stating that ‘no artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything’. He shows solidarity with Whistler’s combinatory ideal by positing that ‘from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician’, and, perhaps considering himself and the importance of his personality to his art, ‘from the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type’. Finally, after noting that ‘the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely’, he concludes that ‘all art is quite useless’.

Sarah Bernhardt

Wilde achieved his greatest artistic success in the theatre in the 90s, with comedies of serious intent such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance. The theatre enjoyed a huge upsurge in popularity in this period, and undoubtedly the hugest star of the stage was Sarah Bernhardt, who rose to an almost mythical ascendancy, at first in Paris and then throughout the Western world. She was the Garbo or Dietrich of her day. The divine Sarah was another embodiment of Aestheticism, pale and thin, a lover of both men and women, and a mistress of the extravagant gesture. She was photographed lying supine in an open coffin, sipping from a skull, and used to surround herself with lilies. Wilde cast an armful of lilies at her feet as a gesture of supplication when she arrived in England in 1879. The French decadent writer Jean Lorrain summoned up her dangerous allure (drawn from a certain degree of personal experience) in his poem Le Sang des Dieux (The Blood of the Gods): ‘When she roamed abroad like a young goddess,/Irritating Paris with her loud laugh,/Golden chains flashed from her eyes/And her bare feet trampled the bruised bodies of her lovers.’ Wilde simply called her ‘that serpent of old Nile’. Bernhardt often played male roles on stage (she played Hamlet in a French translation), or parts such as the lead in Dame aux Camellias, which projected an exaggerated femininity. In modern terms, her persona would be considered camp. She was keen to play Salome in Wilde’s play, and the two discussed the production, whose stage design was to have been influenced by the jewelled mythological fantasies of Gustave Moreau. The play was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, however, and never reached the stage. Bernhardt influenced many writers and artists of the fin de siecle period, notably Alfonse Mucha, who designed a number of posters for her theatrical appearances and helped to consolidate her image. These became signature works of art nouveau, which was in many ways a development from the Decadent and Aesthetic movements. A striking theatrical poster on display here, designed by Fred Walker, advertises an 1871 stage adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ novel of Victorian gothic The Woman In White. Its dramatic composition is similar to Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ in its use of tonal variation within a limited palette, but uses the bolder outlines of a print. Its depiction of a figure approaching the dark threshold of the night is reminiscent both of GF Watts’ Love and Death and William Blake’s Los Entering the Grave, the frontspiece to his visionary epic Jerusalem.

A George du Maurier Punch satire

Aesthetic figures like Wilde and Bernhardt were characters of such self-created exaggeration, whose every gesture and utterance were part of a sustained performance, that they became easy targets for satire. George du Maurier’s cartoons in Punch were particularly popular and effective, and exhibited a keen insight into the spirit of Aestheticism. This was unsurprising, given that du Maurier had lived with Whistler whilst he was a young art student in Paris. Du Maurier’s satirical portraits centred around two characters whom he invented; the poet Maudle and the painter Jellaby Postlethwaite. Variants on Wilde regularly made an appearance, too, which didn’t bother him, since the caricatures were never vicious. Being the regular subject of satire was a compliment in its own way. It was a testament to how widely recognised he had become. He was wise to the mechanics of maintaining celebrity and realised that any publicity was good publicity (although the universal applicability of such an equation would later prove to be disastrously unfounded). In 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan produced their comic opera Patience, a satire of the Aesthetic movement based around two sparring Aesthetes, Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor. Wilde asked if he might reserve a box for the opening night, and wrote ‘I am looking forward to being greatly amused’. Elsewhere in the exhibition we find Alfred Concanen’s cartoon of a swooning Aesthete on the cover of the sheet music to a comedy song entitled ‘Quite Too Utterly Utter’. Perhaps most amusingly, however, there is an 1881 Royal Worcester teapot in the form of a fey Aesthete, his crooked arm forming the handle, and gesturing, limp-wristed arm the spout. It’s interesting to note how far back the limp-wristed stereotype goes. No doubt it predates this period, reaching back to the courts of Louis and Charles and probably further.

Aubrey Beardsley - The Climax

The latter stages of the exhibition include a particular focus on literature and the arts of book illustration and design. The central figure here is Aubrey Beardsley, another artist who owed his success to the patronage and promotion of Wilde. He was also someone who was quite capable of producing his own unflattering, pre-emptive caricatures of himself as an enervated, swooning and painfully thin figure (he was never in good health and died young from the tuberculosis which had afflicted him from an early age). He described his 18 year old self in 1890 as possessing ‘a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop’. This element of self-loathing perhaps fed into the grotesque nature of many of his creations. His illustrations for the published version of Salome were not to Wilde’s taste, but they have come to define and possibly even eclipse the play itself. The Toilet of Salome, included here, has Beardsley’s characteristic bold, flowing outlines with areas blocked in black, along with stippled lines lightly evoking lace or frills. There is a small collection of books stacked below Salome’s dressing table whose titles can be traced along the spines (if you look closely) and which offer a decadent’s reading list of literary inspiration; de Sade, Manon Lescault, Nana by Zola and the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the satirical second century tale of a boy transformed into an ass, which also includes a telling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche – undoubtedly of relevance to Wilde’s play. The Climax is perhaps Beardsley’s best-known illustration, an intensely expressionist depiction of the culmination of the play. Salome seems to hover in ecstatic flight above the ground, the sinuous tendrils of her hair echoing the unfurling shoot coiling into life beneath her bent knees (the germinating seed of her morbid seduction). The baptist’s disembodied head sheds an almost continuous ribbon of blood, which resembles a stalk upon which it rests like a flower or seed head. Salome is held within a circling, bubbling, cloudlike envelope, and stares with mad intensity into the eyes of the severed head which she is about to kiss. It rivals Munch’s The Scream in terms of a composition in which everything is an emanation of the disturbed psychological state of the central figure.

Aubrey Beardsley - The Abbe

The Abbe is an illustration for Beardsley’s own Romantic novel Under the Hill, published in volumes 1 and 2 of the Savoy Magazine, and is a work of baroque fecundity. The diminutive face and miniscule hand of the eighteenth century dandy at its centre are wholly engulfed not just by the stippled, choking bowed cravatte, tightly furled and many layered muff and voluminous, op-art lined cloak but also by the thick, exotic, long-stemmed flowers which rise above him on either side and the dark woodlands which press against him from behind. He holds a foil, which looks more like a decorative pin, between fragile thumb and forefinger, and the insectile head of some strange stringed instrument peers from behind his shoulder, its body invisible, strapped to his back. A narrow break in the treeline allows the man moon to tentatively emerge and illuminate a fairy which is more moth than human in form. Perhaps that pin foil will be necessary after all. Beardsley’s illustration to Siegfried, first published in The Studio magazine in 1893, is an intricate weave of lines of fantastic complexity, whose curlicued arabesques form both the river winding towards the distant mountains, the profusion of twining trees and flowering undergrowth, and the figure of Siegfried himself, resting in languorous repose above the dragon which he has just slain. The whole composition looks as if it has grown out from several pen point planted on the paper’s seedbed surface. It’s influence on future fantasy artwork and magazine illustration is profound.

The infamous Yellow Book (1894), with its Beardsley cover, is one of several such journals which served to propogate the fervid fin de siecle growth of decadent art and literature. Of these, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon’s The Dial is also included here, with a cover illustration by Ricketts himself. The Yellow Book caused an outburst of heated fulmination in the Westminster Gazette, which called, in a rather Father Ted-ish way, for parliamentary action ‘to make this sort of thing illegal’. It and other magazines gave access to and displayed the influence of the literature of the French decadents, and their intoxicating essence pervaded the Aesthetic Movement in the 90s. As Lord Henry opines in The Picture of Dorian Gray when faced with the prospect of progress and ‘development’, ‘decay fascinates me more’. This chimed perfectly with the fin de siecle sense of the sunset of an era; of some things dying and other waiting to be born. The magazines also created a thriving market for short stories, and as Elaine Showalter points out in the collection Daughters of Decadence (with inevitable Beardsley cover) which she edited, over a third of the contributors were women. These were writers such as: George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose The Yellow Wallpaper is a classic of psychological horror), and Charlotte Mew, whose A White Night Showalter describes as ‘a feminist counterpart of Conrad’s A Heart of Darkness’. Other book illustrators represented here include Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane, well known for their pictures for children’s books. Crane produced the illustrations for Wilde’s The Happy Prince. There are also books which are works of art in themselves, bookmaking being one of the fine crafts ennobled by Morris. Aubrey Beardsley’s Morte D’Arthur was certainly influenced by the publications of Morris’ Kelsmscott Press, and even though he disapproved of the mechanical means of its reproduction, it is a thing of exquisite beauty.

Rossetti - Daydream

The final gallery takes us into the last, late evening blooming of the Aesthetic Movement, now fully into its decadent phase, which it embraced with self-immolating fervour. Here we encounter one final Rossetti Goddess in his portrait of Jane Morris as ‘Monna Primvera’ in The Day Dream (1880). Janey is depicted as the sad-eyed spirit of Spring, sitting amongst the branches of a tree in her iridescent green dress, the buds bursting into leaf around her. She seems rather heavyset in this picture, her neck stretching out of proportion to her face, her fingers crooked and distended. She certainly seems too massive for the thin branches on which she sits. These seem almost to be emerging from her body at several points, leaving the impression that she is some sort of dryad, a wood spirit which is growing with and out of the tree, becoming more (or less) than human, the green of her eyes shading into the fresh green of the new leaves in the upper canopy. Lord Leighton’s Garden of the Hesperides also seems to depict a sort of ecstatic union with the non-human world, with its classical figures happily reclining in the coils of the serpent which binds them to the apple tree, clearly feeling no urgency to free themselves. It is a painting which reminds me of the opening of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, in which Marlowe first enters the louche, hothouse atmosphere of the Sternwood house and observes ‘a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying’. No decadent Aesthete, Marlowe.

Time for tea

The final room has the visitor circulating around the cast for a sculpture which has been seen by a far greater number of people than any other work in the exhibition: Alfred Gilbert’s Eros. Made as a memorial for Lord Shaftesbury, this created a stir of controversy when its form was revealed, the naked figure with its flaccid bow having evidently just loosed its arrows of love considered to amount to an advertisement and signpost for the prostitutes who gathered to ply their trade in the area. Its permanence and recognition as one of the major London landmarks is in its own way a testament to the lingering appeal of Aestheticism, a lasting memorial to the spirit of the movement as much to the philanthropy of Lord Shaftesbury. The turn of the century and the bright dawn of the brief, practically-minded Edwardian era saw the dissipation of the Aesthetic dream, which was so much associated with an eschatological end of Empire glow, an embracing of the impending end of things. As Dorian Gray says in Wilde’s novel, ‘I wish it were fin du globe…life is a great disappointment’. Wilde’s trial and imprisonment marked a reassertion of establishment power and values. The Empire didn’t crumble, and as it geared up for conflict once more, it became less inclined to tolerate ‘unmanly’ qualities which be of no use in keeping the Boers or Germans at bay. One final sculpture from the early twentieth century serves to sum up its decline into ineffectual mannerism. Charles Ricketts had collaborated with Wilde on potential set designs for Salome, illustrated his collection of children’s stories A House of Pomegranites, produced and illustrated his own magazine The Dial, and set up the Vale press in 1896. But his 1905 sculpture Silence (intended as a memorial to Oscar Wilde) is little more than a trinket; an enervated angel, hand held to its mouth in a camp gesture, half-regretful, half-amused at some minor mishap or misdeed. Jacob Epstein’s Paris Pere Lachaise tomb, with its move towards art deco and modernism, is a far more fitting monument. Ricketts’ statuette is more Frank Spencer or Charles Hawtrey than divine messenger, hapless rather than heavenly. It as an appropriate figure to usher us out of this lush end of the century dreamworld and back into the contemporary wasteland (literally in terms of the roadworks currently engulfing Exhibition Road), in which people retreat into digital dreamworlds. Fortunately, it is but a short walk through the sculpture galleries (Buddhist and nineteenth century European, as I recall, possibly incorrectly) to the museum’s gorgeous William Morris tea rooms, a glorious setting for a more than decent cuppa, and a tasty scone.