Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian ‘Disability Pride’ ef

Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian

‘Disability Pride’

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away (1857)

That this particular constitutional state is a degeneration […] and that it is frequently associated, both in individual and in family, with other degenerate conditions, such as idiocy, insanity, deaf-mutism, cancer, drunkenness, epilepsy, and crime, it is now my business to prove. (p.197)

[tuberculosis] in the parent not only deepens to scrofula in the child, but to that lowest of all types of humanity, the scrofulous idiot (p. 205)

S. A. K. Strahan, Marriage and Disease: A Study of Heredity and the More Important Family Degenerations (London,

1892)

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898)

Beardsley c. 1890 (aged 18)

I am now eighteen years old, with a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop…

Beardsley to A. W. King, July 1891

Beardsley by Jacques Emile Blanche, and caricatured as ‘Alan Roy’ in Punch (both 1895)

Beardsley by Walter Sickert (1894)

John Keats (1795-1821)

‘I shall not live much longer than did Keats’.

Beardsley to Penrhyn Stanlaws in 1894

…although he looked haggard and pale, as victims of consumption generally do, I found in Mr Beardsley an excellent talker, concise and to the point, interested in everything, listening eagerly, and, although his slight stoop and frail physique betrayed the invalid, entering into every point with considerable keenness. Mr Beardsley, when I saw him, was faultlessly dressed…

‘How can a man die better than by doing what he wants to do most!’ he adds with a laugh.

Arthur Lawrence’s interview with Beardsley in The Idler (1897)

The whole thing has charm, but it is undoubtedly the charm of degeneration and decay. These things do not belong to the sane in body or mind, and they do not find their out-and-out admirers in men of robust intellect, or of wholly healthy moral tone…

Public Opinion (1893)

Beardsley by Frederick Evans (1893)

‘A Footnote’, by Beardsley (1896)

The power of transgression always originates at the moment when the derided object uncharacteristically embraces its deviance as a value. In perversely championing the terms of their own stigmatization, marginal peoples alarm the dominant culture with a seeming canniness over the terms of their own subjugation.

Mitchell & Snyder (2001), pp.208-9

No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay hostile, criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark […]. As to my uncleanliness, I do my best for it in my morning bath, and if he really has any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.

Beardsley to the editor of St Paul’s (1894)