Charles Ricketts

Book Reviews revealing the hidden world of pornography which influenced him. Beardsley was not a grim reformer bent upon extending the social boundaries for women or upon exposing sexism. His program of resistance to the prevailing cultural norms of love and sexuality was always diffuse and unsystematic. As a man and as an artist, he stood outside the hollow patriarchal social code. Zatlin maintains that Beardsley has a vision of equality between the sexes: the erotic impulse was not simply the pivotal force in human relations, it was also the foundation of non-exploitative human relations. As a collector of Japanese erotic woodblock prints, Beardsley was widely acquainted with the full range of their explicit sexuality. He was influenced by these prints and they "gave his work a philosophic delicacy ." Unable to depict sexuality, fantastically or realistically, as openly as the Japanese masters, Beardsley empowered his work with their joy, beauty, and humor of sexuality—"a devastatingly effective tactic to focus on Victorian sexual hypocrisies." In closing this most interesting chapter of the text, Zatlin writes: "Beardsley combined the techniques of Shunga as well as emblems and motifs of the verbal and visual traditions of pornography to challenge the Western tradition that denigrated and abused women." Zatlin's study of Beardsley's art is a wonderfully interesting contribution to the expanding critical literature on culture and gender. Her thesis is carefully marshalled and lavishly illustrated. All scholars who are interested in new interpretive dimensions of the 1890s will gain from Zatlin's devoted exploration of a significant contributor to new dimensions in cultural/historical studies. Daniel J. Cahill University of Northern Iowa Charles Ricketts J. G. P. Delaney. Charles Ricketts: A Biography. New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. xxiii + 429 pp. $96.00 CHARLES RICKETTS (1866-1931) was a painter, wood-engraver, typographer , illustrator, stage-designer, critic, connoisseur, collector, jewelry-designer, and much else. A modeller in homage to Rodin, he has been called by Philippe Garner the "foremost English sculptor" of the Edwardian period. He was adviser to the National Gallery of Canada 477 ELT: Volume 34:4, 1991 from 1923, formally so from 1927. In 1914, to his later regret, he had declined the directorship of the National Gallery in London. Devoted disciples included T. Sturge Moore, Laurence Binyon, Gordon Bottomley, Thomas Lowinsky, Cecil Lewis, less directly Will Rothenstein and his brother Albert Rutherston, and briefly Laurence Housman and Roger Fry. Ricketts designed covers or layouts, or both, of books by his friends "Michael Field," Oscar Wilde, John Gray, Bottomley, and Binyon, and commercially for John Addington Symonds, Lord De Tabley, Humbert Wolfe, and others, most lastingly for Yeats and Hardy. Ricketts appears in several poems by Yeats, who was among those who gathered around Ricketts and Charles Shannon on Friday evenings in their progressively elegant domiciles. Gray and Masefield edited volumes for the Vale Press, which Ricketts regarded partly as his anthology of favorite English poets. For the 90-odd volumes of the Vale Press, Ricketts designed and cut symbolic title pages, ornamental initials, and three fonts. His woodengraved borders are more varied and more fluent than those of William Morris, his cover designs less delicate than those of Lucien Pissarro, who employed Ricketts's Vale type for the earliest books of the Eragny Press. Ricketts, the boldest costume-designer of his time, did dress and decor (praised repeatedly by Shaw and Beerbohm) for plays by Yeats, Shaw (climactically Saint Joan), Wilde, Barker, Masefield, Barrie, Maeterlinck, Rupert Brooke, Arnold Bennett, Binyon, Sturge Moore, preeminently Shakespeare, and others. He did individual costumes for Lillah McCarthy, Vladimir Rosing, and Yeats as "Jester." His costumes for The Mikado, trademarks for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, have survived the company. Following a half-dozen monographs on Ricketts within the last fifteen years, Professor Delaney has now produced a major, thoroughly researched biography. Fifty-three uncolored illustrations exemplify the range of Ricketts's craftsmanship and suggest his vigor as friend and patron. The illustrations include one of the several caricatures of Ricketts and Shannon by Beerbohm but none of those, equally affectionate, by Edmund Dulac. The biography itself goes much deeper. Delving through but much beyond the diaries and related materials in...