Asses and Aesthetes: Ritualism and Aestheticism in Victorian Periodical Illustration

Scholars, period-film buffs, and AP English students know what late Victorian aestheticism looks like: it looks like Oscar Wilde dressed in the silk stockings and velvet knee breeches he commissioned from the theatrical costumier Nathan’s before departing for his American tour late in 1881 (figure 1). As James Laver explains in his 1945 Taste and Fashion from the French Revolution to the Present Day, Wilde’s appearance in those early days of his career became iconic, the definitive look of the male aesthete: “What was the Aesthetic dress, and how did it come about? For men it consisted of knee-breeches, loose flowing tie, a velvet jacket, and a wideawake hat.”¹ Closely resembling the uniform worn by members of the Apollo University Lodge, the Masonic lodge to which Wilde belonged while at Oxford, this “Cavalier” sartorial style piqued Wilde’s American audiences and inspired satirical send-ups that peppered newspapers and broadsheets on both sides of the Atlantic.² More than one hundred years later, this image remains the image of the male aesthete in nearly every representation of British aestheticism, parodic or otherwise.

It is noteworthy, then, that when “GAS,” a reviewer writing for the Illustrated London News, watched the actors lampooning male aesthetes on stage in F. C. Burnand’s 1881 play The Colonel, he did not think of Cavalier portraits, Oxonian Masons, or Oscar Wilde.³ Instead, as he sat in the audience of that first successful theatrical satire of “art for art’s sake,” GAS thought of Anglo-Catholics—British Anglo-Catholics commonly referred to as Ritualists.⁴ A glance at any of the surviving illustrations of actors in The Colonel suggests the reason for GAS’s unexpected conflation of Ritualist and male aesthete (e.g., figure 2). The play’s arch-aesthete, Lambert Streyke (at center), does not conform to the Cavalier dress we tend to associate with late Victorian aesthetes. Instead of displaying Wildean heft and

Figure 1.

Oscar Wilde, 1882. Photo by Napoléon Sarony. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

sporting a velvet jacket and Fauntleroy collar, Streyke, like other devotees of “art for art’s sake” in the play, is emaciated and attenuated, costumed rather funereally in a long frock coat and tight trousers. He, or rather Burnand, who created, cast, and costumed the character, takes his visual cues not from Wilde, as we might expect, but from a completely different cultural source: the caricatures of Ritualists that flooded comic magazines and newspapers in the decades preceding The Colonel’s debut.⁵

When one considers the lingering cultural appeal of Oscar Wilde, as well as the enormous popularity of The Colonel’s theatrical rival, Gilbert

Figure 2.

Detail from “The Colonel Waltz” depicting a scene from Burnand’s The Colonel, 1881. ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

and Sullivan’s drama Patience (which adopted costumes reminiscent of Wilde’s), it is easy to understand why the Cavalier style has remained for us the definitive look of British aestheticism. For GAS, however, as for many other Victorians, the male aesthete was recognizable by a different set of signifiers, the straight-legged trousers, Tilbury top hat, and knee-length frock coat that we see in illustrations of The Colonel, but also certain gestures, poses, expressions, and body types that visually align the male aesthete with his pictorial antecedent, the Ritualist. Like the Ritualist in his day, the “dandy-aesthete,” as Martin Green dubbed this figure, appears in caricature after caricature in late nineteenth-century illustrated papers such as Punch and Fun.⁶ His ubiquity relegates representations of the Cavalier aesthete to minority status in the venue that determined the visual appearance of aestheticism for large numbers of British readers.⁷

In “Fashioning Aestheticism,” Talia Schaffer examines the dandy-aesthete’s displacement of the Cavalier aesthete in Victorian popular culture and attributes the latter’s disappearance to a desire on the part of aesthetes to distance themselves from accusations of effeminacy...