Beau Brummell
Encyclopedia
Fashion
Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person...
in Regency England and a friend of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV
George IV of the United Kingdom
George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...
. He established the mode of men wearing understated, but fitted, tailored clothes including dark suits and full-length trousers, adorned with an elaborately knotted cravat
Cravat
The cravat is a neckband, the forerunner of the modern tailored necktie and bow tie, originating from 17th-century Croatia.From the end of the 16th century, the term band applied to any long-strip neckcloth that was not a ruff...
.
Beau Brummell is credited with introducing and establishing as fashion the modern man's suit, worn with a tie. He claimed he took five hours to dress, and recommended that boot
Boot
A boot is a type of footwear but they are not shoes. Most boots mainly cover the foot and the ankle and extend up the leg, sometimes as far as the knee or even the hip. Most boots have a heel that is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the sole, even if the two are made of one piece....
s be polished with champagne. His style of dress is often referred to as dandyism.
Biography
Brummell was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, the son of William Brummell, of Donnington Grove
Donnington Grove
Donnington Grove is a Strawberry Hill Gothic mansion, now an hotel and country club, and associated Golf Course at Donnington in the civil parish of Shaw-cum-Donnington, near Newbury, in the English county of Berkshire. It is overlooked by Donnington Castle....
in Berkshire
Berkshire
Berkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
. He was fair complexioned, and had "a high nose, which was broken down by a kick from a horse soon after he went into the Tenth Dragoons".
His father died in 1794, leaving him an inheritance of more than £20,000. He was educated at Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
and at Oriel College, and later joined the Tenth Light Dragoons.
It was during this time he came to the attention of George
George IV of the United Kingdom
George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...
, Prince of Wales
Prince of Wales
Prince of Wales is a title traditionally granted to the heir apparent to the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the 15 other independent Commonwealth realms...
. Through the influence of the Prince, Brummell had been promoted to captain by 1796. When his regiment was sent from London to Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
he resigned his commission because of Manchester's poor reputation and atmosphere and the lack of culture and civility exercised by the general populace.
Brummell took a house on Chesterfield Street in Mayfair
Mayfair
Mayfair is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster.-History:Mayfair is named after the annual fortnight-long May Fair that took place on the site that is Shepherd Market today...
, and for a time avoided extravagance and gaming: for example, he kept horses but no carriages. He was included in Prince George's circle, where he made an impression with his elegant, understated manner of dress and clever remarks. His fastidious attention to cleaning his teeth, shaving, and bathing daily became popular. When asked how much it would cost to keep a single man in clothes, he was alleged to have replied: "Why, with tolerable economy, I think it might be done with £800." (The average wage for a craftsman was £1 a week.) Such liberal spending rapidly began to take a toll on his capital.
He was influenced by his wealthy friends as well. He began spending and gambling
Gambling
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...
as though his fortune were as great as theirs. This was not a problem while he could still float credit. Brummell, Lord Alvanley
William Arden, 2nd Baron Alvanley
William Arden, 2nd Baron Alvanley was the son of Richard Arden, 1st Baron Alvanley. He was an officer in the Coldstream Guards, attaining the rank of Captain in the service of the 50th Regiment of Foot....
, Henry Mildmay and Henry Pierrepoint were considered the prime movers of Watier's
Watier's
Watier's Club was a Gentlemen's Club established in 1807 and disbanded in 1819. It was located at 81 Piccadilly on the corner of Bolton Street in west London....
, dubbed "the Dandy Club" by Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement...
. They were also the four hosts of the masquerade ball in July 1813 at which the Prince Regent greeted Alvanley and Pierrepoint, but then "cut" Brummell and Mildmay by snubbing them, staring them in the face but not speaking to them. This provoked Brummell's famous remark, "Alvanley, who's your fat friend?". This finalized the long-developed rift between them, dated by Campbell to 1811, the year the Prince became Regent and began abandoning all his old Whig friends. Normally, the loss of royal favour to a favourite was doom, but Brummell ran as much on the approval and friendship of other rulers of the several fashion circles. He became the anomaly of a favourite flourishing without a patron, still in charge of fashion and courted by large segments of society.
However, his debt spiralled out of control, and he tried to recover by devices that only dug the hole deeper. In 1816, he fled to France to escape debtor's prison
Debtor's prison
A debtors' prison is a prison for those who are unable to pay a debt.Prior to the mid 19th century debtors' prisons were a common way to deal with unpaid debt.-Debt bondage in ancient Greece and Rome:...
– he owed thousands of pounds. Usually, Brummell's gambling debts, as "debts of honour", were always paid immediately. The one exception to this was the final wager recorded for him in White's
White's
White's is a London gentlemen's club, established at 4 Chesterfield Street in 1693 by Italian immigrant Francesco Bianco . Originally it was established to sell hot chocolate, a rare and expensive commodity at the time...
betting book. Recorded March, 1815, the debt was marked "not paid, 20th January, 1816".
He lived the remainder of his life in France, acquiring an appointment to the consulate at Caen
Caen
Caen is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Basse-Normandie region. It is located inland from the English Channel....
due to the influence of Lord Alvanley
William Arden, 2nd Baron Alvanley
William Arden, 2nd Baron Alvanley was the son of Richard Arden, 1st Baron Alvanley. He was an officer in the Coldstream Guards, attaining the rank of Captain in the service of the 50th Regiment of Foot....
and the Marquess of Worcester, only in the reign of William IV
William IV of the United Kingdom
William IV was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of Hanover from 26 June 1830 until his death...
. This provided him with a small annuity. He died penniless and insane from strokes in Caen
Caen
Caen is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Basse-Normandie region. It is located inland from the English Channel....
in 1840.
A statue of Brummell by Irena Sedlecka
Irena Sedlecká
Irena Sedlecká is a Czech sculptor and Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. After training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, she was awarded the Lenin Prize for sculpture before fleeing the communist regime in 1967...
was erected on London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
's Jermyn Street
Jermyn Street
Jermyn Street is a street in the City of Westminster, central London, to the south, parallel and adjacent to Piccadilly.It is well known as a street where the shops are almost exclusively aimed at the Gentleman's market and is famous for its resident shirtmakers Jermyn Street is a street in the...
in 2002.
Cricket
Brummell played a single first-classFirst-class cricket
First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...
match for pre-county club Hampshire
Hampshire county cricket teams
Hampshire county cricket teams have been traced back to the 18th century but the county's involvement in cricket goes back much further than that...
in 1807 against an early England side. Brummell made scores of 23 and 3 in the match to leave him with a career batting average
Batting average
Batting average is a statistic in both cricket and baseball that measures the performance of cricket batsmen and baseball hitters. The two statistics are related in that baseball averages are directly descended from the concept of cricket averages.- Cricket :...
of 13.00.
In popular culture
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
's 1896 historical novel Rodney Stone
Rodney Stone
Rodney Stone is a Gothic mystery and boxing novel by Scottish writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first published in 1896.The eponymous narrator is a Sussex country boy who is taken to London by his uncle Sir Charles Tregellis, a highly respected gentleman and arbiter of fashion who is on familiar terms...
. In the novel, the title character's uncle, Charles Tregellis, is the center of the London fashion world, until Brummell ultimately supplants him. Tregellis' subsequent death from mortification serves as a deus ex machina
Deus ex machina
A deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.-Linguistic considerations:...
in that it resolves Rodney Stone's family poverty, as his rich uncle bequeaths a sum to his sister.
Brummell's life was dramatised in an 1890 stage play in four acts by American playwright Clyde Fitch
Clyde Fitch
Clyde Fitch was an American dramatist.-Biography:Born William Clyde Fitch at Elmira, New York, he wrote over 60 plays, 36 of them original, which varied from social comedies and farces to melodrama and historical dramas.As the only child to live to adulthood, his father, Captain William G...
and starred Richard Mansfield
Richard Mansfield
Richard Mansfield was an English actor-manager best known for his performances in Shakespeare plays, Gilbert and Sullivan operas and for his portrayal of the dual title roles in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
. This in turn was adapted for the 1924 silent
Beau Brummel (1924 film)
Beau Brummel is a 1924 American silent film historical drama. The film stars John Barrymore and was directed by Harry Beaumont. The film is based on Clyde Fitch's historical play which had been performed by Richard Mansfield....
movie with John Barrymore
John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...
and Mary Astor
Mary Astor
Mary Astor was an American actress. Most remembered for her role as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, Astor began her long motion picture career as a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s.She eventually made a successful transition to talkies, but almost...
. Another play about him, authored by Bertram P Matthews, is only remembered because it had incidental music written for it by Edward Elgar
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet OM, GCVO was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos...
. It was staged at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham
Theatre Royal, Birmingham
The Theatre Royal, originally the New Theatre, was a theatre located on New Street in Birmingham, England between 1774 and 1956.-Bibliography and further reading:**...
in November 1928, with Elgar himself conducting the orchestra on its first night. Only the minuet from this is now performed.
Earlier movies included a 10-minute film by the Vitagraph Company of America (1913), based on a Booth Tarkington
Booth Tarkington
Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams...
story, and the 1913 Beau Brummel and his Bride, a short comedy made by the Edison Company. Brummel's life was also made the subject of a 1931 three-act operetta by Reynaldo Hahn
Reynaldo Hahn
Reynaldo Hahn was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic and diarist. Best known as a composer of songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie....
, later broadcast by Radio-Lille (1963). In 1937 there was a radio drama on Lux Radio Theater
Lux Radio Theater
Lux Radio Theater, a long-run classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network ; CBS and NBC . Initially, the series adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films. These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences...
with Robert Montgomery
Robert Montgomery (actor)
Robert Montgomery was an American actor and director.- Early life :Montgomery was born Henry Montgomery, Jr. in Beacon, New York, then known as "Fishkill Landing", the son of Mary Weed and Henry Montgomery, Sr. His early childhood was one of privilege, since his father was president of the New...
as Brummell and Gene Lockhart
Gene Lockhart
Eugene "Gene" Lockhart was a Canadian character actor, singer, and playwright. He also wrote the lyrics to a number of popular songs.-Early life:...
as the Prince. A further film, Beau Brummell
Beau Brummell (film)
Beau Brummell is a historical film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed by Curtis Bernhardt and produced by Sam Zimbalist from a screenplay by Karl Tunberg, based on the play Beau Brummell by Clyde Fitch. The music score was by Richard Addinsell with Miklós Rózsa...
, was made in 1954 with Stewart Granger
Stewart Granger
Stewart Granger was an English-American film actor, mainly associated with heroic and romantic leading roles. He was a popular leading man from the 1940s to the early 1960s rising to fame through his appearances in the Gainsborough melodramas.-Early life:He was born James Lablache Stewart in Old...
playing the title role and Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...
as Lady Patricia Belham. There were also two television dramas: the sixty-minute So war Herr Brummell (Süddeutscher Rundfunk, 1967) and the UK Beau Brummell: This Charming Man
Beau Brummell: This Charming Man
Beau Brummell: This Charming Man was a 2006 BBC Television drama in based on the biography of Beau Brummell by Ian Kelly.-Production:The film was commissioned by BBC Four for broadcast as part of its 2006 The Century That Made Us season.-Reception:...
(2006) starring James Purefoy
James Purefoy
James Brian Mark Purefoy is an English actor best known for portraying Mark Antony in the HBO series Rome.-Early life and work:...
as Brummell.
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer was a British historical romance and detective fiction novelist. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story for her younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer...
, author of a number of Regency romance
Regency romance
Regency romances are a subgenre of romance novels set during the period of the British Regency or early 19th century. Rather than simply being versions of contemporary romance stories transported to a historical setting, Regency romances are a distinct genre with their own plot and stylistic...
novels, included Brummell as a character in her 1935 novel Regency Buck
Regency Buck
For the band, see Regency Buck Regency Buck is a novel written by Georgette Heyer. It has three distinctions: it is the first of her novels to deal with the Regency period; it is one of only a few to combine both genres for which she was noted, the Regency romance and the mystery novel; and it is...
. He is also a minor character in T. Coraghessan Boyle
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Tom Coraghessan Boyle is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the mid 1970s, he has published twelve novels and more than 100 short stories...
's 1982 novel, "Water Music". More recently, Brummell is the detective-hero of a series of period mysteries by Californian novelist Rosemary Stevens, including Death on a Silver Tray (2000), The Tainted Snuff Box (2001), The Bloodied Cravat (2002), and Murder in the Pleasure Gardens (2003). These are written as if related by their hero.
Brummell's name was adopted by the faux-British Invasion
British Invasion
The British Invasion is a term used to describe the large number of rock and roll, beat, rock, and pop performers from the United Kingdom who became popular in the United States during the time period from 1964 through 1966.- Background :...
band The Beau Brummels
The Beau Brummels
The Beau Brummels were an American rock band. Formed in San Francisco in 1964, the band's original lineup included Sal Valentino , Ron Elliott , Ron Meagher , Declan Mulligan , and John Petersen...
who recorded during the 1960s. At the same period Brummell's name was also used by South African born Michael Bush for his English rock group, Beau Brummell Esquire and His Noble Men, who released at least one single (Columbia DB 7447) in 1965.
Finally, two unrelated products were named after the dandy. The Beau Brummel rhododendron
Rhododendron
Rhododendron is a genus of over 1 000 species of woody plants in the heath family, most with showy flowers...
was hybridized in 1934 by Lionel de Rothschild and is still available. Flowering in late June, it has red, waxy flowers with darker speckling. Then during the 1940s and 1950s watchmaker LeCoultre
Jaeger-LeCoultre
Jaeger-LeCoultre is a high-end luxury watch and clock manufacturer based in Le Sentier, Vaud, Switzerland. In addition, Jaeger-LeCoultre also has a long tradition of supplying movements and parts to other prestigious watch companies in Switzerland. Since 1996, Jaeger-LeCoultre has been a fully...
marketed a watch of that name. It had a minimalist design with no numbers and a small modern face.
Further reading
- Jesse, Captain William. The Life of Beau Brummell. Published in two volumes
- Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules. Of Dandyism and Of George Brummell, 1845
- Wharton, Grace and Philip. Wits and Beaux of Society. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861
- Lewis, Melville. Beau Brummell: His Life and Letters. New York: Doran, 1925
- Campbell, Kathleen. Beau Brummell. London: Hammond, 1948
- Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960
- Nicolay, Claire. Origins and Reception of Regency Dandyism: Brummell to Baudelaire. Ph.D. diss., Loyola U of Chicago, 1998
- Kelly, Ian. Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy. Hodder & Stoughton, 2005