In vain does society refuse to bend, in vain do aristocracies admit only received opinions; one day Caprice arises and makes its way through those seemingly impenetrable grades, which were really undermined by boredom. It is thus that Frivolity, on the one hand acting upon a people rigid and coarsely utilitarian, on the other, Imagination, claiming its rights, in the face of a moral law, too severe to be genuine, produced a kind of translation, a science of manners and attitudes, imposible elsewhere. And of this Brummell was the final expression and can never be equalled. 

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell

§ 2.1. Regency

In 1821 Sir George Hayter—British painter best known for his State Portrait of Queen Victoria (1838)—made an oil study of the coronation of George IV. Like the pictures that Kafka describes in The Trial (1.17), Hayter’s painting shows an imposing throne atop the long staircase of one of the chapels of Westminster Abbey; an unreachable sovereign framed by a huge red and golden canopy. Hayter’s study, a modest painting of fourteen by twenty inches, represents one of the most expensive coronations in the history of the United Kingdom; the ceremony and preparation of the surroundings of the abbey would have cost twenty-one million pounds sterling in 2019.

George Hayter, Coronación de Jorge IV (1821)

By the time of his coronation, George IV was a 57 year-old obese and scrofulous man. His penchant for splendid banquets and copious consumption of alcohol had left him at the mercy of gout, arteriosclerosis and edema; he had presumably become addicted to laudanum on account of his terrible bladder pains. He had served, with the title of Prince of Wales, as Regent since 1811, when his father George III was finally declared interdict by Parliament after frequent fits of mental illness that lasted for two decades. George IV was a regent and king both loved and hated. An extract from the diary of one of his personales aides:

A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist... There have been good and wise kings but not many of them… and this I believe to be one of the worst.¹

Personal traits notwithstanding, the future king was a great patron of the arts and his Regency is remembered as a moment of enormous social, political and economical change for British society. It was a time of great cultural achievements in the arts and architecture, in most cases at the expense of ordinary people. “Gracious and lovely ways of life,” John Gray reminds us, “may be the offspring of tyranny and oppression, while delicate virtues may rely for their existence on the most sordid human traits.”²

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1. Kenneth Baker, “George IV: a Sketch,” History Today, Volumen 55, Issue 10, October, 2005.  ↩︎
2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette, 43. ↩︎