A couple of early examples of dandyism compiled by Spanish writer and critic Luis Antonio de Villena:

William Beckford, extravagant man of letters, and one of the clear predecessors of dandyism, fancied riding on horseback through the fields surrounding his palace-abbey in Fonthill, near Bath, wearing the habit of a medieval monk and a dark cape, surrounded by hooded dwarves in black… the good people who saw them galloping by—perhaps they were curing their melancholy, for the dandy is melancholic—made the sign of the holy cross believing that it was Lucifer and his diabolical retinue. They ignored that Beckford sympathized with Lucifer, not only as a fallen angel, but, especially, for being “the most beautiful of angels.”¹

Lord Byron, an aristocratic dandy considered by many as one of the first celebrities in the modern sense of the term,

… only went once to the House of Lords—of which, having inheriting the title of his grandfather, he was a rightful member—to make a speech that had them turn green. Sure enough, he did not come back. He didn’t mean to.²

In the speech in question, Byron supported the Luddites—destroyers of industrial machinery—and denounced the “benefits” of automation for employment. A remarkable man, he inspired the character of Lord Ruthven, in The Vampyre by John William Polidori, once his personal secretary and doctor. But Byron was not the only dandy to inspire literary characters. Robert de Montesquieu, celebrated figure of the Belle Époque, served as a model for the character of des Esseintes in Against the Grain by J.K. Huysmans and the Baron de Charlus in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The threshold between fiction and reality has begun to solidify (2.2)

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1. Antonio de Villena, “La bella provocación de lo diferente: pinceladas dandis”, in Prodigiosos Mirmidones, 7-8. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 9. ↩︎