I would go out tonight

But I haven’t got a stitch to wear

This man said “it’s gruesome

That someone so handsome should care”

The Smiths, This Charming Man

If not the Regent and future King of England, who was the sovereign of this new secular aristocracy driven by an amalgamation of essence and appearance? (2.3) Indeed, it was someone close to George IV, both in heart and attitudes, who nevertheless was not born into a powerful or wealthy family.

George Bryan “Beau” Brummell was the son of a William Brummell, squire and private secretary of Prime Minister Frederick North, who steered Great Britain during the American War of Independence. Thanks to his father’s contacts Brummell was sent in 1790 to Eton College, where he stood out among his colleagues “through his careful dressing and the frigid languor of his manners.”¹ After graduating from Eton, he went to Oxford for a year and then decided to enter the cavalry regiment of Tenth Royal Hussars, which was under the command of the Prince of Wales. As with his school peers, Brummell’s manners and his extraordinary sense of fashion, exerted a fascination over the future king, who took him under his wing. By 1796, with only three years in the regiment, “he was made a captain, to the envy and disgust of older officers who felt that ‘our general’s friend was now the general’.”² However, his military career came to a sudden and definitive halt when his regiment was sent to Manchester, whose “undistinguished ambience and want of culture and civility” made him resign his commission.

It is difficult to estimate the extent of the fascination that Brummell exerted in the society of his time. Thanks to his personal relationship with the Prince of Wales, once Beau Brummell returned to civilian life he was able to ascend to the summit of British society, where he became the supreme arbiter of fashion and good taste. His graceful manners, says Barbey d’Aurevilly, were the fusion of the movements of body and spirit. His is the invention of the pantaloon and the cravate, direct ancestors of the trousers and the modern tie that we identify today with masculine elegance. The frac was also his idea. His exquisite coldness was well-known and feared by mothers and debutants alike, the slightest smirk of disgust could turn a promising young lady into a spinster. He used to stay in the society salons long enough to be seen and then quickly disappear, like a rumor, so he would be missed. In her portrait of Brummell, Virginia Woolf said that “the French Revolution had passed over his head without disordering a single hair.” Lord Byron also gave in to his spell and assured that “he would rather be Brummell than the emperor Napoleon.”⁴ He was great because he devoted himself to his trade like no other and never meant his vanity to bear more fruit than the admiration of his peers. His coldness in this matter was such that he was never known to have shared his bed with any women (or men).

Like Byron, and later on Montesquieu (2.4), Brummell quickly went from being a legendary figure in social circles to a literary character. The fashionable novels so popular during the regency and the reign of George IV (2.2), made him the inspiration and covert protagonist of books such as Vivian Gray (1828) by Benjamin Disraeli, Pelham, or the adventures of a gentleman (1828) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Granby (1826) by Thomas Henry Lister.

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1. d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell, 125. ↩︎
2. John Doran, Miscellaneous Works, Volume I: Habits and Men, Beau Brummell, 380. ↩︎
3. William Jesse, The Life of George Brummell, Esq., commonly known Beau Brummell. ↩︎
4. d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell, 116. ↩︎