Four vignettes (both factual and fictional) of Beau Brummell:

Virginia Woolf, Beau Brummell (1925):

Skill of hand and nicety of judgment were his, of course, otherwise he would not have brought the art of tying neck-cloths to perfection. The story is, perhaps, too well known—how he drew his head far back and sunk his chin slowly down so that the cloth wrinkled in perfect symmetry, or if one wrinkle were too deep or too shallow, the cloth was thrown into a basket and the attempt renewed, while the Prince of Wales sat, hour after hour, watching.

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell (1845):

Brummell wore gloves which took the shape of his fingers like moist muslin. But here the dandyism does not lie in in the perfection with which these gloves took the shape of the nails as the flesh takes it; but in the fact that they had been made by four special artists, three for the hand and one for the thumb.

William Hazlitt, Brummelliana (1828):

We look upon Beau Brummell as the greatest of small wits. Indeed, he may in this respect be considered, as Cowley says of Pindar as “a species alone,” and as forming a class by himself. He has arrived at the very minimum of wit, and reduced it, “by happiness or pains,” to an almost invisible point. All his bons mots turn upon a single circumstance, the exaggerating of the merest trifles into matters of importance, or treating everything else with the utmost nonchalance and indifference, as if whatever pretended to pass beyond those limits was a bore, and disturbed the serene air of high life.

Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Elegant Living (1830)

“Nevertheless, gentlemen,” added Brummell, “there is one fact that dominates all the others: man dresses before acting, speaking, walking, eating. The acts that concern fashion, poise, conversation, etc. they are never more than the consequences of our toilette. Sterne, that admirable observer, has proclaimed in the most ingenious way that the ideas of a shaved man were not the same as those of a bearded man. All of us experience the influence of a suit. The artist, once his toilette is done, does not work anymore. A woman dressed in a robe is different if she is dressed for a ball... You could say that they are two different women!

Balzac in particular is very clever at playing with dandyism’s confusion of reality and fiction ( 2.4, 2.6):

By keeping Brummell’s name and mingling biographical facts about him with whimsical inventions of his own, Balzac goes beyond merely modelling a character on a real individual, to appropriating Brummell’s celebrity as an integral part of the text. This move attempts to solve dandyism’s aesthetic dilemma of how to reproduce what must remain unique.¹

Brummell’s mythical reputation lies precisely in his capacity for “staying” in a threshold (0.9), in his case one between fiction and reality.

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1. Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle, 16. ↩︎