Item 63: Notes for essays on contemporaries (ca. 1915)

Drawing a line between fact and fiction was impossible for Beerbohm. His artworks and essays regularly blurred and crossed it, especially in his series of fanciful visual portraits of famous men as “Old and Young Selves,” who were confronted with imagined embodiments of their past identities. In this notebook, Beerbohm listed celebrity writers, artists, and politicians whom he planned to write about and/or to caricature. Dating these notes and sketches is difficult, but they may be earlier than 1915, as there is a reference to “No. 2. The Pines” which became the title of his 1914 reminiscence about the “fleshly” Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne in old age. Unusually, too, Beerbohm mentions a woman: “Lady Cardigan,” who scandalized her Victorian contemporaries with her love affairs outside of marriage.