Item 21: Lord Queensberry (1894)

Given that John Sholto Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry (1844–1900), represented everything that Beerbohm loathed—bullying, boxing, and badgering his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, who was both Oscar Wilde’s lover and Beerbohm’s fellow undergraduate at Oxford, to be more “manly”— this drawing was not as vicious as it might have been. Then again, it was intended for publication in Pick-Me-Up, an illustrated comic weekly to which Beerbohm contributed celebrity caricatures. Had he shown in print the rancor that he felt toward this figure, who later engineered the downfall of Oscar Wilde, Queensberry might have paid a visit to Beerbohm’s family’s house, as he did to Wilde’s, accompanied by a professional prizefighter and threatening violence.