Item 23: Limited Editions (1893)

Richard Le Gallienne owed his transatlantic fame in the 1890s not only to his poetry and criticism, but also to the late-Victorian celebrity industry. Influenced when young by seeing Oscar Wilde lecture in Liverpool and then meeting him, as well as by Wilde’s international publicity in the 1880s, Le Gallienne adopted the Irish Aesthete’s “brand”: velvet suits, floppy ties, and long hair—lots of hair, in his case. Physically more attractive than his hero, he became a favorite subject of photographers and then a literary pinup through coverage in the press. To Beerbohm, who shared with him a publisher— John Lane, cofounder with Elkin Mathews of The Bodley Head publishing house—Le Gallienne was a Wildean Mini-Me, and he doodled unflattering caricatures throughout this copy of Limited Editions.