Bon-Mots of Charles Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, Selected by Walter Jerrold, with Grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley

Charles Lamb and Douglas Jerrold

Bon-Mots of Charles Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, Selected by Walter Jerrold, with Grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley

London:

J. M. Dent,

1893.

Although Beardsley would soon be associated mainly with the Bodley Head firm, he continued to work for J. M. Dent on projects such as the Bon-Mots volumes, supplying not illustrations per se for the witty sayings of others, but images unrelated to the text. Some were merely decorative; many were savagely funny; a few, like this one, were haunting and disturbing, showing an imagination without limits, untroubled by propriety. In Le Morte Darthur, Beardsley had introduced suggestive nudes of vaguely classical origin. There was no precedent, however, for this aggressively gender-bending figure, with its phallic shape and pregnant belly giving birth in two directions at once, that taunted the audience and stuck out its tongue in defiance.

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press