The Works of Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm assembled this slim volume of essays while still an Oxford undergraduate, and its knowing wit made his name almost overnight. Several pieces first appeared in fin de siecle magazines like The Yellow Book and The Savoy, and they take up dandies, cosmetics, royalty, and the poses of the age, treating each with a mock-solemn scholarship that quietly punctures every pretension it examines. Beerbohm writes as a dandy defending dandyism, praising artifice and rouge with such straight-faced elegance that the joke lands twice. The whole collection is a performance of style as much as an argument, and it fixed his reputation as the cleverest parodist of the 1890s. First published in 1896. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.