Beau Brummell - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Brummell appears as a character in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1896 historical novel Rodney Stone. In the novel, the title character's uncle, Charles Tregellis, is the center of the London fashion world, until Brummell ultimately supplants him. Tregellis' subsequent death from mortification serves as a deus ex machina in that it resolves Rodney Stone's family poverty, as his rich uncle bequeaths a sum to his sister.

Brummell's life was dramatised in an 1890 stage play in four acts by American playwright Clyde Fitch and starred Richard Mansfield. This in turn was adapted for the 1924 silent movie with John Barrymore and Mary Astor. Another play about him, authored by Bertram P Matthews, is only remembered because it had incidental music written for it by Edward Elgar. It was staged at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham in November 1928, with Elgar himself conducting the orchestra on its first night. Only the minuet from this is now performed.

Earlier movies included a 10-minute film by the Vitagraph Company of America (1913), based on a Booth Tarkington story, and the 1913 Beau Brummell and his Bride, a short comedy made by the Edison Company. Brummell's life was also made the subject of a 1931 three-act operetta by Reynaldo Hahn, later broadcast by Radio-Lille (1963). In 1937 there was a radio drama on Lux Radio Theater with Robert Montgomery as Brummell and Gene Lockhart as the Prince. A further film, Beau Brummell, was made in 1954 with Stewart Granger playing the title role and Elizabeth Taylor as Lady Patricia Belham. There were also two television dramas: the sixty-minute So war Herr Brummell (Süddeutscher Rundfunk, 1967) and the UK Beau Brummell: This Charming Man (2006) starring James Purefoy as Brummell.

Georgette Heyer, author of a number of Regency romance novels, included Brummell as a character in her 1935 novel Regency Buck. He is also a minor character in T. Coraghessan Boyle's 1982 novel, Water Music. More recently, Brummell is the detective-hero of a series of period mysteries by Californian novelist Rosemary Stevens, including Death on a Silver Tray (2000), The Tainted Snuff Box (2001), The Bloodied Cravat (2002), and Murder in the Pleasure Gardens (2003). These are written as if related by their hero.

Brummell's name became associated with style and good looks and was therefore borrowed for a variety of products or alluded to in songs and poetry. One product named after the dandy was the Beau Brummell rhododendron, hybridized in 1934 by Lionel de Rothschild and still available. Flowering in late June, it has red, waxy flowers with darker speckling. Then during the 1940s and 1950s watchmaker LeCoultre marketed a watch of that name. It had a minimalist design with no numbers and a small modern face.

T.S.Eliot's poem about "Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town" refers to him as the "Brummell of Cats", an allusion taken up in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats, the 1981 musical based on Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Around that time other allusions to Brummell began to appear in rock lyrics, but the name had already been adopted by rock bands in the 1960s: the faux-British Invasion band The Beau Brummels and Beau Brummell Esquire and His Noble Men, the name used by South African born Michael Bush for his English rock group.