STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.] [[bmid:2125292a]]
STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.] [[bmid:2125292b]]
STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.] [[bmid:2125292d]]
STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.] [[bmid:2125292c]]
STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.]
STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.] [[bmid:2125292e]]

STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.]

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Beardsley as Schoolboy Actor and Illustrator

STEVENS, E.H. (editor). Past and Present. The Magazine of the Brighton Grammar School. Volume XIII. [Nos 1–7.] Brighton: ‘Printed by King and Thorne … and published at the school’. [May–December] 1888.

[bound with:]

[BEARDSLEY, Aubrey (illustrator)]. The Brighton Grammar School Annual Entertainment, at the Dome, on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 1888. Programme & Book of Words, Price, Four-Pence. [Brighton: Tucknott’s Steam Printing Works.] December 1888. 

8vo. Contemporary straight-grained red roan, borders double-filleted in black with floral cornerpieces, contrasting green and red gilt lettering-pieces to spine, board-edges roll-tooled in gilt, edges speckled red, comb-marbled endpapers; Past and Present: pp. [iv], 184; plate containing sheet music facing p. 16; Annual Entertainment: pp. 46, [2]; spine and joints lightly rubbed; light spotting to flyleaves; very good.


The thirteenth volume of the Brighton Grammar School Magazine, which had published Beardsley’s first literary work in 1885 and his first drawings in 1887, bound with a programme for the school’s annual entertainment (in which the sixteen-year-old Beardsley played a role), featuring eleven of his illustrations.

Beardsley attended Brighton Grammar School from 1884 to 1888 and is described in the programme as ‘A Present Boy’. He played Mercury in the Prologue (written by his mentor and schoolmaster, A.W. King) as well as Herr Kirschwasser, a pedantic Privy Councillor, in the comic operetta The Pay of the Pied Piper: a Legend of Hamelin Town, by Fred Edmonds with music by C.T. West. His eleven etchings to the play represent some of his earliest published illustrations, and several would be reproduced in The Poster, the Westminster Budget, and the Magazine of Art in 1898, shortly after his death. Samuels Lasner and Ross note that some copies of this programme were bound as a supplement to the subsequent volume of Past and Present (XIV:1, February 1889).

Gallatin, pp. 19–20; Gertner Zatlin 34–44; Reade 10; Reade & Dickinson 110; Samuels Lasner 5; Vallance 12.

SKU: 2125292