The dinner jacket man

This is an entirely delightful book: a French 19th century essay on George "Beau" Brummell and the concept of Dandyism, translated by George Walden and published along with his own prefatory essay on the same subject. I did not think such a book could still find a publisher, but anyone who reads it will be very, very happy that it did.

What a marvellous subject Beau Brummell is. Rising on nothing but his own stylishness, he, the son of a government clerk, became the first ornament of the English Regency, even officiating as best man at the wedding of George IV to Princess Caroline of Brunswick.

He was the best-dressed man in Europe. At a time when the upper class dressed in brilliant-coloured silks, Brummell wore black and white. Within a short time all the nobles of Europe were changed from peacocks to penguins, and never changed back: our dinner jacket is Brummell's bequest.

It took a score of tradesmen and the best part of a morning to complete Brummell's toilet: four glovemakers to make his gloves (one, it was said, for the thumbs), teams of laundresses and lackeys to dry his shirts in sweet country air, or polish his boots in champagne. And, yet, when he was finished he was transfigured, by his own elan, into something far greater than the sum of his creditors.

Greatly to the annoyance of those, like the Prince Regent, who wished to emulate him, the Brummell effect was unpurchasable and inimitable. He had a distinction that everyone could recognise but nobody could quantify. With him began the idea that style is innate.

Brummell had far to fall, and when he did there was no one to catch him. His debts obliged him to leave England for Caen, in France, where he rapidly disintegrated into squalor and madness, and where he was glimpsed in his decline by a young French novelist called Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly.

The pearl of the English Regency was a perfect subject for Barbey, who disliked the modern France of his own age, in which, as he saw it, mechanised industry and mass-production now threatened what little individualism was left after the revolution.

In Brummell he discerned a true original: an individual of truly heroic proportions, who had conquered through the majesty of his manner alone, and placed himself above distinctions of class, rank or even merit.

The purity of this enraptured Barbey. "Brummell was a dandy and nothing more," he wrote. "His art was his life itself."

In January 1844, Barbey sat down and, with "smoking pen" as he described it, discharged his extraordinary essay, On Dandyism and Beau Brummell, in a couple of weeks. It is a startling and somewhat morally disorientating piece of work, as Barbey recasts traditional vices in a heroic mould: here caprice is a life-force, vanity is benevolence and frivolity is necessity.