cypherpress

Books

Aubrey Beardsley

Enoch Soames:
The Critical Heritage

Introduction
Order
Links
Search

Contents
The Calumny of Beerbohm
The Anxiety of Influence
New Light on Soames
Enoch’s Castle
In Praise of Christian Diabolism
Iconographia Fungosiana
Strange Growths
A Letter to the Editor
 
List of Illustrations
Le Diaboliste Catholique
Portrait Study of Enoch Soames
En Attendant
Crème de Menthe and Nicotine
A Man of Letters
Enoch Soames, Esq.
The Bad Homburg

Contact Us

The Arms of a PoetEnoch Soames - The Critical Heritage
ICONOGRAPHIA FUNGOSIANA

A catalogue of Portraits of Enoch Soames
From the papers of Siegfried von Frieblisch, D.D.

by Stephen Calloway.

Only with the recent death of the great German polymath and leading Soames scholar, Siegfried von Frieblisch of Potsdam, affectionately known to generations of eager 1890s scholars as "Doktor Decadenz", did it finally emerge that his long and no less eagerly anticipated catalogue of the portraits of the poet Enoch Soames, though it had lain in manuscript form for many years in the professor's celebrated library at Unter dem Hügel, was in fact complete.
     At the time that his papers came to be sorted and appropriately deposited in the Archival Resource Center of the Department of Catholic and Diabolist Studies at the University of Bangkok, the city that had in more recent years become his beloved second home, it rapidly became clear that here was to be found the single most important archive of Soames material, and the crucial foundation upon which all future Soames studies would necessarily rest. Henceforth, at least some time spent in that numinous city would become essential for all those seeking a true understanding of the milieu of Soames's London of the 1890s.
     From this priceless cache of material relating to the fin-de-siècle period, the drafts of Frieblisch's Soames Catalogue have been among the very first items to be disinterred for publication; with only the most minor and pedantic of scholarly interpolations, they have been faithfully translated to form the basis of the present selection.

Enoch Soames