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Books

In Black & White

Order

Title Page
Under the Hill

Prose
The Art of the Hoarding
Letters to his Critics
   Pall Mall Budget
   Daily Chronicle
   St. Paul’s
Table Talk
Lines upon Pictures
   St Rose of Lima
   Salome

Poetry
The Three Musicians
The Ballad of a Barber
Ave Atque Vale
The Celestial Lover
The Ivory Piece
Prospectus for Volpone

Appendix : Juvenilia
The Valiant
A Ride in an Omnibus
The Confession Album
The Courts of Love
Dante in Exile
Written in Uncertainty
The Morte Darthur

Enoch Soames

Under the Hill
Letters

To the Editor of St. Paul’s.

28 June 1895.
114 Cambridge Street.

          Sir,

No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay hostile, criticism, or enjoys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, and I may be forgiven if I take up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean”.
As to my uncleanliness, I do the best for it in my morning bath, and if he has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it.
                    Yours obediently,

                                                               Aubrey Beardsley

¶ 1895. This letter was written in reply to the journalist Haldane MacFall, who later became a supporter of the artist and wrote a valuable, if wildly opinionated, study of his character and art.