Max Beerbohm - Icon Profile | Alexandria
Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), known as "The Incomparable Max," was an English essayist, caricaturist, and literary critic whose razor-sharp wit and elegant prose style made him one of the most distinctive voices of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. A self-styled "dandy" and master of satire, Beerbohm emerged as a singular figure in British letters, combining refined aestheticism with a devastating talent for exposing social pretensions.
First gaining prominence in the 1890s while still at Oxford, Beerbohm's earliest writings appeared in The Yellow Book, where his sophisticated essays caught the attention of literary London. He succeeded George Bernard Shaw as drama critic for The Saturday Review in 1898, a position that established his reputation for incisive commentary delivered with characteristic grace and humor. His connection to the aesthetic movement, particularly through his half-brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree, placed him at the heart of fin de siècle cultural circles, though he maintained an amused detachment from their excesses.
Beerbohm's literary output, while selective, proved remarkably influential. His only novel, "Zuleika Dobson" (1911), a fantasy about an Oxford beauty whose allure drives undergraduates to mass suicide, remains a masterpiece of comic writing. His caricatures, collected in works such as "Rossetti and His Circle" (1922), displayed an uncanny ability to capture personality through exaggeration, while his essays, particularly those in "And Even Now" (1920), elevated the personal essay to new heights of sophistication. Perhaps most intriguingly, Beerbohm chose semi-retirement in 1910, retreating to Rapallo, Italy, where he continued to produce work but at an increasingly leisured pace, becoming something of a literary legend in absentia.
Beerbohm's influence extends beyond his direct literary output; his cultivation of the persona of the urbane observer, his mastery of parody, and his elegant prose style influenced writers from Evelyn Waugh to Vladimir Nabokov. Modern readers continue to discover in his work a singular combination of wit, wisdom, and social observation that illuminates both his era and our own. As Virginia Woolf noted, he was "a presence which pervades the age," raising the question of whether his greatest creation might have been his own public personality, carefully cultivated yet seemingly effortless in its perfection.