Customer Reviews

How to Be a Complete Dandy: A Little Guide for Rakes, Bucks, Swells, Cads and Wits

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This is a charming little book, the only fault of which is that it leaves one wishing for more. The dashing writing style and the author's light touch are well-suited to the subject, interspersing biographies of dandies, witty (of course!) quotes by famous dandies, examinations of various aspects of dandyism, and little scenes between two fictitious dandies. It is so evocative of the spirit of dandyism that I, who am in many ways the opposite of a dandy, began wishing that I were a little more like the historic and fictional bon vivants that inhabit its pages. My only criticism is that photographs are sometimes a little misplaced in the text, so that you are reading about Thomas Wainewright and looking at Benjamin Disraeli, but this is infrequent, and is a very small flaw in a gem of a book.

If it's hard scholarship on the history of the dandy that you seek, this book is not for you.

This little book is a totally tongue-in-cheek look at the phenomenon of dandyism: the great dandies of the nineteenth century and well into the 20th--complete with mini-biographies--and the concepts you must master in order to become one with them, sartorially and spiritually.

The illustrations are grainy and poor, and there is some lack of continuity with images and the text, as has already been noted, and a few small historical bits of trivia that are incorrect (for instance, the age of famous dandy's bride when the consummation of their marriage was stipulated; the book states the age was twenty when it was, in reality, nineteen; the true deed itself happened when the bride was 18) but overall a fun read.