The dandy was an elusive cultural icon which found expression
in many literary works and attracted the attention of prominent
cultural critics. The general undiscerning assumption was that the
dandy was merely a man interested in clothes and matte
rs of style.
A more discriminating examination of the dandy figure reveals,
however, that he was much more sophisticated than this assumption
makes him to be. This paper examines the nineteenth-century
theoretical debate about the dandy in the works of Charles
Baudelaire and Thomas Carlyle, particularly in Carlyle’s book
Sartor Resartus and then proceeds to study the presentation of the
dandy figure in two novels by Charles Dickens, Hard Times and
Bleak House, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham.