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"Count" Wratislaw: 1890s Poet Who Lived Too Long Darren J. Sheppard. Theodore Wratislaw: Fragments of a Life. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2017. 291 pp. $50.00 £40.00
THEODORE WRATISLAW (1871-1933) may not even have made the second eleven of 1890s writers, yet he contributed to the iconic Yellow Book and Savoy. His flagging reputation afterwards cost him, until now, a biography, a gap effectively and readably redeemed by D. J. Sheppard, Senior Academic Mentor at Oakham School, Rutland.
Son of a solicitor in Rugby with aristocratic antecedents in Bohemia, Theodore Count Wratislaw-as he sometimes adopted his rather flimsy claim to a title-had no desire to follow his father in a suffocating small-town law practice. While reluctantly studying law in London he aspired to become a man of letters. A garret in Bloomsbury led him to literary coteries, to the gaudy allure of music halls and to Swinburnean bathos. However attracted to dancing girls, and shocking his father by ecstatically admiring, in verse, their "contours," he lapsed even further in judgment. Closing "To a Sicilian Boy" (although he never knew one), Wratislaw pretended to the "Uranian" predilections of some of his...