“Clever ministrations”: regenerative beauty at the fin de siècle

Abstract This paper is the first to consider the role of late-nineteenth century British beauty culturists in establishing the respectability of anti-aging goods and services. It surveys self-published beauty texts, periodical press coverage, and advertisements to ask how female beauty providers positioned their businesses so as to enhance the reputation of their wares. These texts reveal that, by foregrounding the respectability, modernity, and novelty of regenerative techniques, British beauty culturists challenged existing narratives of commercial beautification, shifting feminine regeneration from the realm of vanity to necessity, from a question of moral character to commercial endeavor. However, these discursive strategies, not to mention the use of technology for the purpose of female bodily enhancement, were not welcomed by all. The paper subsequently turns to police court coverage and medical journals that criticized beauty “quacks” for reportedly duping unsuspecting female customers. The pursuit of duplicitous “beauty doctors” by unsatisfied customers and medical publications comes to the fore in a concluding profile of Anna Ruppert, a popular London-based beauty culturist who found herself charged under Ireland’s Pharmaceutical Act in 1893 for selling arsenical compounds. And yet, despite public scrutiny, the British press, consumers, and commercial providers increasingly embraced a more overt beauty culture that would prevail through the interwar period. This paper argues that this was due, in part, to discursive shifts advanced by fin de siècle beauty culturists, who paid the price for these interventions, existing as a liminal group straddling respectability and quackery.