More Fitzrovia characters depicted by Walter Sickert.

More added :-)  ......

The harp 'having language for us' in that beautiful Jacobite song, can you help identify these characters in Walter Sickert's secret and personal sketch collection, do you think? I'm not sure I yet recognize them. ( But for three: one I think is the Duke of Manchester, another who seems to be Edgar Degas, another seems to be the 7th Duke of Atholl.)
They are Walter Sickert's 1880s Cleveland Street Fitzrovia Characters: toffs, socialites and artists who were involved in a Jacobite confederacy in the 1880s. He has drawn  more,  I am okay as per who they are, they are on this blog or not yet disclosed and  going onto the soon to come website.

Who is this toff? ...he is not quite Manchester or Montague Druitt.  (He looks a bit like a Fiennes doesn't he?)..

Oh...... do you think it's this one? Not out of the question, is it? Lewis Carroll, below, at the centre of the MacDonald family.. Slant of the eyebrows is perfect in the caricature above, and the neck, chin and the ears...the mouth... it's just the nose that's extra elongated isn't it... and it's clearly a caricature.. 
 Hmm. What do you think.

Perhaps Charles' ( Lewis's)  nose elongated slightly when he took whatever substances he bought from no 19 and 21  Cleveland Street to take with his pipe or his tea ( which he obviously did take, come on.) Love this one.

...here, a link to scholars' criticisms of Lewis Carroll as a 'Jack the Ripper' suspect. Apparently Carroll had 'a real interest in the Jack the Ripper' murders- and an intriguing theory which he refused, in his lifetime to disclose. Well, he must have been in Cleveland Street, and  in the know about 'the secret letter delivery service' then.  

Is there any secret letter 'delivery service inference' in any of Lewis Carroll's work? There is the business about the 'Knave's letter' in Alice in Wonderland, isn't there.

Oh...! The Knave of Hearts, who 'stole those tarts right away'..... the Randolph Culdecott poem used by Lewis Caroll in his 'trial of the Knave of Hearts.'...

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts

All on a summers day

The Knave of hearts, he stole those tarts

And took them right away....

.....there's a Stuart/Jacobite reference in a Randolph Culdecott poem a Blackbird ...... Find both poems here.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of Rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie,

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.

Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the King!

 Walter Sickert, inferring Lewis Carroll's work in his secret and personal sketches, does seem to have been making an inference about the Special Branch police discovery of the Jacobite confederacy that was taking place in Chelsea, Fitzrovia and Whitechapel . ( Looking at Carroll's choice of poet in context with the other discoveries in Walter Sickert's secret and personal sketch collection of course.)

'Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the King!'

Indeed.

And there is this Walter Sickert sketch picture here, below......

.....it looks like a picture of Randolph Culdecott. Yes it's him :-)

That must be Lewis Carroll, seen in the sketch previously. Wonderful indeed!

...he seems to have some sort of toothache this one, below. These are Walter Sickert's and his friends' private memories of Fitzriovia and the Jacobite confederacy, so 'toff with a toothache' might not strike a chord with any of us. Obviously an incidence that stood out in their own memories, and perhaps was a source of amusement. Oh... he's got something of a pain in the ar*se hasn't he. lol. So perhaps it was a bit more serious than toothache... lol.

 The chappie top right of this one, below, bears a strong resemblance to the contemporary comical send ups of the Viscount Mandeville, the Duke of Manchester of the 1880s ( see here, the one in Vanity Fair.) (  the same chappie, two titles.) There's the little prince 'Joe' and his nanny come nurse, in the middle of the photo. She's very like Martha Tabram, isn't she? Here, the Wiki photo of Martha Tabram. People like to debate whether or not she too was a "Jack the ripper victim" but investigating police in the epoque filed her as one of the victims and she is still in the "Jack the Ripper" files .

Who is the chappie  at the Catholic nurse's toes? Oh perhaps that's Edgar Degas in the mid 1880s. Yes it is. Below, Edgar Degas, self portrait 1886: 

  Could this be The Duke of Manchester too then (below) or is it another person? ... he looks very young here, but then in the early 1880s the Duke of Manchester was young. ( The boy on the top right hand corner of the photo below is one of the telegraph boys, presumably 'Thickbroom.')

Who is this on horseback, below? It seems to be the 7th Duke of Atholl, given the accentuation of the distinctive nose shape- which is even more the property of the 7th Duke's forebears. Note the traveling horse, and the Scottish emblem, the tartan, on the trousers.

This one below,which Walter Sickert drew just below the horseman, seems to be intended to be of the same gentleman. You can see there's some variety in the sketch.

The 2nd Duke of Atholl, below. The nose of the forebear in Walter's sketches of the 7th Duke.

The 7th Duke of Atholl, below, who was apparently in Fitzrovia and a Jacobite confederacy in the 1880s. Below, in younger days, c 1870-5. In the 1880s he was Lord Lieutenant of Perthshire apparently, and would have gone about the place on horseback of course.

It's him isn't it. It's hard to see who else it is, and Walter Sickert was keen on ancestral inferences in face representations. And John Stuart Murray was famous for wearing his highland gear whenever possible. Wiki on him here ( links to his ancestry too). There is quite a lot of involvement in Jacobite confederacies and rumored involvements in respect of others in this clan.


Who is this? ( below.) I wonder if its one of the young Wildes, the shape of the face, (so this would have been an earlier sketch then, mid 1870s) unless Oscar had a child in Fitzrovia/the East End that he never told us about, (which would not surprise me in any way, by now). 

 Interesting!

I always thought Oscar was bisexual personally. He showed original, personalized and  fluent expertise on what a woman is romantically and aspirationally all his life. As a teenager I thought he was one of the few men who ever existed who understood me. (I am not gay.) However he definitely had a very rich gay  life.  In the meantime 'Oscar Wilde Stuart Mason' is coming up as a top Google search. Not before time. Of course the original East End conspiracy was all true ( there are very significant, vital variations on the 1970s East End conspiracy theory that were concealed via very clever Special Branch police disinformation for a hundred years). :-) What did you think?