WILLIAM THEODORE PETERS
As Ernest Dowson’s ‘The Pierrot of the Minute’
William Theodore Peters—remember him?
He is the American poet and actor with recent claims on this blog to be the ultimate decadent of the 1890s.
Peters’s decadent persona is supported by a photograph featured in that article which was thought to be the only one of him known to exist. However, I concluded by hinting at the existence of two other images of Peters that have recently come to my attention.
The first of these is the photograph below of Peters in Pierrot costume.
The Photograph
[Source: Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress]
One of Peters’s claims to fame is that he commissioned from Ernest Dowson the only dramatic work that Dowson ever produced. It was a rhyming playlet titled The Pierrot of the Minute: A Dramatic Phantasy in One Act—which Dowson wrote specifically for Peters to enact.
The photograph shows Peters in costume as the titular Pierrot—the stock character of pantomime and commedia dell’arte—and it gives us a better idea of Peters’s facial appearance than the odd one of him hitherto known.
The picture has an interesting provenance.
In 1958, the then director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, Frederick Adams,2 received a “bundle of Dowsoniana” which included the photograph.
Adams knew that his collector friend and philanthropist, Lessing Rosenwald, already owned everything else in connection with Dowson’s Pierrot play. So he generously decided that Rosenwald’s collection was the “appropriate home” for the photograph, and forwarded it him to enable “the complete story” to be told.
What happened to the photograph next is determined by Lessing Rosenwald’s relationship with the Library of Congress in Washington, and his desire to secure documents for the nation. Rosenwald had been making a series of donations to the library beginning in 1943 and which culminated in 1980 with the bequest of his entire literary collection following his death the previous year. That gift now constitutes the ‘Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress)’.
Among the many thousands of manuscripts and books in the collection along with The Pierrot of the Minute photograph, are Dowson’s original manuscript and Beardsley’s original artwork for it.
The Pierrot archive can be seen here online; and the subset of the Adams letter and photograph from the Morgan library is here.
The Pierrot
The character developed from that of a buffoon to become an avatar of the disenfranchised.
Decadents turned him into a disillusioned foe of idealism; Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-sufferer; Modernists made him into a silent, alienated observer of the mysteries of the human condition. Much of that mythic quality still adheres to the “sad clown” in the postmodern era
Text: Wikipedia
Image: Atelier Nadar: Sarah Bernhardt in Jean Richepin’s Pierrot the Murderer, 1883. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
The Play
One of five illustrations by Beardsley’s for The Pierrot of the Minute
Published by Leonard Smithers, London, (1897)
Library of Congress
(Zatlin, 1040)3
The word Pierrot comes from the name Pierre plus the diminutive indicator [-ot] and thus means ‘little Peter’. Perhaps Peters was attracted by the name. But it seems more likely that he had an affinity for the forlorn figure of the play who bargains his life away for a hour of love with the immortal moon maiden.
Wait a Minute—”an hour?”
“Although Pierrot spends an hour of bliss with the Moon Maiden, Dowson uses the term ‘Minute’ because, as the play details, the change takes place in a minute of eternal time.“
Zatlin4
PIERROT
Teach me again ! I am a sorry dunce—
THE LADY (Moon Maiden)
Then come with me ! below this pleasant shrine
Of Venus we will presently recline,
Until birds’ twitter beckon me away
To mine own home, beyond the milky-way.
I will instruct thee, for I deem as yet
Of Love thou knowest but the alphabet.
Ernest Dowson, The Pierrot of the Minute (1892, published 1897)
Peters also devised a his own one-act play called Le Tournoy d’Amour (The Tournament of Love) which also ends tragically for a love-stricken character.
By commissioning Ernest Dowson to write The Pierrot of the Minute, Peters could not have chosen a better person to encapsulate a fantasy of innocent longing, because Dowson himself lived a notorious real life pining for the love of an unattainable maid.5 But by giving him only three weeks for its composition, he could not have made a worse choice of someone able to cope with production deadlines.
Dowson literally, as well as metaphorically, could not get his act together.
Dowson corresponded with Peters about the play with his customary air of dry withdrawal addressing him as “My dear Pierrot” and referring to the Lord Chamberlain as “His Censorship”. But it didn’t help that he occasionally stayed up until 3 o’clock in the morning discussing the play with Lionel Johnson, with the ensuing sleepover causing him to forget what day it was. As late as October 27, 1892 he told Peters that, “I have not been getting on very rapidly with the play & I can’t hope to finish it in time”, which put the originally scheduled performance at Aldershot in jeopardy. Dowson wrote to friends regretting what a rash decision it was to put himself through “this period of severe mental agony”. By October 31, he was still about 100 lines short of finishing and declared himself “literally done to death.”
Despite this, and his penchant for occasionally losing drafts of his work and then finding them again, he finished the play on November 2. He then took a day to make out a fair copy for His Censorship, attended rehearsals, and finally—with Dowsonian ennui—excused himself to Peters by saying: “I am feeling rather ill, though there seems to be nothing definite the matter with me: the weather I suppose.” 6
The Lord Chamberlain eventually issued a license for The Pierrot of the Minute on November 16, 1892. The first production took place shortly thereafter on November 22, 1892 for the Primrose League7 at Chelsea Town Hall, followed by the deferred performance at the Officers’ Club, Aldershot, on December 5, 1892.
(Leonard Smithers, 1897). Edition: 300 small-paper copies on Japanese vellum
Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress)
Dowson also sent a copy of the play to Oscar Wilde, presumably as a curtain raiser for A Woman of No Importance, but nothing came of it.
Peters continued to give public and private performances of his little playlet, including an appearance in the West Theatre of the Royal Albert Hall in 1893. The cover of the programme for these various productions shows a vignette of Peters as the Pierrot—which is clearly taken from the revealed photograph of him featured in this article.
[Courtesy of the Mark Samuels Lasner collection]
© John Cooper, 2025.
With thanks to William I. Kauffman for helping to locate the photograph of Peters.
In Paris
An evening of music, Dowson’s Pierrot, and Peters’s Tournament of Love.
Footnotes:
- Arthur Collin Moore (1866—1952). Friend and frequent correspondent of Ernest Dowson. A solicitor by profession, he was an occasional writer who contributed to The Yellow Book, and collaborated with Dowson on several novels with varying success.. ↩︎
- Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr. (1910–2001) was an American bibliophile and the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City from 1948 to 1969. ↩︎
- Zatlin, Linda Gertner, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné, Vol 2, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 330 ↩︎
- Ibid 328 ↩︎
- Adelaide “Missie” Foltinowicz, the underaged daughter of a Polish restaurant-owner. ↩︎
- All Dowson correspondence notes:
Desmond Flower and Henry Maas, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford, 1967). ↩︎ - The Primrose League was the social wing of the Conservative Party in Britain, founded 1883. ↩︎
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Aha, here we are: a photogaph much more likely to have been the one displayed in the Wildes’ drawing room than the later known photograph of Peters. I will add it to my webpage about their art collection, with credit.