The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged Beardsley’s artistic leanings. Beardsley had only been a year in London when he retired from the architect’s office and became a clerk in the Guardian Insurance Office, about his seventeenth birthday--August 1889. Whether this change bettered his prospects, or whatsoever was the motive, it was unfortunately to be the beginning of two years of appalling misery and suffering, in body and soul, for the youth. His eighteenth and nineteenth years were the black years of Aubrey Beardsley--and as blank of achievement as they were black. From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in Beardsley’s career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the Guardian Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was assailed by a violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s theatres and operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and what strength remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly position at the Insurance Office in the city. The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to breaking down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his racked body compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him of the solace of the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a business life which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured that he might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sinking him in the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength and energy were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless disease which mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He forsook all hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the plagued youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon--it was enough to have broken the courage of the strongest man. Beardsley’s first three years in London, then, were empty unfruitful years. From sixteen to nineteen he was but playing with art as a mere recreation from his labours in the city as his fellow-clerks played games or chased hobbies. What interest he may have had in art, and that in but an amateurish fashion, during his first year in London, was completely blotted out by these two blank years of exhausting bodily suffering that followed, years in which his eyes gazed in terror at death. His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as appealed to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his disease led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the diagrams led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo--especially the human fetus--with which he repeatedly and wilfully disfigured his art on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a dirty-minded schoolboy.