Aloysius

Today my online Signals* ad was for Steiff plush animals. I checked but they did not have a replica of Aloysius for sale.

Aloysius is Lord Sebastian Flyte's teddy bear in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited (1945).

 The model for Aloysius was Archibald Ormsby-Gore, the beloved teddy bear of John Betjeman, Waugh's friend at Oxford and later the English poet laureate from 1972 until his death. Archibald Ormsby-Gore, better known as Archie, together with a toy elephant known as Jumbo, was a lifelong companion of Betjeman's.

Betjeman brought his bear with him when he went up to university at Oxford in the 1920s, and as a result Archie became the model for Aloysius.

In the 1940s, Betjeman also wrote and illustrated a story for his children, entitled Archie and the Strict Baptists, in which the bear's sojourns at the family's successive homes in Uffington and Farnborough are fictionalised. Archie is here described as a member of the Strict Baptist denomination, riding a hedgehog to chapel, and enjoying amateur archaeology, digging up molehills, "which, he considered, were the graves of baby Druids". A version of the story with illustrations by Phillida Gili was published as a children's book in 1977, Jock Murray, Betjeman's publisher, having declined to publish Betjeman's own coloured illustrations on grounds of cost.

Betjeman also wrote a poem "Archibald" in which the bear is temporarily stuffed in the loft for fear of Betjeman appearing "soft" to his father. Archie and Jumbo were in Betjeman's arms when he died in 1984.
 
Aloysius, and in particular his representation in the 1981 television adaptation of the novel, is credited with having triggered the late-20th century teddy bear renaissance.He was depicted by a Steiff teddy bear named Delicatessen, owned by the actor Peter Bull. Aloysius's companion, Lord Sebastian Flyte, was movingly and beautifully portrayed by Anthony Andrews. Jeremy Irons played Charles Ryder in what became his breakout role.

*Signals: gifts that inform, enlighten and entertain offers items related to, and or/inspired by programs on Public Television. If you wish to see what they have available, click on this link. And no, I do not get a kickback or even a thank you for pointing the way.