The Yellow Book, published in London from 1894 to 1897 by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland,[1] was a quarterly literary periodical
(priced at 5s.) that lent its name to the "Yellow" 1890s. The Yellow
Book's brilliant color immediately associated the periodical with
illicit French novels- an anticipation, many thought, of the scurrilous
content inside. Yet The Yellow Book's first list of contributors bespoke
a non-radical, typically conservative collection of authors: Edmund Gosse, Walter Crane, Frederick Leighton, and Henry James among others. Upon its publication, Oscar Wilde dismissed The Yellow Book as "not yellow at all".[2] In The Romantic '90s, Richard Le Gallienne,
a poet identified with the New Literature of the Decadence, described
The Yellow Book as the following: "The Yellow Book was certainly novel,
even striking, but except for the drawings and decorations by Beardsley,
which, seen thus for the first time, not unnaturally affected most
people as at once startling, repellent, and fascinating, it is hard to
realize why it should have seemed so shocking. But the public is an
instinctive creature, not half so stupid as is usually taken for
granted. It evidently scented something queer and rather alarming about
the strange new quarterly, and thus it almost immediately regarded it as
symbolic of new movements which it only partially represented.[3]
The Yellow Book owed much of its reputation to Aubrey Beardsley,
who, despite John Lane's remonstrations, repeatedly attempted to shock
public opinion. Lane would painstakingly peruse Beardsley's drawings
before each publication as Beardsley was known for hiding
"inappropriate" details in his work. Throughout Beardsley's contribution
to The Yellow Book, the two were caught in a game of hide-and-seek.
Lane's scrutiny of Beardsley's drawings suggests that he wished The
Yellow Book to be a publication only slightly associated with the
Decadence's shocking aesthetic. Indeed, Lane continually emphasized that
he desired the work to be suitable reading material for any audience.
However, Beardsley openly mocked the Victorian artistic ideal, which
he considered to be both prude and hypocritical. Beardsley's artwork was
perhaps the most controversial aspect of The Yellow Book; his style was
thought both highly unnatural and grotesque and he was openly
caricatured in contemporary periodicals.
In response, Beardsley cleverly published two drawings stylistically
divergent to his own under the names Phillip Brouqhton and Albert
Foschter in The Yellow Book's third volume. While The Saturday Review
termed Broughton's piece "a drawing of merit" and Foschter's "a clever
study," they decried the drawings under Beardsley's own name, deeming
them "as freakish as ever."[4]
Beardsley's contribution transformed The Yellow Book into a periodical associated with the more decadent attitudes of the fin-de-siecle.
It was the decision of both Beardsley and Henry Harland to design the
book in accordance with the French novel. This decision was the key
factor in causing Beardsley's removal from the periodical. The media
mistakenly reported the yellow book which Oscar Wilde carried to his
trial to be The Yellow Book itself, when it in fact was a French novel.
Sally Ledger writes in "Wilde Women and The Yellow Book: The Sexual
Politics of Aestheticism and Decadence", ["A]s far as the newspapers
were concerned, Wilde was accompanied to his trail by The Yellow Book,
and such media reports cemented in the cultural imagination of the 1890s
an association between The Yellow Book,aestheticism and Decadence and,
after April and May 1895,homosexuality".[5]
According to Stanley Weintraub,
"The color of The Yellow Book was an appropriate reflection of the
'Yellow Nineties," a decade in which Victorianism was giving way among
the fashionable to Regency attitudes and French influences; For yellow
was not only the decor of the notorious and dandified pre-Victorian
Regency, but also of the allegedly wicked and decadent French novel."[6]
If The Yellow Book was not as "daring" as its introduction advertised,
it was still a part of the vanguard of cultural debate which typified
the main struggles of the "yellow '90s". Its variegated array of
contributors associated The Yellow Book with the "impressionism,
feminism, naturalism, dandyism, symbolism and classicism [which] all
participate[d] in the politics of decadence in the nineties."[7]
The Yellow Book has been credited as "...commercially the most
ambitious and typographically the most important of the 1890s
periodicals. [It] gave the fullest expression to the double resistance
of graphic artists against literature, and Art against commerce, the
double struggle symbolized by the paired words on the contents-pages of
the Yellow Books: Letterpress and Pictures, Literature and Art."[8]
The Yellow Book's contents-pages diverged from Victorian ideas
concerning art. "Texts prescribed pictures and not the other way round".
In the Illustration of Books: A Manual for the Use of Students, Joseph
Pennell explains that "an illustration really is a work of art...which
is explanatory.".[9]
Interviewed before the appearance of the Yellow Book's first
publication, Harland and Beardsley rejected the idea that the function
of artwork was merely explanatory: "There is to be no connection
whatever [between the text and illustrations]. [They] will be quite
separate".[10]
The equilibrium which the Yellow Book poses between art and text is
emphasized by the separate title pages before each individual work
whether literary or pictorial. The use of title pages announces the
piece before the viewer's eye is allowed to glimpse it, separating the
work from the other contributions and presenting each individual work as
both serious and independent from the whole.
The Yellow Book's mise-en-page
differed dramatically from current Victorian periodicals: "...its
asymmetrically placed titles, lavish margins, abundance of white space,
and relatively square page declare the Yellow Book's specific and
substantial debt to Whistler."[11]
The copious amount of blank space utilized by The Yellow Book brought
the magazine simplicity and elegance, stylistically overshadowing the
"anaesthetic clutter of the typical Victorian page."[12]
The use of white space is positive rather than negative, simultaneously
drawing the reader's eye to the blank page as an aesthetic and
essentially created object. The first issue of The Yellow Book's
introduction describes it "as a book in form, a book in substance; a
book beautiful to see and convenient to handle; a book with style, a
book with finish; a book that every book-lover will love at first sight;
a book that will make book-lovers of many who are now indifferent to
books."[13]
The decision to print the Yellow Book in Caslon-old face further
signified the ties which the Yellow Book held to the Revivalists. face,
“an eighteenth-century revival of a seventeenth-century typographical
style” became “the type-face of deliberate and principled reaction or
anachronism.”[14]
A type-face generally reserved for devotional and ecclesiastical work,
its use in the pages of the Yellow Book at once identified it with the
“Religion of Beauty.” The use of [1]
on every page enhanced the Yellow Book’s link to the obsolescent. Both
antiquated and obtrusive, the catch-phrase interrupts the cognitive
process of reading: “making-transparent...the physical sign which
constitutes the act of reading; and in doing this, catch-words
participate in the ‘pictorialization’ of typography”.[15]
By interruppting readers through the very use of irrelevant text,
catch-words lend the printed word a solidity of form which is otherwise
ignored.
It was a leading journal of the British 1890s; to some degree associated with Aestheticism and Decadence,
the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres,
poetry, short stories, essays book illustrations, portraits, and
reproductions of paintings. Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor,[16]
and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its
association with French fiction of the period. He obtained works by such
artists as Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer. The literary content was no less distinguished; authors who contributed were:
- Max Beerbohm
- Arnold Bennett
- "Baron Corvo"
- Ernest Dowson
- George Gissing
- Henry James
- Sir Edmund Gosse
- Richard Le Gallienne
- Charlotte Mew
- Arthur Symons
- H. G. Wells
- William Butler Yeats
Though Oscar Wilde never published anything within its pages, it was linked to him because Beardsley had illustrated his Salomé and because he was on friendly terms with many of the contributors. Moreover, in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to amuse him after the suicide of his first love. This "yellow book" is understood by critics to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a representative work of Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes
like Beardsley. Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to
alert the reader to their lascivious content. It is not clear, however,
whether Dorian Gray is the direct source for the review's title.
Soon after Wilde was arrested in April 1895 Beardsley was dismissed as
the periodical's art editor, his post taken over by the publisher, John Lane, assisted by another artist, Patten Wilson. Although critics have contended that the quality of its contents declined after Beardsley left and that The Yellow Book
became a vehicle for promoting the work of Lane's authors, a remarkably
high standard in both art and literature was maintained until the
periodical ceased publication in the spring of 1897. A notable feature
was the inclusion of work by women writers and illustrators,[17] among them Ella D'Arcy and Ethel Colburn Mayne (both also served as Harland's subeditors), George Egerton, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Ada Leverson, Netta and Nellie Syrett, and Ethel Reed.
Perhaps indicative of "The Yellow Book's" past significance in
literary circles of its day is a reference to it in a fictional piece
thirty-three years after it ceased publication. American author Willa Cather noted its presence in the personal library of one of her characters in the short story, Double Birthday, noting that it had lost its "power to seduce and stimulate..."
The Yellow Book differed from other periodicals in that it was issued clothbound,
made a strict distinction between the literary and art contents (only
in one or two instances were these connected), did not include serial fiction, and contained no advertisements except publishers' lists.
Mentions in literature
In "An Ideal Husband" by Oscar Wilde, Mrs. Cheveley (a rather immoral character) says:
I have never read a Blue Book. I prefer books... in a yellow cover.
The book sent by Lord Henry to Dorian Gray in Wilde's novel, which
contributes considerably to his descent into corruption, is also
described as being[18]
... bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled.
They told him about Cronshaw. "Have you ever read any of his work?"
"No," said Philip.
"It came out in The Yellow Book."
They looked upon him, as painters often do writers, with contempt because he was a layman, with tolerance because he practised an art, and with awe because he used a medium in which themselves felt ill-at-ease.
It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.Poppet and her friends looked on him as a survival from the Yellow Book."
The Yellow Book was parodied in Robert Hichen's 1894 novel The Green Carnation as The Yellow Disaster which contains a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley
of the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting in a wheelbarrow consisting of
just three lines to form the image. Lord Reginald Hastings (a fictional
portrayal of Lord Alfred Douglas) makes the following remark, "What
exquisite simplicity!"
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