The Yellow Book
Highlights of a lecture presented by Jon Evans at Rienzi on March 18, 2010

Rienzi is the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston house museum for European decorative arts. Comprising a remarkable art collection, a house, and gardens, it also contains a library amassed by the Masterson family who lived there and eventually donated the entire estate in 1997. A highlight of the libraries’ holdings is a complete 13 volume set of The Yellow Book published between 1894 through 1897.

Every now and again, history provides us with an object that encapsulates a particular era in such a way that perfectly captures the essence of an entire age – The Yellow Book is just such an object.

The brain-child of Aubrey Beardsley and expatriate American writer Henry Harland, they conceived of “a new literary and artistic quarterly” that aimed to publish those who “cannot get their best stuff accepted in the conventional magazine.”

It was a bridge between the waning age of Victoria, and a look forward to the age of modernism and the 20th century. Although short-lived, it featured some of the best and most representative literary art of the time, including several of Henry James’s well recognized short stories, as well as contributions from other literary luminaries including Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and Joseph Conrad, while the visual arts include such figures as Frederic Lord Leighton, Walter Crane, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and illustrator Laurence Housman.

John Lane and his colleague, Elkin Matthews, who published under the imprint of the Bodley Head, became the publishers. The Bodley Head was known for its publications of fiction, drama, and poetry that were produced to high aesthetic standards.

More than any other published document of its time, The Yellow Book has come to represent the fin de siècle decadence that epitomized the 1890s. It was a multi-faceted, complex and often contradictory publication. While it was fashioned as a literary quarterly and eventually came out in 13 volumes, it was primarily comprised of short stories, poetry, and reviews.

It was uncommon, if not unique, in that it never serialized material as did many other illustrated magazines of its day. Nor did it include book reviews, political commentary, interviews or advertisements of any kind. Furthermore, visual artists also were not hemmed in by restrictions. Works of art were intended to be independent of the literary content and thus Beardsley was able to draw on greater talent than mere illustrators.

The Yellow Book drew from strong intellectual antecedents, such as those fostered by the Aesthetic movement. The Aesthetic movement’s intellectual underpinnings developed in the 1830s through the writings of Theophile Gautier. However, it didn’t come to full fruition until the latter half of the 19th century, roughly 1868 to 1900. Specifically, Aestheticism was an Anti-Victorian and proto-modernist European movement that emphasized aesthetic values over moral or social themes in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design. It was essentially a manifestation of the idea of “art for art’s sake.” Thereby, artists came to believe that art was an end in itself, with no wider social or moral implications. Thus, writers such as Oscar Wilde and artists like James McNeil Whistler exemplified this through their dandied mannerisms. The arts and by extension the artists were the central focus themselves. In fact, Wilde is quoted as saying, “art has no other aim but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her own laws.” Certainly Beardsley and his companions at The Yellow Book took many of these ideas and the ideals of Aestheticism to heart and integrated them into their own works.

^ Aubrey Beardsley

Our chief protagonist, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (b. Brighton, 21 Aug 1872; d. Menton, 16 March 1898) burst onto the international scene at the ripe age of 21. Beardsley was an English draughtsman and writer. His mother gave her children an intensive education in music and literature. At a young age Beardsley became infected with tuberculosis that would ultimately be his demise. He showed an early talent for drawing, which was recognized by none other than Edward Burne-Jones, who informed Beardsley, “I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.”

Stylistically, the most remarkable features of Beardsley’s work was his ability to create extremely austere, beautifully crafted compositions with limited means. Among his finest of his early work were 17 drawings done for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1894). As the illustrator of Salome, Beardsley was immediately linked with that great provocateur of the time.

By March of 1894 Lane produced an announcement, appropriately, on bright yellow paper, decorated with a Beardsley female found in a book stall, a foretaste of future writers in The Yellow Book, who reference the act of reading and writing. The announcement stated that it “shall be beautiful as a piece of bookmaking, modern and distinguished in its letter-press and its pictures, and withal popular in the better sense of the word.”

Notably, the publishers and staff barred Wilde from their “Yellow” pages, although Lane was Wilde’s publisher. Oscar Wilde could be said to have nothing and everything to do with The Yellow Book. Before the 5th volume was released, disaster struck on April 5, 1895 when Wilde was arrested and eventually tried on a criminal charge of committing indecent acts. The subsequent scandal also brought down Beardsley. The notoriety spread over into The Yellow Book and an angry public made the association between the two for the following reasons:

• Beardsley had done his most famous drawings for Wilde’s Salome
• Both were published by the Bodley Head
• Both affected a public façade of dandyism

Ultimately, The Yellow Book and its art editor could never shake connection to Wilde. Crowds threw stones at the Bodley Head sign and windows. Several of Lane’s respectable – and mediocre – authors urged him to not only withdraw Wilde’s books on the Bodley Head list, but to sack Beardsley for good measure. Publisher John Lane did just that by telegram. He later mourned that Wilde’s trial “killed The Yellow Book and it nearly killed me.”

So we have Beardsley – not quite 23 – embittered and miserable; seeking solace through alcohol. No sexual deviant, no friend of Oscar Wilde, but extremely unpopular and embarrassed by his dismissal from The Yellow Book via telegram supposedly for his questionable taste in art.

In January of 1896, Beardsley and Arthur Symons’ emerged in the rival periodical, Savoy. With a narrower literary spectrum than The Yellow Book, it was accompanied by some of Beardsley’s most inspired illustrations.

Beardsley and Symons teamed up with a new publisher, Leonard Smithers, who supported the unconventional and avant-garde with the profits from erotica and pornography. In addition to contributions from George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm and Havelock Ellis, it contained the first part of Beardsley’s erotic serial, Under the Hill, which, although never finished, remains a minor masterpiece of the period. But by this point Beardsley was a dying man, and with him The Savoy also expired 8 months later.

In the end, The Yellow Book accomplished neither of its attempts at becoming fully “modern”, nor fully “respectable” in its outlook. While Harland as literary editor did not bow to fads or narrow aesthetic lines, part of the downfall of the quarterly was its heavy reliance on the stable of writers who were associated with the Bodley Head publishing house.

And while the Wilde trial brought it a notoriety that one could not have imagined, it also spelled the demise of the quarterly’s style and panache that was brought to it by its young artistic editor, Aubrey Beardsley.

In many ways it was no different than many of the other literary magazines of its day – filled with critical essays, solemn stories, and erotic-mannered drawings. All of this was seemingly done in a mannered style that was seemingly very risqué, but the public in some ways had already moved on.

While much of its literary content may have been representative of its time, its visual contributions – particularly those by Beardsley were defining moments in British visual history. His strong linear qualities, impish characters, and bold compositions clearly have influenced generations of artists and illustrators.

In summary, The Yellow Book straddled two artistic phenomena – both the Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau – and has been claimed by both. It perfectly reflected its own era and thus it has remained alive today as a metaphor of decadence and downfall.

References:

Beardsley, Aubrey, Henry Maas, John Duncan, and W. G. Good. The letters of Aubrey Beardsley. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970.

Chan, Winnie. The economy of the short story in British periodicals of the 1890s. Literary criticism and cultural theory. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Greenhalgh, Paul. Art nouveau: 1890-1914. London: V&A, 2000.

Harrison, Fraser. The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly: an anthology. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974.

Reade, Brian. Aubrey Beardsley. London: H.M.S.O., 1966.

Samuels Lasner, Mark, and Aubrey Beardsley. The Yellow book: a checklist and index. London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998.

Simon Wilson. "Beardsley, Aubrey." In Dictionary of Art, Vol. 3, ed. Jane Turner, 444-446. New York: Grove, 1996.

Taylor, John Russell. The Art Nouveau book in Britain. Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 1979.

Weintraub, Stanley. Aubrey Beardsley: imp of the perverse. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.

Weintraub, Stanley. The Yellow book: quintessence of the nineties. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.

NB: To access full-text online versions of The Yellow Book, please consult the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/

Compiled by Edward Lukasek
April 7, 2010