A yellow book that was not yellow at all | University Library
The Yellow Book was one of the leading journals of the fin de siècle: its contributors were distinguished authors and artists, including: W.B. Yeats; Max Beerbohm; Ella d’Arcy; H.G. Wells; Henry James; Walter Sickert; and John Singer Sargent. Different to other periodicals and journals, it was issued clothbound and it contained no advertising (aside from publisher’s lists). It was priced at 5 shillings (roughly the equivalent of £20 today). Although it has a reputation for being shocking, the content is often fairly conservative, and certainly not radical. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) famously (and dismissively) declared that the publication was “not yellow at all”.
Beardsley (1872-1898), a leading proponent of the Aesthetic Movement and critic of what he perceived to be Victorian prudishness, was the periodical’s first Art Editor. It is his drawings – including the cover design – which helped the journal to garner its shocking reputation as he was interested in depicting the macabre, the extraordinary, and the sexually-titillating.
Beardsley had illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) and when Wilde was arrested in 1895, the two men became unfortunately linked in the public consciousness. Wilde was carrying a copy of Aphrodite by Pierre Louys when he was arrested for indecency with men: a yellow book. The media mistakenly reported that it was The Yellow Book and so it came to be associated not only with decadence but also with homosexuality. The periodical’s offices were attacked, Beardsley was sacked and all traces of his involvement were removed after volume 5.
Reference: 19th C. Coll. 820.5 YEL, The Yellow Book: an illustrated quarterly (1894), 19th Century Collection, Newcastle University Special Collections, GB 186.
