The Yellow Book. An Illustrated Quarterly. Vol. V

April 1895

Special Collections PR 1145 Y44

London: John Lane

The short-lived Yellow Book (1894-1897) was an important outlet for those writers and artists who identified with the Decadent Movement, ‘an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality’. The first four volumes were illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, whose mesmerizingly grotesque drawings became one of the journal’s hallmarks. Appearing quarterly, the Yellow Book was lengthy, with each volume weighing in at around 300 pages. The cost was high at five shillings. The content was designed to be beautiful, daring, and shocking to bourgeois sensibilities. Contributors included Henry James, George Gissing, and H.G. Wells. Beardsley was dismissed following Oscar Wilde’s prosecution for ‘indecency’ in 1895. It is believed that the journal failed in April 1897 because of anxieties surrounding the Wilde trials.