We’re told to never judge a book by its cover but in the 1890s, you certainly could. And if that cover was yellow, you were in for a pretty racy read. Designed to appeal to a wide audience, ‘Yellowbacks’ told tales of romance, crime and action, providing page-turning entertainment for a few pennies a time.
Yellowbacks gained popularity on the back of railway mania in the mid-1800’s. Spotting an opportunity for commuters to pick up a book before they boarded the train, William Henry Smith II bought the sole rights to sell books on the London & North Western Railway lines in 1848. On the 1st November that year he opened the first bookstall at Euston station, and called it WH Smith.
The colour yellow already had strong associations not only with decadence but with decay. At the end of the 19th century, yellow signalled the moral corruption that was having a detrimental effect on the fabric of wholesome, conventional society. In France, books with scurrilous content were wrapped in yellow paper covers to alert, or to entice, the reader to their content. In Italy, even today, a ‘giallo’ (Italian for yellow), is a form of thriller, often violent or supernatural.
From its first edition in 1894, the publishers of The Yellow Book aimed to produce a periodical showcasing otherwise unpublished works which championed the transition from rigid Victorian attitudes to the new age of literary and artistic liberalism, known as the Aesthetic Movement. The Yellow Book helped to pioneer the genre of the short story and championed the work of emerging writers, both male and female.
Each edition featured a striking and unique frontispiece produced by different artists including the original chief illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley.
The publication was as dazzling as its jacket colour but short lived, particularly as a result of its association with the trial, for insulting public decency, of Oscar Wilde. On his arrest in 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel, Wilde was reported to be carrying a ‘yellow book’, forever associating it with scandal and immorality.
Four years earlier, in 1891, Wilde published ‘the’ novel of the Aesthetic Movement, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In it, Dorian is given a ‘book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. As Gray descends into ever greater depravity, he lays the blame squarely on this yellow book:
“It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing before him.”
Yellow became the defining colour of the last decade of the 19th century. So much so that the 1890s were known as ‘The Yellow Nineties’. Yellow was considered fresh and modern. It was a colour extensively used in advertising posters, interior decoration and fashion. Although not a new colour, many of the new synthetic pigments in dyes and paints came in dazzling hues and vibrant shades, such as Chrome and Cadmium Yellow. Chrome yellow became the most successful pigment of the age, used to paint houses, carriages, even as a colouring agent for eggs in cakes. American school buses today are still painted in a distinctive chrome yellow livery.
Chrome yellow was the favourite colour of J M W Turner and he used it profusely from its first manufacture in Britain in 1810 until his death in 1851. Turner had read the colour theories of Goethe who identified yellow as the colour closest to white and therefore, light itself.
Turner’s great 1828 painting, Regulus, is loosely based on the Roman general, Regulus’ capture by the Carthaginians, who tortured and blinded him by cutting away his eyelids, forcing him to look directly into the North African sun. But the real subject of the painting is light, embodied by the terrible power of the sun.
Painted in Rome, it radiates with dazzling yellows and titanium white. When the painting was exhibited in London, viewers were advised to shield their eyes. The Spectator warned its readers “to look at it from as great a distance as the gallery will allow”.
Vincent Van Gogh, like Turner, recognised the link between yellow and the sun. Writing to his sister in 1888, he declared,
“The sun, a light that for lack of a better word I can only call yellow, bright sulphur yellow, pale lemon gold. How beautiful yellow is!”
So addicted was Vincent to the colour that apocryphal stories about his habit of eating yellow paint from the tube began to circulate in his lifetime.
The exciting and striking posters designed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for the Montmartre music halls of the 1890s are full of bright, vivid yellows conveying the frenetic spirit and electric lights of Belle Époque Parisian nightlife. This poster for the tour to London by the dance troupe of Mlle. Eglantine was commissioned by Lautrec’s friend, the celebrated dancer, Jane Avril.
Avril openly acknowledged her debt to Toulouse-Lautrec for making her famous and Lautrec often depicted Avril off stage, in more private, introspective moments.
Toulouse Lautrec is one of many artists to feature in my new talk, 'The Art of Parisian Nightlife, 1874 - 1905’.
The City of Lights was an exciting place to be in the last quarter of the 19th century and a major part of that allure was provided by the exhilarating pace and variety of its nightlife. We will peer through opera glasses at who’s wearing what and with whom at the theatre with Renoir and Cassatt. Mingle with the crowd in the cafés with Manet, Degas and Van Gogh. Thrill at the high-kicking antics of the music halls of Montmartre with Toulouse-Lautrec and gaze at the sad circuses with Seurat and Picasso.
I do hope you can make it to one of the talks this Spring.
**Thursday, 18th April, 10.30am
Penton Mewsey Village Hall
£10 to include refreshments
**Thursday 2nd May, 7.30pm
Abbotts Ann Village Hall
£10 to include a glass of wine