What Yellow Book Did Oscar Wilde Carry?

When Oscar Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in 1895, he was reported to be carrying  a copy of The Yellow Book . This notorious periodical, identified with Decadence, was published by John Lane and art-directed by Aubrey Beardsley, whose association with Wilde in the public mind led to his reluctant firing by Lane.

For decades, however, both Wilde and Beardsley biographers have asserted that the book was not a copy of The Yellow Book. Simon Wilson, art historian and former Tate curator, addressed this in a definitive article for The Wildean 58. Nonetheless, the question has been viewed as unsettled by many, and was the subject of a recent extended correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement.

On 18 January 2023, the TLS published this letter from Wilson, which sets the record straight. We post the letter below to clarify what yellow book Oscar Wilde was carrying on his arrest. To read Simon Wilson’s full article, you can order The Wildean 58 for £10 by contacting Robert Whelan.

As Oscar Wilde tells us, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. I have thus refrained from intervening in the correspondence which has been taking my name in vain for some weeks. But enough is enough. My original article in The Wildean (58, January 2021) systematically established from entirely convincing contemporary evidence that when Wilde emerged under arrest from the Cadogan Hotel he was carrying under his arm a copy of the Yellow Book. It also established, in comprehensive detail, that the whole idea that he was carrying some other yellow covered book was much later planted into the historical record by the publisher of The Yellow Book, John Lane, in an attempt once and for all to dissociate Wilde from his firm and in particular from The Yellow Book in which, and in his art editor Aubrey Beardsley, Lane had a very substantial investment. Wilde’s two most important early biographers, Frank Harris (in 1911) and Robert Sherard (in 1916), both close to him, mention that he had the Yellow Book with him, as does Wilde’s sometime lover the poet Richard Le Gallienne in his memoir The Romantic 90s (1929).

In my article, I further demonstrated, at some length, how Lane’s lie succeeded to an extent he could hardly have dreamt of, and which he did not live to see. The story first appears in a hagiographical biography of Lane by his protégé Lewis May, published in 1936, eleven years after Lane’s death, and paid for by a specific bequest to May in Lane’s will. This was picked up by Wilde’s postwar biographer Montgomery Hyde, whose 1948 volume on Wilde in the Penguin Famous Trials series found a wide audience. Every subsequent biographer of Wilde and Beardsley simply repeated Hyde or each other. Lane’s ultimate error was to gild the lily by adding the apparently killer circumstantial fact that the book in question was Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite. The fact that it could not have been, as it appeared the year after Wilde’s arrest, was first pointed out in 1998 in the excellent book by the Beardsley scholar Stephen Calloway that accompanied the V&A Beardsley exhibition of that year. Calloway nevertheless concluded that what it was “may never now be discoverable”. And so John Lane’s barefaced, self-interested lie continued to hold sway until my exposure of it. Distressingly, and pace the gallant Iain Ross among your correspondents, it apparently continues in some quarters to do so.

Simon Casimir Wilson
London