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AS OSCAR WILDE was escorted to the Old Bailey in 1895, one or two newspaper men noted that the disgraced author had under his arm a large volume bound in yellow. According to subsequent reports in the media, the yellow-backed tome that Wilde took with him to the first of his two trials was The Yellow Book, the hardbacked quarterly periodical edited by Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley.1 As it happened, the book clutched under Wilde's arm was a French novel; the yellow dust jacket generally denoted either risqué French fiction or popular novels sold at railway bookstalls. But as far as the newspapers were concerned, Wilde was accompanied to his trial by The Yellow Book, and such media reports cemented in the cultural imagination of the 1890s an association between The Yellow Book, aestheticism and Decadence and, after April and May 1895, homosexuality. The association was reinforced intertextually by the fact that the very title of The Yellow Book appears to allude to an episode in Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, when Dorian's incipient decline into decadence and degeneracy is anticipated in the moment when "His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him"-an edition of Huysmans's bible of French Decadence, À Rebours.2
The Yellow Book, like other avant-garde publishing projects of the 1890s, paid a high price for its apparent connection with Wilde: "It killed The Yellow Book and it nearly killed me," John Lane would claim in later years, and he was barely exaggerating.3 As well as The Yellow Book, Lane also published the high-profile Keynote series of novels under the Bodley Head imprint.4 In the moral panic that ensued after the sentencing of Wilde to two years hard labour for "acts of gross indecency," Lane's premises in Vigo Street were attacked by a stone-throwing mob. The hitherto popular New Woman fiction-a good deal of which had been published in Lane's Keynote series-also came under pressure, with Punch triumphantly announcing in December 1895 "THE END OF THE NEW WOMAN-The crash has come at last."5 Aubrey Beardsley, as readers of this journal well know, was another who fell victim to the moral rearguard action and, in the wake of Wilde's imprisonment, he was sacked as art editor...