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Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
The novelist, playwright, and children’s book illustrator Mabel Dearmer was born Jessie Mabel Pritchard White on March 22, 1872. Her parents were Surgeon-Major William White and Selina Taylor (Pritchard) White of Caernarvon, Wales. She grew up isolated but spirited and ambitious, aspiring first towards a career in theatre and then towards one in the visual arts. She attended Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s art school in Bushey, North London in 1891, but left upon her marriage to the Rev. Percy Dearmer (1867-1936) the following year. During the next two decades, the Dearmers pursued a vibrant cultural and political life. A curate and then vicar in Lambeth, South London, Mabel’s husband was appointed minister of St-Mary-The-Virgin, Primrose Hill in 1901. They resided there until 1915, raising two sons, Geoffrey (1893-1996) and Christopher (1894-1915). The Dearmer marriage rested on shared ideals of socialism, pacifism, and feminism.
By all accounts, Mabel Dearmer was an inspired and energetic personality, and these
qualities surface in her illustrative art of the 1890s. In 1896 and 1897, she
contributed images to
In contrast to the ornamental style of many other late-Victorian illustrators, Dearmer’s images appear strikingly modern. Male contemporaries minimized her talent as a draftsperson, but viewers were captivated by her vibrant colour choices and often eerie landscapes. Further elements of her style include a deliberate asymmetry, allusions to Japanese art, bold colour blocking, and the use of heavy outline.
Dearmer’s greatest inspiration seems to have been Beardsley’s poster art. One critic
declared, with sardonic allusions to James McNeill Whistler
(1834-1903) and George Egerton (1859-1945), that the
“illustrations are rather wonderful and fearful, Mrs. Pearcy [sic] Dearmer having
evidently studied in the Aubrey Beardsley School, and being addicted to harmonies
— or discords — in the brightest yellow” (“Christmas”). Dearmer’s use
of the figures of Pierrot and Pan for drawings in
The couple sustained long-term friendships with Housman (1865-1959), Sharp
(1869-1955), Stephen Gwynn (1864-1950), and
Following her friend Housman’s account in
Further, the union of ethics and aesthetics undergirded the Dearmer marriage. As a Christian Socialist, Percy allied himself with Ritualist ministers who had created a specialized venue for ecclesiastical arts and crafts. He advised on the design of materials from vestments to altar frontals. He also strengthened his wife’s aesthetic alliances: she initially befriended Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947) through him. And as his interest in hymnology grew, Percy consulted with Evelyn Sharp’s brother, Cecil (1859-1924), the collector of folk ballads, on the road to his crowning work in indexing Anglican hymns with Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Mabel Dearmer’s own fusion of good works and good art appears most vividly through
her religious stories for children and scripting and producing of mystery plays and
children’s plays. Her contemporaries recalled her natural instinct for the theatre. A
trained elocutionist, she had offered public readings in 1894 of Henrik Ibsen’s
Dearmer’s negotiations between aestheticism and Christian altruism seem also to have
inspired two of her novels,
A lifelong pacifist, Dearmer was initially indifferent to the events that led up to
the First World War. However, after their two sons enlisted, her husband volunteered
his services as chaplain to the British Red Cross, and Dearmer decided to accompany
him. She contracted typhoid and pneumonia and died while serving as a nursing orderly
in Serbia in 1915. Her war experiences are recorded in her posthumously published
Despite her significant contributions to 1890s aestheticism, Mabel Dearmer was, until
relatively recently, a forgotten figure to all but a few book collectors and
specialists in children’s book illustration. She has, however, been the subject of a
public lecture (Shefrin) and several blog entries by Cambridge University library
cataloguers (Tower Project). Her one extant poster appeared in an exhibition in 2003
and has been reproduced in its catalogue (Stetz). The Baldwin Library of Historical
Children's Literature at the University of Florida has digitized
© 2012, 2021, Diana Maltz, Southern Oregon University
Diana Maltz is a Professor of English at Southern Oregon University. Her book,