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From The Graphic: “The Yellow Book”

The Yellow Book is beginning to be interesting as a survival. It
is not so long since every one used ot look forward to its quarterly
publication with a sort of smiling expectancy, which was variously
attributable either to a desire to see what new antics its con-
tributors had been playing or to a belief that behind all
the Yellow Book‘s eccentricities, and even behind its enormities,
there lurked a good deal of cleverness and a good deal of effort to
be original. But the twelvth volume fills us with an apprehension,
which grows with every page, that we have to look forward neither
to playful and disturbing eccentricities nor to anything par-
ticularly good or particularly clever. The publication has purged
itself for the doubtful drawings of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley,
but it has hardly a drawing in it worth looking at. It has rid itself
of the erotic muse of Mr. Arthur Symons—and we do not pretend
ti regret that loss—but it has replaced him by some singularly dull
verses by Mr. William Watson. It no longer contains con-
tributions by young gentlemen who lost themselves in admiration
of rogue and violet powder; but we do not think that the
note-book jottings by Miss Menie Muriel Dowie, which
replace them, are so nearly productive of the gaiety of nations.
In fine, the Yellow Book is a good deal more middle-class than it
ever was before in every sense of that expression. It has kept some
of its earlier contributors—Mr. Henry Harland, “Mr.” E. Nesbit,
Mr. Le Gallienne, Miss Ella D’Arcy, and Miss Evelyn Sharpe; but
since none of them venture far away from the lines which they first
laid down for themselves, the most noticeable effect which they have
upon the contents of the volume is that of making it appear almost
exactly like several of the volumes which have immediately preceded
it. It all the contributors to a certain periodic magazine were very
clever and very original, perhaps we could be reconciled to meeting
them time and time again. But originality is not the distinguishing
characterstic of the writers we have named; at the most they are
clever short-story or agreeable essay writes, and the natural conse-
quence is that when their contributions have been presented to us
for some volumes in succession we begin to find the Yellow Book as
as whole rather “stodgy.”

MLA citation:

“The “Yellow Book”.” Review of The Yellow Book, vol. 12, January 1897, Graphic, 30 January 1897, p. 134. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019. https://1890s.ca/yb12-review-graphic-30-jan-1897/