Never Let Edmund Gosse Arrange the Seating Plan for Dinner!

I found these two accounts of a dinner party, here, and just had to share because I don’t want to forget about them. The dinner party took place on 25 July 1888 at the Criterion, when the Society of Authors held a dinner for some American writers, including Henry James. Some of the British writers in attendance included Wilkie Collins, Walter Besant, Oscar Wilde, and Edmund Gosse.

With all of these important people present, Gosse was in charge of the seating arrangement.

In his writing, Wilde made some dinner parties seem like adventures. According to this account, by the secretary of the society, James Stanley Little, Wilde had a knack for doing that in real life too (though not all adventures are entirely pleasant)!

When I arrived at the Criterion another difficulty presented itself. I was immediately confronted by Oscar Wilde who, in his inimitable manner, upbraided me for having seated him at the table next to Lady Colin Campbell [who had recently referred to Wilde as ‘the great white slug’]. As I turned away with the assurance I would see if I could re-shuffle the name tickets, Lady Colin approached me with bitter reproaches on her lips, she being no less dissatisfied with her neighbour. Both being Irish, it may be imagined that their descriptions one of the other did not lack picturesque vividness. I had no previous knowledge, of course, that there was an old-standing war to the knife between these two. Well I had to keep smiling, welcoming guests, introducing, etc., though I was suffering the tortures of the damned, and how I got through that dinner without collapsing is a mystery to me to this day.

Like all good adventures, I’m sure Little looked forward to the dinner; he clearly regretted it, while it was happening; and thought fondly of it after the fact. The next day, he wrote to Besant:

We scored a brilliant success last night. The reports and leaders in this morning's papers are, I think, all that could be desired. The various American guests expressed to me their feeling of satisfaction and I believe the evening went off without a hitch ... I don't know how far the dinner was successful from a culinary standpoint, as I was only able to eat the devilled lobster which was certainly admirable.

However, Wilde would later recommend to Little:

I can only hope that if the Society gives another banquet the arrangement of the guests will not be left to a person like Gosse.

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The Yellow Book

After reading the first edition of The Yellow Book (April 1894), Oscar Wilde quickly dismissed it as "not yellow at all." The title of the journal meant to reflect the risque nature of French fin de siècle literature. Yellow covers warned readers of a books "pornographic" content. Bram Stoker's Dracula even had a yellow cover, when it first hit the shelves in 1897.

Wilde was right, in the sense that the writing was rather tame. With contributing authors, like: Edmund Gosse, Walter Crane, Frederick Leighton, and Henry James; the artwork was by Aubrey Beardsley and that, to me, really set The Yellow Book apart.

Beardsley's best-known work is in The Yellow Book and Salome, and both are characteristic mockeries of the Victorian artistic ideal, moving toward a style that I would associate with art deco. Even in the 1890s Beardsley associated with people, who would really flourish in the 1920s, when art deco first appeared; people, like Max Beerbohm.

Most of Beardsley's contemporaries, however, saw his style as highly unnatural and grotesque, making him subject to ridicule in other periodicals. It was The Yellow Book's link to French novels, not Beardsley's art, that would colour its controversial perception though. 

As Wilde was escorted to the Old Bailey in 1895, one or two newspapers reported that he carried a copy of The Yellow Book under his arm. Not particularly fond of The Yellow Book, Wilde was, in fact, carrying an actual French novel. Since April 1894, the journal had been associated with aestheticism and decadence; after May 1895, it would also be associated with homosexuality.

To distance the journal from the stigma, Beardsley was fired for his former associations with Wilde and the editors wrote:

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 of The Yellow Book; all traces of his definitive illustrative work for the quarterly were removed from the April 1895 edition before it was released for publication.

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