Publishers' bindings from the turn of the twentieth century have experienced a resurgence of popularity in recent years. Although books bound in publisher's cloth have been in production since at least the 1820s, it is the bindings from the late nineteenth century—after publishers began turning book decoration over to established artists and designers—that continue to capture our attention today. In a previous blog post, I took a look at how the study of American publishers' bindings can provide a window into how women working in the male-dominated field of book publishing supported each other both personally and professionally. As a follow up to that discussion, today we will be considering the books that English artist Charles Ricketts and his partner Charles Shannon designed for Irish author and dramatist Oscar Wilde and the insight they can offer about a similar network of support between gay men in the publishing industry in the United Kingdom.

English artists and romantic partners Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon first befriended Oscar Wilde in 1889, two years before the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray  (1891) when he was still known as "a young English versifier and aesthete." They sent a complimentary copy of the premier issue of their little magazine The Dial: An Occasional Publication (1889-1897) to Wilde, who so enjoyed it that he visited the couple at their home in London. The three men developed a lifelong friendship; Ricketts and Shannon would be among the few who maintained their support for Wilde when he was imprisoned at Reading Gaol for his homosexuality—then punishable by law as a crime of "gross indecency"—from 1895-1897.

But let's get back to the bindings: the first book that Charles Ricketts designed for Oscar Wilde was The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Faustian story about a man who trades his soul for earthly pleasures. The book was issued in two different formats, and each had a variation of the same binding design. The trade issue (intended for a general audience) featured ten gilt-stamped decorations (bibliographer Stuart Mason describes them as "butterflies," while Wilde called them "tiny gold marigolds") on gray boards, but the large paper issue (of which only 220 copies were produced) has fifty-five.

At first glance, the design on the large paper copy may appear as just a more elaborate version of the trade issue's cover, but placing these designs within the context of the novel's publishing history seems to suggest otherwise. Dorian Gray was first published serially in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890, and it was quickly deemed scandalous. This prompted Wilde to pen a particularly memorable preface for the first book edition of 1891 in defense of his work: 

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated… They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty."

With this in mind, the large paper copy seems intended for those "who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things," which puts the trade issue in a different light; although it, too, is lovely, the clearly pared down version of the design seems to have been intended be more palatable to those who might seek to criticize.

Wilde enunciated a similar defense for his collection of fairy tales A House of Pomegranates (1891) after a review in The Speaker admonished Ricketts's binding design as "grotesque" and unappealing. Wilde was quick to assert his support for Ricketts in a letter he wrote to the magazine's editor shortly thereafter, noting that:

"It is the spectator, and the mind of the spectator, as I pointed out in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that art really mirrors. What I want to indicate is this: the artistic beauty of the cover of my book resides in the delicate tracing, arabesques, and massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory, the colour-effect culminating in certain high gilt notes, and being made still more pleasurable by the overlapping band of moss-green cloth that holds the book together."

Not only does this letter underscore the emphasis that Wilde placed on the physical appearance of his published works, but it also demonstrates that Ricketts—and, by extension, Shannon—were part of the same "cultivated" few that Wilde referred to in his preface for Dorian Gray.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Oscar Wilde went to great lengths to keep the 1892 edition of Poems —one of his and Charles Ricketts's most avant-garde collaborations—out of the hands of literary critics. This so-called "author's edition" of Poems (first published in 1881) was created from the sheets of leftover copies of the fifth edition of Poems, together with a new title page and a signed limitation page. The whole thing was dressed up in lavish binding that marked "a striking departure from high Victorian norms" by challenging their "assumption, widespread until the end of the 1880s, that bookbinding was merely a 'decorative' art." Publishers Elkin Mathews and John Lane even gave the binding its own title: "The Seven Trees."

Wilde preemptively defended the 1892 Poems, arguing that it was meant "not for reviewers but merely for lovers of poetry, a small and quite unimportant sect of perfect people... Its raiment, gold smeared on tired purple, might attract attention in the Strand, and that would annoy it, books being delicate and most sensitive things, and, if they are books worth reading, having a strong dislike for the public."

Wilde's shift from describing his intended audience as an "elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty" to "a small and quite unimportant sect of perfect people" is notable; instead of merely asserting the validity of his audience's opinion, Wilde seems to be creating safe space in which the beauty of both his verse and Ricketts's design can be appreciated without mainstream critique.

To confirm this, we need only look at the bindings that Charles Shannon created for Wilde's plays, including Lady Windemere's Fan (1893) and A Woman of No Importance (1894), which were intended for public consumption. Both of these bindings feature similarly placed gilt-stamped decorations (Wilde called them "gold petals" in an 1898 letter to Leonard Smithers), but compared to Ricketts's more elaborate designs, Shannon's bindings echo the (relative) conservativeness of the trade issue of Dorian Gray.

So, what can we learn from this understanding of the significance Wilde attached to the appearance of his works? Is this really so surprising from one of Victorian England's most notorious dandies?  For one, we can gain a deeper appreciation of how Wilde's defense of Charles Ricketts's designs was not just a rebuke of criticism of his own books, but the championing of a gay artist at a time when homosexuality was considered a crime. (Even if the three men never discussed their sexual preferences, it is unlikely that Wilde would not have recognized that Ricketts and Shannon were a romantic couple).

This understanding also sheds different light on the binding design that Ricketts and Shannon chose for the inaugural issue of their magazine The Pageant  (1896). Many of Wilde's friends and collaborators distanced themselves after the arrest, but Shannon and Ricketts remained steadfast, even knowing they could be found guilty of the same crime for which Wilde was imprisoned. This considered, it is hard to see the binding of The Pageant, which is reminiscent of A Woman of No Importance, as anything but a pictorial statement of support for their friend. Indeed, the dust jacket for the second volume (1897) appears to show the binding's dove device surrounded by bars, much like Wilde himself.  Knowing the affection and support Wilde, Shannon, and Ricketts had for one another, the physical appearance of the The Pageant seems nothing short of a defense of Wilde—and perhaps even homosexuality—as being a type of beauty that the masses simply could not appreciate.

The books shown here are part of the Oscar Wilde collection held by the  Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, but publishers' bindings can be found in collections across The New York Public Library. To continue reading about publisher's bindings at NYPL, please see Designing Women: The Art of Cloth Bindings by Meredith Mann and “Do you think Betty is a Chrysanthemum?” Sarah Wyman Whitman & Sarah Orne Jewett by Julie Carlsen.
 

Resources consulted for this blog post:

Capelleveen, Paul van. Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon. URL: http://charlesricketts.blogspot.com/. 

Frankel, Nicholas. The Decorated Books of Oscar Wilde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen.Yellow Nineties 2.0 . URL: https://1890s.ca/. 

Mason, Stuart. Bibliography of Oscar Wilde. London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., [1914].

Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.