Description
Book SynopsisThis work chronicles the experience of Leonard Smithers (1861-1907), a key figure in the literary culture of late Victorian England. Known primarily for publishing books of upscale pornography, he became the publisher of choice for the Decadents, including Oscar Wilde and Audrey Beardsley.
Trade Review“Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, and Dowson offers a much needed reexamination of Smithers’s meteoric career as one of the period’s leading and most misunderstood publishers. It is a handsome book, with numerous illustrations and useful appendices on topics such as Smithers and the erotic book trade and Smithers and the Chiswick Press. What emerges is a very different, and unabashedly positive, view of Smithers. To this end, and with impeccable scholarship, Nelson touches on all aspects of his enterprise: finances, gauging of a perspective audience, advertisement, production, response to reviewers, and, most importantly, his relationships with some of the most prominent authors of the day.”
—Ellen Brinks Colorado Review
“We see how the authors’ circumstances interact with the creative process; how a skillful, if uxorious, publisher supports, prompts, and cajoles his artists in often distressing circumstances; and how type, paper, binding materials, illustration, and title-page design combine in masterpieces of the publisher’s art. . . . Publisher to the Decadents will satisfy the most rigorous scholar. But it will also engage the general reader with an interest in Wilde, Beardsley, or Dowson, the decadent 1890s, or publishing history.”
—Phillip K. Cohen Albion
“What Publisher to the Decadents provides, nonetheless, is a thoughtful, rigorous, materially grounded, and eye-opening examination of the book world in the latter half of the literary Nineties.”
—Margaret D. Stetz Nineteenth-Century Literature
