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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.
Edmund Gosse is now known predominantly for
This textual moment of self-analysis highlights the tension between Gosse’s
upbringing and his inclinations. Educated at St. Marychurch in Devon, and later at
Thorn Park, a boarding school in nearby Teignmouth, Gosse was baptised at 10 years of
age and became a member of the Brethren. Nevertheless, he was clearly drawn to a very
different world, a world of art, poetry, and aestheticism. The conflict between
worthy industry and the Arts is figured in his life and his literary production. In
1866 he became a librarian at the British Museum; in 1875 he began work as a
translator at the Board of Trade; from 1884 to1889 he succeeded Leslie Stephen as
Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge; and from 1904 to1914, he was the
librarian at the House of Lords library. Alongside these official appointments he
sustained a parallel career as a poet, embracing a literary form that evidently
functioned as an outlet for his suppressed paganism. Comparing Gosse’s poetry with
that of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), A. C. Benson
(1862-1925) noted that there could be no greater contrast, “for Miss Rossetti is at
heart a
Gosse’s move to London in 1866 marked a transition between his life in Devon among
the Plymouth Brethren and a new social world informed and enriched by the artistic
circles in which he began to move. While he first lodged in Tottenham with two
members of the faith, he soon became interested in the wider horizons London life
could offer. In 1870, he forged a friendship with the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter
William Bell Scott (1811-1890), and began to frequent gatherings that included
writers, artists, and sculptors such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Ford
Madox Brown (1821-1893), William Morris (1834-1896), and Algernon
Swinburne (1837-1909). Gosse would become Swinburne’s first biographer, and
with Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937), edit
In 1870, Gosse took a trip to Scotland, where he met Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894), who was to become a lifelong friend. The following year he visited
Norway, where he discovered the work of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), with whom he later
corresponded. Gosse wrote an influential essay on Ibsen for the
In the 1890s Gosse contributed to
Gosse was knighted in 1925 and died three years later, on 16 May 1928 at the age of
79. In the preceding years, his health had declined considerably. His sight had been
failing and a fall had affected his mobility, but his mental faculties had retained
an unexpected agility. To the end of his life he continued to write articles and
correspond with friends, including Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), G. K. Chesterton
(1874-1936), and Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). In his introduction to
© 2012, Patricia Pulham
Patricia Pulham is Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of Portsmouth.
She is author of