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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.
The second son of the wood-engraver and illustrator Thomas Robinson, Charles was born in Islington in 1870. Unlike his artist brothers Tom and William, he was never able to study art full time. He attended the Highbury School of Art for a short time before being apprenticed to the lithographic printers Waterlow and Sons. On completing his apprenticeship, he enrolled at the Royal Academy schools, but almost immediately abandoned his studies there due to lack of finances, continuing at evening classes at the West London School of Art and at Heatherley's.
An instinctive draughtsman and colourist, Robinson did not find this lack of
formal training an impediment to his career as an illustrator. His first
published drawings were for three children's primers published by MacMillan, and
their favourable review in
Over the next ten years he was inundated with commissions for book and magazine work, initially in black and white, but increasingly in colour as well; for some of the coloured work he was able to employ his skills as a lithographer. Inevitably, some of his work from this period shows signs of haste, and on occasions he even adapted discarded drawings by his brothers to meet a pressing commission. But at his best, Robinson showed a sureness and facility of line, and an unfailing appreciation of the decorative possibilities of illustration rarely equalled by his contemporaries.
The royalties from his edition of
The onset of the First World War brought considerable hardship to Robinson and
his family. The years leading up to the war had seen him produce some of his
finest work in colour, including
After the war, work from magazines such as
At family gatherings it was always Charles who took the lead in any entertainments, and he was, with his brothers, a founder member of an informal social club, the Frothfinders Federation, taking a leading role in its activities. Like his brother Will, he was a member of the London Sketch Club and of The Savage Club, serving as President of the former in 1926 and 1927. It therefore came as a great shock to his family and friends that one who was so full of life should be suddenly taken ill and die in the summer of 1937 at the age of 67. In his spare time he had loved to build model ships, and left a model of a galleon unfinished at his death.
© 2011, Geoffrey Beare
Geoffrey Beare is a freelance writer and researcher in the history of book
illustration. He is chairman of the Imaginative Book Illustration Society and a
trustee of the William Heath Robinson Trust. He is author of