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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 artist, author, editor, and designer Pamela Colman Smith was a friend of and
collaborator with many key participants in the British aesthetic and decadent
movements. She illustrated over two dozen books, periodical issues, and
pamphlets, while her paintings were exhibited in Britain, Europe, and the United
States. Nevertheless, she died in debt and without a notable reputation for her
work. A jack-of-all-trades, she has, generally speaking, not been recognised as
a master of any. The exception has been her illustrations for the Rider-Waite
tarot deck, now the most popular deck in the world. As Smith’s work on the deck
is increasingly appreciated, it has also become known as the Smith-Waite,
Waite-Smith, and Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The actual breadth and diversity of her
talents, however, are perhaps most succinctly captured in her editorial vision,
writing, and illustrations for the periodical
Corinne Pamela Colman Smith was born in London, England, in 1878 to expatriate
Americans John Edward Smith and Corinne Colman. Part of an extended family of
artists, authors, and actors, she was exposed by her parents to the visual and
performing arts. The family also introduced her to the mystical teachings of
Emanuel Swedenborg, and likely to other elements of mysticism and the occult
(Kaplan 5). In 1889, when Smith was 10, her father’s job took the family on
occasion to Kingston, Jamaica. There, Smith delighted in her exposure to the
folklore of the West Indies, resulting in some of her most popular works.
Notable among these are the collections
In 1893, at age 16, Smith was accepted to the Pratt Institute of Art and Design
in New York, where she came under the guidance of instructor Arthur Wesley Dow
(1857-1922). He had developed both his aesthetic views and artistic skills in
France during the peak of the Symbolist movement, gradually combining his early
work with studies in Aztec, ancient Egyptian, and especially Japanese aesthetics
and practices. This mix of interests resulted in his highly influential
At key periods in Smith’s career her work was more recognised in the United
States than Britain. An article entitled “Notes” in
In 1897, a year after her mother died, Smith left Pratt without attaining a
degree. She also had her first art show in 1897, at William Macbeth’s New York
gallery. In 1899, she moved back to London. Even though her father died soon
after her return, the year proved to be one of her most productive, with Smith
authoring five books, including
During the later 1890s, Smith often stayed with the actress Ellen Terry
(1847-1928), who is said to have been the person who gave Smith the nickname
Pixie. The artist was close to Terry’s family, especially her daughter, Edith
Craig (1869-1947). Smith was likely a lesbian. There is no record of her having
romantic or sexual relations with men, but she had a number of intimate
relations with women. In addition to Craig, she was also close to Craig’s
partner Christabel Marshall (1871-1960), who published in
Smith also continued her involvement, begun in the early 1890s, in the Lyceum Theatre community of Terry and Craig. It included Henry Irving and Bram Stoker. Smith worked for the company as an illustrator as well as a costume and stage designer, often travelling with the troupe for their performances outside London. By the end of the decade, she also entered the Irish theatre scene and occult community of Florence Farr (1860-1917), Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), and John (aka Jack) (1871-1957) and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The latter commissioned her first mystical illustrations and introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which reinforced the spiritualist aesthetics she had already been developing.
Smith joined the Order in 1901, and remained involved for about four years. She became friends with a number of influential members in the Order, even if she was not particularly earnest about training in secret knowledge (Gilbert 197). In fact, Smith never defined herself predominantly as an occultist, one who is educated and trained in the secrets of esoteric knowledge and spiritual practices. Rather, she presented herself as a mystic, one who is innately attuned to otherworldly divine forces. In 1903, Smith left the Yeats-led Isis-Urania Lodge, which emphasized training in natural magic, and joined Arthur Edward Waite’s more mystical Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn. The latter group felt mystical experiences occurred when one opened oneself up to pre-existing otherworldly forces, allowing an esoteric symbology to mediate on one’s behalf. In keeping with such a belief system, Smith described her mystical writing and visual art as largely the product of influences beyond herself (Anon, “Pictures,” 649).
In 1901, Smith began inviting artists, authors, and other creative types to weekly open houses at her London flat. These gatherings were characterized by lively, vibrant discussions and her frequent costumed performance as a story-teller of Jamaican tales. Visitors included J.M. Barrie (1860-1937), Lady Augusta Gregory, W.T. Horton (1864-1919), Arthur Ransome(1884-1967), Jack and W.B. Yeats, and children’s novelist (and poet laureate from 1930 to 1967) John Masefield (1878-1967).
Smith’s first venture into editing was
The positive response to Smith in the United States, where she was seen as an
American artist, is apparent from Alfred Stieglitz choosing her work for his New
York Little Galleries of the Photo Secession’s first exhibition of art that was
not avant-garde photography. Gustav Stickley, writing as the editor of
The show proved to be Stieglitz’s greatest gallery success to date and, not surprisingly, he followed it with two more Smith shows during the next two years. Even this was not enough, however, to secure her a steady income. In 1909, Waite commissioned Smith to illustrate an entire tarot deck based on his instructions, and it was published by William Rider and Son that year. In a letter to Stieglitz asking for any possible sales money, Smith notes that she was not paid nearly what Waite’s commission demanded of her time and effort. Another of her ventures that year was no more lucrative, but it reflects Smith’s frustration, articulated in some of her letters, with the fact that female artists were under-appreciated. When in 1909 Clemence and Laurence Housman and Alfred Pearse founded the Suffrage Atelier of female artists to produce political posters, postcards, and other works promoting women’s right to the vote, Smith and her friend Alma Tadema joined up, even though other commitments of their time would have paid more.
It would seem that Smith had resigned herself to the likelihood that her many connections and the consistently positive reviews of her art on both sides of the Atlantic would not result in a financially comfortable existence. In 1911, she moved to New York, but returned to England roughly three years later. During this time, she also converted to Roman Catholicism. She was involved in the war effort as an illustrator, while also contributing some illustrations to magazines (O’Connor 87). In the early 1920s, an inheritance allowed Smith to purchase a home on the Lizard at the remote western tip of Cornwall. Smith eventually shared her Cornwall home with Nora Lake, of whom little is known. When Smith died in 1951, she left Lake her estate (which amounted to nothing after debts were addressed).
© 2018 Dennis Denisoff
Dennis Denisoff is Ida Barnard McFarlin Chair of English at the University of
Tulsa and co-editor of