what is the yellow book in dorian gray
The Yellow Book Though Oscar Wilde never published anything within its pages, it was linked to him because Beardsley had illustrated his Salomé and because he was on friendly terms with many of the contributors. Moreover, in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to amuse him after the suicide of his first love. This "yellow book" is understood by critics to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a representative work of Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes like Beardsley. Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to alert the reader to their lascivious content. It is not clear, however, whether Dorian Gray is the direct source for the review's title. Wilde was purported to have been carrying a copy of the first "Yellow Book" when he was arrested, at the Cadogan Hotel, in 1895, though in fact it was a copy of Pierre Louÿs’s racy, yellow-bound novel Aphrodite.[3]