About The Savoy

The Savoy

The Savoy was a British magazine of literature, art and criticism published in London in eight numbers between January and December 1896. It was edited by the poet and critic Arthur Symons, with Aubrey Beardsley as its art editor and principal illustrator, and it was published by Leonard Smithers. Named after the new Savoy Hotel in London, a name intended to suggest modernity and opulence, it was conceived as a successor to, and competitor of, The Yellow Book, from which Beardsley had been dismissed the previous year.

Only eight issues appeared: two quarterly numbers in January and April 1896, followed by six monthly numbers from July to December. Yet in that single year The Savoy published work by W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm and Ernest Dowson, among others, and the critic Holbrook Jackson later described it as the most satisfying achievement of fin de siècle journalism in England.

After The Yellow Book

The Savoy was born from the wreckage of Aubrey Beardsley's career at The Yellow Book. Beardsley had co-founded that quarterly in 1894 and served as its art editor, but his association with Oscar Wilde, whose Salome he had illustrated, led the publisher John Lane to dismiss him in 1895 after Wilde's arrest. The Savoy was the response of Beardsley and his friends: a magazine of their own, free of Lane's caution.

The founders were Arthur Symons, who edited the magazine; Beardsley, who designed its covers and title pages and supplied numerous illustrations; and Leonard Smithers, who published it. Smithers, a former solicitor turned bookseller and publisher, was a controversial friend of Wilde and one of the few London publishers prepared, after Wilde's trials in 1895, to continue handling decadent literature. His willingness to take risks that established houses would not made The Savoy possible.

Leonard Smithers and his list

Smithers's background explains both the magazine's freedom and its fragility. He had become friendly with the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and had published Burton's translation of the Book of One Thousand and One Nights, as well as translations of Catullus and the Satyricon. He published works by Beardsley, Beerbohm, Aleister Crowley, Dowson, Symons and Wilde, and was notorious in the trade for the sign in his Bond Street shop announcing that smut was cheap that day.

After the Wilde trials, that notoriety became a kind of service to literature: Smithers kept decadent writing in print when others would not, going on to publish Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898. The Savoy, appearing in the year between the trials and that poem, was the magazine expression of the same defiance. Smithers himself went bankrupt in 1900 and died in 1907, and the world that had sustained The Savoy disappeared with him.

Format and appearance

The first two numbers of The Savoy were issued as an illustrated quarterly in pink pictorial boards, with cover, title page and contents designs by Beardsley; the first number even contained a loosely inserted Christmas card designed by him. From the third number, in July 1896, the magazine became an illustrated monthly and appeared in pale blue-green wrappers. Beardsley was responsible for the cover and title page design of all eight issues, as well as numerous illustrations inside them.

Other artists who contributed to the magazine included Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Charles Conder, Joseph Pennell and William Thomas Horton, whose visionary work appeared alongside Beardsley's. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Abbott McNeill Whistler were also among the artists whose work was reproduced in its pages, connecting the magazine of 1896 to the earlier generations of the Aesthetic movement.

Contents of the magazine

The literary contents of The Savoy mixed poetry, fiction, criticism and translation. Its contributors included W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson and Paul Verlaine. The first number alone contained Havelock Ellis on Zola, a piece by Beerbohm, Arthur Symons's poem sequence on Dieppe in 1895, and the opening of Beardsley's own unfinished prose romance, which he wrote as well as illustrated.

Symons used the magazine as a platform for the ideas he would soon develop in his book on the Symbolist movement in literature, a study that would influence Yeats and T. S. Eliot. The Savoy was, in the phrase used of it by booksellers and scholars alike, a manifesto in revolt against Victorian materialism: it existed to publish art and literature that the commercial magazines considered too advanced, too French or too morally doubtful.

Beardsley's last magazine

For Beardsley, The Savoy was the last periodical he would shape. He designed every issue while his health, undermined by tuberculosis, was failing, and he also used its pages for his own writing. In the November 1896 number, Symons announced in an editorial note that with the next number the magazine would come to an end; the same issue contained Beardsley's drawing Ave Atque Vale, hail and farewell, printed opposite his own translation of Catullus's Carmen CI, the Latin poet's address to his dead brother, which ends with the same hail and farewell for all time.

The farewell proved prophetic for the artist as well as the magazine. Beardsley died in Menton, France, in 1898, less than two years after The Savoy closed, at the age of twenty-five. In his final illness, having converted to Roman Catholicism, he asked Smithers to destroy his obscene drawings; Smithers ignored the request and continued to sell reproductions of his work.

End of publication

The Savoy ended with its eighth number in December 1896, after two quarterly and six monthly issues. Symons's November announcement had prepared readers for the closure, and no attempt was made to continue the magazine into 1897. The causes were those that ended many little magazines: a small circulation, a publisher whose business rested on precarious ventures, and a movement whose moment, after the Wilde trials, was passing.

The complete run is small enough to be collected entire, and complete sets of the eight issues, in their original boards and wrappers, are prized by collectors and regularly appear in the sale rooms, often bound with the advertisements and the inserted Christmas card that formed part of the first number as issued.

Reputation and legacy

The Savoy's reputation has grown steadily since its brief life ended. Holbrook Jackson's judgement, that it was the most satisfying achievement of fin de siècle journalism in England, is quoted wherever the magazine is discussed. Where The Yellow Book had been a commercial publisher's version of the avant-garde, The Savoy is seen as the real thing: uncompromising, beautifully designed and entirely of its moment.

Together with The Yellow Book and The Dome, The Savoy completes the trilogy of British Aesthetic magazines of the 1890s. Its eight issues preserve early work by Conrad and Yeats, some of Beardsley's finest magazine designs, and the clearest statement in periodical form of the Decadent movement in its final phase. For a magazine that lasted one year, its presence in literary and art history is out of all proportion to its size.

Collecting The Savoy

Because only eight numbers were published, The Savoy is one of the few major 1890s magazines that a collector can realistically own entire, and complete sets are regularly offered in the sale rooms. The sets are valued for the features that made the magazine distinctive when new: the pink pictorial boards of the first two quarterly numbers, the pale wrappers of the six monthly numbers that followed, the advertisements bound at the back, and the loosely inserted Beardsley Christmas card that accompanied the first number as issued. Beardsley's cover and title page designs run through all eight issues, giving a complete set a visual unity that longer-lived magazines rarely achieve. The survival of the magazine in this collectable form has helped to keep it before the public: exhibitions of Beardsley's work and of 1890s illustration draw on The Savoy as a matter of course, and its eight issues are reprinted and studied as the purest periodical expression of the British Decadent movement.