5. Yellowbacks

Chosen by:
Dr Christopher Worth,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts

Monash Rare Books holds a remarkable collection of 'Yellowbacks' initiated by a generous donation from Mr John Holroyd. These distinctive cheap editions with their vivid, often lurid, cover illustrations evolved in tandem with railway bookstalls from the mid-19th century and became collectable after the 1930s. Well-preserved examples are rare because they were consumable, discardable popular reading. They offer lively insights into literary, social and cultural history. The examples displayed are highly selective — many genres of fiction and non-fiction are represented in the Monash collection.

Dead men's shoes : a novel / by the author of "Lady Audley's Secret", "Aurora Floyd," etc. etc. etc. Stereotyped ed. (London : John and Robert Maxwell, [1878?])

What could be more attractively melodramatic or better fare for railway reading than the narrative implied by this picture? Deception, moustachioed villainy, murder, detection, all the elements of the sensation novel are to the fore here. The prodigiously productive Mary Braddon created a scandal with Lady Audley's Secret, depicting bigamy, murder and revenge in high society, but this cover perhaps promises more than the novel itself delivers. The Monash collection contains numerous Yellowbacks of Braddon's later works which provided material for a recent MA thesis.

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion / Jane Austen. (London : Chapman and Hall, 1872)

This crudely dynamic cover shows how yellowbacks dramatized literary classics, appealing to the tastes of the railway public much as do stills from movies on the covers of today's paperbacks. And as do films also, the illustration with its vivid 'speaking gestures' updates the fashions of Austen's time: the man's coat would be clearly old-fashioned to contemporary purchasers but the woman's dress is more 1870 than 1800. Looking at such adaptations of familiar works is a lively area of contemporary research in the humanities.

Geoffry Hamlyn / by Henry Kingsley. New ed. (London : Chapman and Hall, [1872])

Here is Australia for the metropolis, an Australia in which young men in democratic everyday clothes, not hunting pinks, can ride dashing horses to hunt kangaroos (drawn with somewhat less confidence than the horses). Parrots flash around them in vegetation which, while not particularly Australian, would certainly be unusual to London readers. This version of Kingsley's novel represents the complex interactions between colonial idealism and metropolitan pretensions that remain a focus for writers and academics in a post-colonial age.

Phineas Finn : the Irish member / by Anthony Trollope. New ed. (London ; New York : Ward, Lock, [1882?])

Serious railway reading, suggests this wonderfully composed image of intense negotiation in the rarefied world of English politics. If the dress looms large it is in part because the novel emphasises that without appropriate female help the ambitious young Irish man will get nowhere. Yellowbacks not only provided images of contemporary fashion and politics (no doubt pored over when they arrived in the colonies), but also (then and now) fascinating discussion points on the constrained intimacies of men and women.

The Scudamores : a novel / by F.C. Philips and C.J. Wills. (Melbourne : George Robertson, 1890)

Here is London for the colonies, a London in which the wealthy and fashionable attempt to find true love in a world of deception, jealousy and misunderstanding. This 'smart set' novel did what soap operas like The Young and the Restless continue to do, it presented heightened everyday interactions within an imaginary world of money and influence. The fin de siècle cover drawing, flattened yet dramatic, could represent a scene from Oscar Wilde, suggesting how canonical works like Lady Windermere's Fan are embedded in a complex cultural matrix.

The ordeal of Richard Feverel : a history of a father and son / by George Meredith. Australian edition. (Melbourne : George Robertson, 1888)

This and the The Scudamores are examples of books written and printed in Britain but published in Melbourne as part of the increasingly self-confident Australian book-selling industry. The elegant cover image is refined and oh so English in depicting the relation of hero and heroine — but the dynamic structure of the image is still as attractively sensational as that of Dead Men's Shoes. The riverside scene has a degree of realism which matches that of the novel, for even popular merchandising reflects changing audience expectations of textual technique