Item 22: A Peep into the Past (ca. 1894)

Beerbohm was just as mischievous at the expense of Oscar Wilde as Aubrey Beardsley, who inserted caricatures of Wilde into the illustrations for Wilde’s play Salome (1894). But Beerbohm’s targets in A Peep into the Past were broader. They included Wilde, the Decadent world, and the “new journalism” that profiled and puffed famous people, along with the public’s short memory and hunger for novelty. The resulting essay, in which Beerbohm pretended to speak from the distant future about Wilde as an aged, forgotten man who “at one time ... was in his way quite a celebrity[,]” did not, however, appear in the April 1894 Yellow Book. Nor were Beerbohm’s savagely funny drawings of Wilde that decorated the manuscript published.