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Henry Harland
Brooklyn, 1861 - 1905, San Remo
Harland's first employment was as tutor to two boys in Manhattan, after which he travelled abroad. In Rome he became, at least emotionally, a Roman Catholic. Returning home he became a clerk, writing in his spare time: his novel Grandison Mather (1889) exploits that experience. His attraction to Jewish life in New York, which he saw as exotic and picturesque, led to his earliest efforts in fiction. Despite unpromising prospects he married on 5 May 1884 the musically talented Aline Herminie Merriam (1860–1939). They had no children. Her interests were reflected in Harland's first novel, As it was Written: a Jewish Musician's Story (1885), published under a seemingly Jewish pseudonym, Sidney Luska. Its earnings enabled the couple to divide their time between New York and Paris, during which period Harland wrote two further ‘Jewish’ novels, Mrs. Peixada (1886), and The Yoke of the Thorah (1887). Exposure of his identity ended his career as Sidney Luska.
Late in 1889 the Harlands moved to London, where Harland began to write, one acquaintance quipped, as ‘a lemonade Henry James’. Fame followed a chance meeting with Aubrey Beardsley in the offices of a physician treating both men for tubercular symptoms. In collaboration they devised a hard-cover quarterly, the Yellow Book, which would display what they saw as the quintessence of contemporary art and literature, with the gifted Beardsley creating as well as acquiring the art, and Harland procuring and editing the letterpress portion. John Lane of the Bodley Head became the publisher, and the first number appeared to great acclaim in April 1894. From the beginning Harland demonstrated his shrewdness as editor in the writers he solicited as contributors, who ranged from the eminent and safe to the upcoming and experimental. Although the quarterly opened with a novella by Henry James and art by J. S. Sargent, critics sniffed scandal in the yellow covers, used in France for racy novels, and in the artifice of Max Beerbohm and Beardsley himself. Other writers who appeared during its abbreviated life were such representatives of respectability as Edmund Gosse, William Watson, Richard Garnett, and George Saintsbury, and, as their modish antithesis, George Moore, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), John Davidson, and Arthur Symons.
The Yellow Book might have lived down abuse as precious and depraved, had Oscar Wilde not been described on his arrest a year later as carrying ‘a yellow book’. The Bodley Head offices were stoned, and Beardsley—who had refused Wilde a place in the publication—was sacked by Lane to save the journal.
When the Yellow Book expired in 1897, Harland, now jobless, resumed writing novels, often suffused with Romanism. He and Aline were received into the Roman Catholic church in 1898, inspiring his novel The Cardinal's Snuff-Box (1900). Its popular success financed stays in France and Italy as Harland's tuberculosis worsened. Two novels with a Roman Catholic ambience followed, The Lady Paramount (1902) and My Friend Prospero (1903), with fashionable ladies and transparent questions of identity.
Slight, moustached, and bearded in mid-life, as he was drawn by Beardsley, Harland at the end was wan, spectacled, and clean-shaven. His last novel, The Royal End (1909), unfinished at his death in San Remo, Italy, on 20 December 1905, was completed by his widow. Aline added a further fiction by referring to her late husband as Sir Henry, and to herself as Aline, Lady Harland. After initial burial in San Remo cemetery the day he died, Harland was reburied on 1 March 1906 at Yantic cemetery, Norwich, Connecticut.
Harland's enduring claim to significance lies in his packaging of a publication that, although no manifesto of a movement, became the model for future reflections of aesthetic moments in time. The Yellow Book, as exemplar of later periodicals with similar ambitions, has, as a metaphor, remained alive.
Stanley Weintraub
Sources K. Beckson, Henry Harland: his life and work (1978) · K. L. Mix, A study in yellow: the Yellow Book and its contributors (1960) · S. Weintraub, The London Yankees (1979) · J. G. Nelson, A view from the Bodley Head (1971) · The letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. H. Maas, J. L. Duncan, and W. G. Good (1970)
Archives Boston PL, letters · Col. U. · NYPL, Berg collection · Queen Mary College, London, Westfield College archives :: Connecticut College, Aline Harland MSS · Pennsylvania State University, Pattee Library, K. L. Mix MSS · Ransom HRC, corresp. with John Lane
Likenesses photograph, 1900, NPG · F. Hollyer, photograph, c.1902, repro. in The Critic, 44 (1904), 108 · A. Beardsley, sketch, repro. in The early work of Aubrey Beardsley (1899) · M. Beerbohm, caricature, repro. in M. Beerbohm, Caricatures of twenty-five gentlemen (1896) · photograph, repro. in The Lamp, new ser., 26 (April 1903), 227
Wealth at death seemingly little; widow sent begging letters to publishers
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Stanley Weintraub, ‘Harland, Henry (1861–1905)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biograp
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