Leonard Charles Smithers
The memorial is located just north of the chapel, but the location of the unmarked gravesite where Smithers was actually buried is unknown. The dedication reads "Publisher to the Decadents", with a vignette of a sword-wielding harlequin on a winged horse, from a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley. 5A B 1X is the memorial's location on the cemetery section layout.
Publisher of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and other Decadents.
1861-1907
He published Richard Burton’s Book of One Thousand and One Nights in 1885, also works by Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Aleister Crowley, Oscar Wilde and others. He also published a series of pornographic books and was notorious for a slogan in his Bond Street Bookshop “Smut is cheap today”.
When Aubrey Beardsley converted to Roman Catholicism he asked Smithers to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings...by all that is holy all obscene drawings." Smithers ignored Beardsley's wishes and continued to sell reproductions as well as forgeries of Beardsley's work.
After the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, Smithers was one of the few publishers prepared to handle "decadent" literature, such as Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898, and The Savoy.
Smithers went bankrupt in 1900 and died in 1907 from cirrhosis of the liver. His body was found in a house in Parson's Green on his 46th birthday. He was buried in an unmarked grave, paid for by Lord Alfred Douglas in Fulham Cemetery.
The memorial
We don't currently know when the memorial was erected or by whom, but it is modern.
Publisher to the Decadents is the title of Smithers' biography by James G. Nelson, published by the Rivendale Press / Penn State Press in 2000. The book uses the same vignette as the memorial – a harlequin-like figure wielding a sword on a winged horse – on its back cover and title page. So it seems likely that the memorial was erected after this date, perhaps to coincide with the book's publication.
The drawing by Aubrey Beardsley was originally used for the title page of The Savoy magazine no.3, published in 1896. The Savoy was a magazine of literature, art, and criticism associated with the Decadent movement, published by Leonard Smithers. Under the drawing was the motto, "Ne Iuppiter quidem omnibus placet" – "Not even Jupiter pleases everyone".
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Research contributed by Francois Jordaan • October 2024
Book of One Thousand and One Nights, 1888
Smithers edited and published Sir Richard Francis Burton's English translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Burton's version accentuated the sexuality of the stories as compared to Edward Lane's 1840 bowdlerized translation.
Read more: Wikipedia • Rooke Books
Lysistrata, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, 1886
Lysistrata is an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes. It is a comic account of a woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War between Greek city states by denying all the men of the land any sex.
Read more: Wikipedia
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1888
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written after his release from prison in 1897. The poem was published by Smithers under the name "C.3.3.", which stood for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3. This ensured that Wilde's name – by then notorious – did not appear on the poem's front cover.
Read more: Wikipedia
View the graves map to see the location of all the graves. Photo album: Graves and memorials