The first volume of The DIal, one of the earliest of the late-Victorian little magazines, was edited and self-published by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who aimed to emulate the Pre-Raphaelite Germ of 1850. Their magazine of art and literature appeared in August 1889, with a wood engraved paper cover designed by Ricketts and engraved by Shannon. Laurence Housman met Ricketts and Shannon in 1890, when he was trying to obtain a copy of the out-of-print issue from its co-editors at their home in The Vale, Chelsea. Ricketts was a critically important mentor in Housman's artistic career. "Within a month" of their first meeting, he wrote in his autobiograhy, "Ricketts had dragged me away from my timid preference for fuzzy chalk drawing…and had set me to pen work, with Rossetti and the other pre-Raphaelites as my main guides both in composition and technique. From that time on, I felt set—I acquitred a new confidence; I had found out at last what I wanted to do" (Unexpected Years 115). The first issue of the Dial also brought Ricketts and Shannon, then only in their twenties, into contact with Oscar Wilde, who became a frequenter of their home in the Vale and thereafter collaborated with them on his decorated books.