Oscar
Wilde: References & Notes
See Church
of Ireland records of the baptism of Oscar Wilde - infra |
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References
John Sutherland, Oxford Companion to Victorian Fiction,
give bio-dates, 1854-1900 [sic]; separate entry for The Picture of
Dorian Grey, serialised in abbrev. form in Lippincotts Monthly
Magazine, 1890. The mawkish Ballad of Reading Gaol appeared
in 1898; Wildes disgrace and persecution had an enduring effect
on English literary culture whose tentative flirtations with decadence,
aestheticism and post-Romanticism were promptly discontinued. BL 4 [fiction].
Internet resources
Rachel Sahlman, Short Biography of Wilde
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The Oscar Wilde Collection |
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The Fisherman and his Soul |
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- last available at
05.12.2009 |
The OScholars website
contains a library of essays on Wilde - see Articles, index.
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Lord Alfred Douglas, ed.,
Plain English, Nos. 8-30, 30 Aug. 1920-29 Jan. 1921 [bound as 25 issues,
some missing; rare periodical, edited and partly written by Douglas and
showing him at his most crazily xenophobic; throughout are virulent attacks
on the Jews, the Irish, Robert Ross, &c.; Douglas edited it for 16
moths, till mid 1921. Eric Stevens 1992 [Cat. 168] £145. Also Plain
Speech, vol. 1 nos. 1-12., Oct. 1921-Jan 1922; identical in style and
format to the previous, £55. Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie, The Story
of Lord Alfred Douglas, his friends and enemies (London: W. H. Allen 1963),
414pp [1st], £12; Brian Roberts, Lord Alfred Douglas, The Mad Bad
Line, the family of Lord Alfred Douglas (Hamish Hamilton 1981), 319, 8
plates [1st], £10.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed.,
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry 1991), Vol 2
selects The Happy Prince; Mr Froudes Blue Book (on Ireland)
[Viz., Two Chiefs of Dunboye, reviewed]; The Picture of Dorian
Gray; Intentions, The Decay of Lying [from Intentions;
and cf. Mahaffy, Decay of the Art of Preaching ]; The Importance
of Being Earnest [376-91]; The Ballad of Reading Gaol
[731-37]; The Poems of Oscar Wilde, Requiescat [elegy to
his sister Isola], Les Silhouettes, La Fuite de La
Lune, The Harlots House [738-39]; BIOG 514 [and
note misquotation of Lord Queensberrys note]; References &
Remarks: 8, 295, 372-76; Yeats met Wilde and others at the London home
of W. E. Henley [Heaney, ed.], 787; [biog. Yeats, 830] [W. J. McCormack,
Gothic connections, 837, 838, Stokers wife Florence Balcombe had
been courted by Wilde, 1842; published version of Vera includes
a crude anticipation of Lady Gregorys Kiltartanese, 845; in addition
to familys devotion to things Irish, Lady Wilde had contributed
to the store of Irish gothic writing with German translations [unspec.,
WJM], 846, [err. 848], [err. 859], 963n, [Frederick Ryan 999n], [Corkery,
1008]. Bibl. of works and criticism [as listed on this website - see
Works, supra & Criticism,
supra].
Jacqueline Wesley (Cat.
22; Oct. 1993) lists Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study
(London: Martin Secker 1912), 213pp., front. port [oil by Harper Pennington];
subject of a libel action brought by Lord Alfred Douglas because Ransome
had described De Profundis as written to a man to whom Wilde
felt that he owed some at least of the public circumstances of his disgrace;
verdict given in favour of Ransome but passages complained of omitted
from later editions; John Moray Stuart-Young, Osrac: The Self-Sufficient,
and Other Poems, with a Memoir of the Late Oscar Wilde (London: Hermes
Press 1905), 119pp. front. port., 5pls. and 2 facs. [contains 2 alleged
facs. letters of Wilde to the author which are forgeries - as is the inscription
on the portrait to Johnnie [Mason 681]; Sherard, Oscar
Wilde Twice Defended from André Gides Wicked Lies and Frank
Harriss Cruel Libels to which is added A Reply to George Bernard
Shaw / A Refutation of Dr. G. J. Reniers Statements /
A Letter to the Author from Lord Alfred Douglas, an Interview with
Bernard Shaw by Hugh Kingsmill (Chicago: Argus Book Shop 1934), 76pp.
[Note that a copy of the last held in the British Library was formerly
owned by Lord Alfred Douglas and the whole formerly published by Vindex
in Calvi, France. See COPAC online;
accessed 27.02.2010.]
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Libraries & Booksellers
Belfast Central Library holds Complete Shorter
Fiction of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (OUP 1979); Wilde, Oscar,
Aforismi, scelti e tradotti de Alex R Falzon (Milan: Epoca 1986), 155pp.;
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by C.3.3. (London: Leonard Smithers 1898),
31pp.; The Canterville Ghost (London: John W Luce 1906), 124pp.; A critic
of Pall Mall, being extracts from reviews and miscellanies (London:
Methuen 1919), 218pp.; De Profundis, 31st ed. (London: Methuen 1915),
156pp; 42 ed. (1927), 151pp. Among numerous other works not copied here
are, The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde, selected and ed. and intro. Owen
Dudley Edwards (London: Barrie & Jenkins 1959), 282pp.; Wilde, The
Importance of Being Earnest and related writings (London: Routledge
1992), 271pp.; Importance, etc., drawings by Sheila Jackson (London:
Grey Walls Press 1948), 86pp., col. ills.
Eric Stevens (Cat. 1992) lists H. Montgomery
Hyde, The Other Love, an historical and contemporary survey of homosexuality
in Britain (London: Heinemann 1970) [1st ed.], 323pp. [contains much
about Wilde and Alfred Douglas, Eric Stevens 1992 £10; Also Wilde,
Children in Prison & Other Cruelties of Prison Life (Murdoch &
Co. 1898) [Long letter written by Wilde to the editor of the Daily Chronicle
in defence of warder Martin who had befriended him during his last months
in Reading and who had been dismissed as a result of his humane actions]
[1st ed.], 16pp [rare], £135; ALSO Four Letters by Oscar Wilde
[not included in the English ed. of De Profundis] (priv. 1906; 500 copies)
[1st ed.], 34pp., £95; Lady Windermeres Fan (Leipzig Tauchnitz
ca.1933), 238pp., £3; Rupert Hart-Davis, The Letters of Oscar
Wilde (London: Hart-Davis 1962) [1st ed.] xxv+958pp, 35 ills, £35;
Hart-Davis, ed., More Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Murray 1986; rep.
of 1985), 215pp., £6; E. H. W. Meyerstein, Letter to RN Green-Armitage,
1940, 3pp. 4to, £25; François Porche, LAmour Qui
NOse Pas Dire Son Nom, Oscar Wilde (Paris: Bernard Grasset 1927)
[9th ed.-] 242pp., £12; Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre
of the 1890s (OUP 1990) [1st ed.] 204pp., £15.
Oxford University Press (Cat. 1996) lists Isobel
Murray, ed., Oscar Wilde, [Works], incl. The Picture of Dorian
Gray; Lady Windermeres Fan, The Importance of Being
Earnest ; The Decay of Lying ; and The Ballad of Reading
Gaol, with notes; 660pp.; also, Murray, ed., The Picture of Dorian
Gray [Worlds Classics] (OUP q.d.); Rupert Hart-Davis, ed.,
Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (OUP [1962]), 432pp.; Rupert
Hart-Davis, ed., More Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray
1985), 224pp.; Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand, eds., Oscar
Wildes Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (OUP q.d.),
176pp., ill.; Murray, ed., The Soul of Man and Prison Writings
[Worlds Classics] (OUP q.d.), 248pp.
James Joyce held in his Trieste library copies
of An Ideal Husband (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1908); Intentions
(Leipzig: English Library 1907); Lady Windermeres Fan (Leipzig:
Tauchnitz 1909), signed S. Joyce; The Picture of Dorian Gray
(Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1908); Salomé(Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1909);
Selected Poems (London: Methuen 1911); The Soul of Man Under
Socialism (London: priv. 1904); A Woman of No Importance
(Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1909); and R. H. Sherard, Oscar Wilde (London:
Greening 1908). [See Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of James
Joyce, Faber, Appendix, p.133.]
Peter Harrington Books (Cat. 2005) lists The
Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Ward, Lock & Co. 1891), 1st Edn.,
trad. iss., bound by Chelsea Bindery in full green morocco [£1,750].
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Notes
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Wildes
Baptism dates as registered at the Parish Church of St Marks
in Brunswick St., Dublin [now Pearse St, Dublin 2].
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The entry for Wildes baptism at
St Marks Church of Ireland Parish Church in Brunswick
St. [now Pearse St.] shows the date of birth corrected to
1854 in a firm hand, apparently the same as the original entry
to read 16 Oct. 1854 while the heading at the top of the page
reads in bold letters: Baptisms solemnized in the Parish
of [St. Marks] in the County of [the City of Dublin] in the
Year 18[55] - where the phrases given here in brackets
have been added in hand-writing by the recording cleric. It
appear that the normal expectation of baptism following rapidly
on birth led the clergyman at first to assume that the year
of birth was 1855. In Wildes case that expectation was
foiled by the tardy application of parent(s) and, in fact,
Wilde may have been previously baptised in the Roman Catholic
religion. [Infomation supplied by Anne van Weerden, NL.] |
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In 1855 the Church of England [Anglican]
was still the Established Church in Ireland and so-remained
until the Irish Church [Disestablishment] Act of 1869 which
separated English and Irish Churches and deprived the Church
of Ireland of the right to collect tithes. The reason for
Wildes Catholic baptism (if at all so) may have been
his mother Francescas affinity ith the Irish majority
in keeping with her sympathies with the Young Irelanders of
that day, or else occasioned by the fact that her mother,
an OFlynn and Catholic, wished it. The baptism was purportedly
conducted by a Catholic priest at Glencree in Co. Wicklow.
At the time of writing, the Church of Ireland genealogy research
site at IrishGenealogy.ie,
erroneously cites 16th Oct. 1855 as the date of Wildes
birth - an obvious transcription error from the registry as
shown here since it implies that he was baptised before he
was born. The entry is confusing but not as strange as that! |
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Imagines extracted from the Church
Records - online;
view the full sheet here - as pdf;
accessed 03.09.2020. |
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Vera, or the Nihilist
(written 1880), combines details from the lives of Vera Figner, author
of memoirs, who spent 22 years in Schlusselberg Fortress for her activities
as an anarchist, and Vera Zasulich, who shot and wounded Gen. Trepov,
City Prefect of St Petersburg, and went on to advocate the assassination
of the Tsar; Wilde intended Sarah Bernhardt [recte Mrs. Bernard Beere]
to play the part; in 1882, Bernhardt was playing in Fedora by Sardou,
with a similar theme. (Q. source; corrig. supplied by D. C. Rose, Goldsmiths
Coll., London, 27 July 2001.)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) [I] -
Plot: Dorian cruelly jilts Sybil Vane who then commits suicide. Gray decides
to overcome his momentary guilt by viewing Sybils suicide as an
artistic event, It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending
to a wonderful play. He is encouraged in this erasure by his Mephistopheles,
Lord Henry Wotton, The girl never really lived, and so she has never
really died. Wildes book can be read as a protest against
such deadly constructions of experience. Dorians wit runs to: Men
marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are
disappointed.
Dorian Gray (1891) [II]: Dorian Gray,
based on motif of the painting that drains the subject, developed by
Poe in The Oval Portrait, and featuring Lord Henry Wotton
(prob. based on the Elizabethan diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, comforter
of all youths in Izaak Waltons phrase, who served as a diplomat
between the court of the Duke of Florence and James VI of Scotland,
afterwards James I of England); also includes thematic reference to
the myth of Ossian, grandson of Fingal, who visits Tir na nOg; note
that in Ancient Legends, Lady Wilde wrote a tale of Oscar
the Lion, who cuts off the head of a treacherous Celtic chief,
carry it back bleeding to the fort, where the blood releases the captive
Fenian knights; Dorians mother was a Devereux (i.e.,
of the stock of the ill-fated Earl of Essex). Dorian Gray was
first serialised in Lippincotts [July 1890].
Dorian Gray - English gent.? Though
not himself aristocratic (Mr Dorian Gray does not belong to
the Blue-books - Picture, Penguin Edn. 1994, p.41),
Dorin was brought up by his aristocratic grandfather, the last lord
of Kelso. (See Andrea Hermes, Dorian Gray: Rebel or Sinner?
- a seminar paper at Google Books [online].)
Dorian Gray (1891) [III]: Wilde defended
Dorian Gray in letters to St. James Gazette (25 June 1890):
[T]he sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct
and separate; and further, good people, belonging as they
do to the normal, and so commonplace, type, are artistically uninteresting.
Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies.
They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate
ones reason; bad people stir ones imagination (26
June 1890); issued in book-form (1891), with additional epigraphs [as
infra.] Note also a letter to the Scots
Observer (You may ask me, sire, why I should care to have
the ethical beauty of my story recognises. I answer, simply, because
it exists, because the thing is there. (All the foregoing [I,
II, & III] in Neil Sammells, Pulp Fictions, in Irish
Studies Review, Summer 1995, pp.40-41.)
Epigraphs to Dorian Gray incl. 1] There
is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written,
or badly written. That is all. 2] The nineteenth century
dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass. 3] there is no such
thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly
written. That is all. 4] No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
5] Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for art.
6] All Art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath
the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so
at their peril. 6] It is the spectator, and not life, that
Art really mirrors. 7] All art is quite useless. [Numbers
added here.]
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An Ideal Husband
(1895): Sir Robert Chilton, friend of Lord Arthur Goring (the son of Lord
Caversham), has exploited government secrets for financial gain in the
Suez Canal Affair early in his political career; his secret is discovered
by Mrs. Cheveley who threatens blackmail at the cost of his career as
well as his marriage to Lady Chiltern, a figure of strict rectitude who
cannot tolerate character flaws, especially in her ideal husband.
Both Chilterns turn to Lord Arthur while Mabel Chiltern, Sir Roberts
sister, looks on Lord Arthur as a potential husband for herself. Yet in
order to be a successful blackmailer, ones own reputation must be
beyond reproach and, in the event, the blackmailer turns out to have stolen
a bracelet from Lord Arthurs cousin Mary Berkshire and Arthur sees
her off, but not before she attempts to destroy Lady Chiltern with an
ambiguous letter that the latter has addressed to Lord Arthur. At the
conclusion of these transactions Lord Arthur reveals the philosopher
that underlies the dandy and proves himself the first well-dressed
philosopher in the history of thought, resolving all difficulties
with wise words about human love, tolerance and the dangers of idealisation.
(Act. IV.) Finally, Lady Chiltern learns to accept her husbands
appetite for power and Lord Arthur proposes to Mabel Chiltern, undertaking
- in Lord Cavershams words - to become an ideal husband.
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The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895) - Summary I: Two young men, Algernon Moncrieff
and Jack Worthing, JP, who is in love with Algernons cousin Gwendolen;
Algernon does not realise that John was christened Ernest, though Uncle
Jack to his ward, Cecily; the men discover in conversation that
they both pretend to be someone else when it suits them, Algernon has
a useful invalid friend Bunbury, while John becomes his own wicked brother
Ernest, under which name Gwendolen has accepted his marriage proposal;
Cecily accepts Algernon who falsely tells her he is Ernest, a name she
fancies; Lady Bracknell repudiates the proposal directed towards her charge
Gwendolen; the ensuing confusions are resolved when it is discovered that
Jack was indeed so named before being mislaid in the cloakroom of a London
station by Miss Prism, a forgetful governess, and then adopted by Cecilys
father.
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
- Summary II (Film version): comedy, black and white, 93 minutes, directed
by Anthony Asquith (1952), starring Sir Michael Redgrave, Michael Denison,
Dame Edith Evans, Dorothy Tutin, Margaret Rutherford, Joan Greenwood,
Miles Malleson. Summary: Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff - two
wealthy and eligible bachelors of the 1890s - are hopelessly in love.
The former with Gwendoline, who is the latters cousin. The latter
with Cecily, who is the formers ward. Due to Jacks ignoble
habit of representing himself as his imaginary brother, Ernest, when
in town, and Algernons adoption of Ernests name and wicked
reputation to speed his courtship of Cecily, both girls believe themselves
to be engaged to the non-existent Ernest. When Jack discovers this,
he goes into deep mourning, announcing that his brother has been killed
by a severe chill in Paris ... but the girls see through this deception!
Obliged to admit that neither is really called Ernest, the two men agree
separately to be re-christened in that name to prove their devotion.
They reckon, however, without the intervention of the formidable Lady
Bracknell, Gwendolens mother and Algernons aunt, who opposes
everything until Miss Prism, Cecilys governess and a devoted family
retainer, brings to light an old skeleton in the family cupboard and
makes it clear that one of the men, is in fact earnest.
(Video exhibited to private audience at 18h30 on Friday 11th May 2001
in the Conference Room at the Princess Grace Irish Library.)
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The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898): The ballad materially concerning the hanging in Reading Gaol of
Trooper Thomas Woodridge for murder of his wife, an execution that took
place during Wildes period of imprisonment there. Its chief themes
are the tragic universality of the murderers crime (each man
kills the thing he loves); the possibility of Christian redemption
(the man was one of those / Whom Christ came down to save);
and the futility of the prison system in general and capital punishment
in particular (every prison that men build / Is built with bricks
of shame). Lines from the ballad appeared on his monument in Père
Lachaise cemetery in Paris, his mourners will be outcast men, /
And outcasts always mourn.
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De Profundis
(1905): The first edition of De Profundis, ed. Robert Ross, is
less than half the MS letter written in January-March 1897 by Wilde, and
handed to Ross on the day after leaving Reading Gaol; Ross made two typed
copies, sent one to Douglas, the addressee (though the latter always denied
having received it), and bequeathed the second to Vyvyan, who published
it in full in 1949; Ross left the MS to the British Museum on condition
that it was not read for fifty years; it is this version which serves
as copy-type for the Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., Letters of Oscar Wilde
(London 1962). See under Quotations, supra;
also longer extracts, attached
- or go to full-text version in RICORSO Library, Irish Classics,
via index,
or direct.]
De Profundis (2): the work, written in
1896-97, skirts penitence and acknowledging faults (not those cited
in the courtroom) while vindicating the authors individuality
(see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p.xiii).
De Profundis (3): Addressed to
Wildes lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and composed in Reading Gaol,
it was later given the title De Profundis by Wildes
friend and literary executor, Robert Ross. It was Rosss severely
abridged and sanitized version, published in 1905 and again 1908, which
inaugurated the tradition of seeing De Profundis as the
apologia pro sua vita of a broken man. This edition takes
account of this complex heritage by arguing that Wildes prison
document may be seen not just as the basis of a letter (a typed copy
of which may have been sent to Douglas) but also as an unfinished literary
work which he intended for public consumption at some future date. Such
a case is made by placing in the public domain, often for the first
time, a number of different works, derived from different texts, each
of which bears witness to Wildes multiple intentions for his prison
document. These texts comprises of: the manuscript held in the British
Library; the version of Wildes letter published by his son, Vyvyan
Holland, from a typescript bequeathed to him by Robert Ross; hitherto
unpublished witnesses to that typescript; and Rosss editions,
collated with each other. The commentary to this edition - again for
the first time - sets Wildes story of his own life in De
Profundis against the testimony of other players in his drama,
including, most importantly, that of Douglas. In so doing, it exposes
the partial nature of Wildes narrative, as well as the personal
obsessions which animated it. (COPAC notice [Collected Works]
- online;
accessed 22.03.2010.)
De Profundis: The definitive edition
of Wildes impassioned letter from Reading Gaol. Imprisoned in
Reading Gaol in 1895 for his homosexuality, Oscar Wilde once defiantly
wrote `I dont defend my conduct, I explain it. Wildes
notorious liaison with the Marquess of Queensberrys son, Lord
Alfred Douglas (`Bosie), had so inflamed the Marquess that he
made public attacks on Wildes character. In return, Wilde sued
for slander, an action which, to Wildes bitter astonishment,
led to a series of scandalous trials and convictions. From his cell
Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis, the detailed and unsparing revelation
of his love and tragedy. Each day he wrote a page at the behest of
his warden who would then take it. Only upon his release was he given
the full text to read and revise. This volume comprises the complete
text of De Profundis, a letter from Wilde letter to Robert Ross, as
well as The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It also features an essay by W.H.
Auden which offers an insightful retrospective on Wilde, the text
itself and the genre of epistolary literature more broadly. (COPAC
notice on De Profundis, new edn., with notes by Rupert Hart-Davis,
an essay by W. H. Auden and The ballad of Reading Gaol. (London: Duckworth
2017) - online;
accessed 22.03.2010.)
De Profundis - Epistola:
in carcere et vinculis, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde,
Vol. 2, ed., Ian Small (2010): This volume presents for the first
time the complete textual history of one of the most famous love letters
ever written. Addressed to Wildes lover, Lord Alfred Douglas,
and composed in Reading Gaol, it was later given the title De
Profundis by Wildes friend and literary executor, Robert
Ross. It was Rosss severely abridged and sanitized version,
published in 1905 and again 1908, which inaugurated the tradition
of seeing De Profundis as the apologia pro sua vita of a broken man.
This edition takes account of this complex heritage by arguing that
Wildes prison document may be seen not just as the basis of
a letter (a typed copy of which may have been sent to Douglas) but
also as an unfinished literary work which he intended for public consumption
at some future date. Such a case is made by placing in the public
domain, often for the first time, a number of different works, derived
from different texts, each of which bears witness to Wildes
multiple intentions for his prison document. These texts comprise:
the manuscript held in the British Library; the version of Wildes
letter published by his son, Vyvyan Holland, from a typescript bequeathed
to him by Robert Ross; hitherto unpublished witnesses to that typescript;
and Rosss editions, collated with each other. The commentary
to this edition - again for the first time - sets Wildes story
of his own life in De Profundis against the testimony
of other players in his drama, including, most importantly, that of
Douglas. In so doing it exposes the partial nature of Wildes
narrative, as well as the personal obsessions which animated it. The
commentary also demonstrates a hitherto unnoticed element of Wildes
work, the extent and nature of its richly layered intertextuality
and its similarity, in its compositional practices, to many of his
earlier works. (COPAC - online; accessed 08.12.2017.)
See also LRB Letters (Issue
of 24-17 Dec. 2017) - in response to Colm Toibins article
on Wilde in the LRB (30 Nov. 2017): |
Colm Tóibín writes that when
Oscar Wilde was released from prison, he gave the
manuscript [of De Profundis] to his friend Robert Ross,
who had two copies made (LRB, 30 November).
[...] He sent one to Lord Alfred Douglas; the other he later
lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Rosss
copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. The complete version,
based on the original manuscript, wasnt published
until 1949. The facts are that Wilde gave the manuscript
to Ross with the instruction that two typed copies should
be made. Ross sent one of these to Lord Alfred Douglas (who,
incidentally, claimed that he never received it). Ross had
the manuscript to hand, not just his typed copy, when he
published excerpts in 1905 and 1908. In 1909 he presented
the manuscript to the British Museum on condition that no
one be allowed to see it for fifty years. He eventually
bequeathed the second typed copy to Wildes elder son,
Vyvyan Holland.
Holland published a first complete
and accurate version in 1949. However, having no access
to the manuscript, he took the text from his typed copy. This
contained a number of errors: misreadings of Wildes
handwriting, misprints and omissions. The first truly complete
edition, based on the manuscript, was published in 1962 in The
Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. On
the occasion of the centenary of Wildes death in 2000
the British Library published a facsimile of the manuscript
with an introduction by his grandson, Merlin Holland. Ross
entitled his 1905 edition De Profundis. Wilde
himself called it Epistola: In carcere et vinculis
- A letter from prison and in chains.
Donald Mead
Oscar Wilde Society, London SW20
|
See also Colm Tóibín,
ed. & intro.,, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings [Penguin
Classics] (Penguin Books 2103), xxxii, 266pp. edited and introduced
by Colm Tóibín. At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde
was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage
success, An Ideal Husband. But by May of the same year, Wilde
was in Reading prison sentenced to hard labour. De Profundis
is an epistolic account of Oscar Wildes spiritual journey
while in prison, and describes his new, shocking conviction that
the supreme vice is shallowness. This edition also includes
further letters to his wife, his friends, the Home Secretary, newspaper
editors and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas - Bosie - himself, as
well as The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the heart-rending
poem about a man sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he
loved. This Penguin edition is based on the definitive Complete
Letters, edited by Wildes grandson Merlin Holland. Colm
Toibins introduction explores Wildes duality in love,
politics and literature. This edition also includes notes on the
text and suggested further reading. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin.
His three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince, Lord
Arthur Saviles Crime and A House of Pomegranates,
together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
won him a reputation as a writer with an original talent, a reputation
enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies - Lady
Windermeres Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An
Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Colm
Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The
Blackwater Lightship and The Master, and a collection
of stories, Mothers and Sons. His essay collection Love
in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar appeared in
2002. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction.
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Wildes
people
Aristotle: Wilde inscribed
the following sentence in his copy of Aristotles Nicomachean
Ethics: Man makes his ends for himself out of himself: no end
is imposed by external considerations, he must realise his true nature,
must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.
The inscription is dated Magdalen College 1877 October. (See
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 1987; Penguin 1988, p.60.)
Giordano Bruno (1): Soul and body,
body and soul - how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the
soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could
refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly
impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the
arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult
to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a
shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul,
as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was
a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.
(The Picture of Dorian Gray, Eveleigh Nash & Grayson Ltd.
148 The Strand, London [1928], p.87; see full text in RICORSO Library,
Irish Classics, via index
or attached
Chap. 4].)
Giordano Bruno (2): Dullness is always
an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent
Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave. To an artist
so creative as the critic, what does subject-matter signify? No more
and no less than it does to the novelist and the painter. Like them,
he can find his motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is
nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge. (The
Critic as Artist, Intentions, 1891; rep. in The Works
of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press 1987, pp.984-998, p.966 -
see longer extract - as attached.)
[Note that Bestia Trionfans is the title of a work of Giordano Bruno.)
Giordano Bruno (3): Nor, again, is the
critic really limited to the subjective form of expression. [...]
He may use dialogue [...] Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary
form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno,
and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight,
the creative critics of the world have always employed, can never
lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression. [...]
By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and
show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining
in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from
those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea
in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or
from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness
to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm
of chance. (The Critic as Artist, Intentions,
1891; rep. in Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley 1987, p.985;
see full text version [Pt. II] in RICORSO Library, Irish Classics
- via index or attached.)
G. B. Shaw: Shaw wrote to
Wilde, We are both Celtic and I like to think that we are friends.
(Rupert Hart-Davis, Letters, of Oscar Wilde, 1962, p.332. And note: Shaw
wrote a Preface to Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde (1938
edn.), written 25 years after the first edn., and defending Harris against
Sherard, a writer who has attacked his biography as an imposture
although Shaw discovers the same thing that he objects to said in a biography
of his own - viz. the claim that Wilde died of syphilis, which Sherard
at first disputed, and then endorsed in his interview with the gullible
American biographer Boris Brasol of 1935.
[ top ]
Marquess
of Queensberry - letter to his son Alfred Lord Douglas |
|
Alfred,
Your intimacy with this man Wilde must either cease
or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not
going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but
to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own
eyes I saw you in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship,
as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience
have I seen such a sight as that in your horrible features.
No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear
on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning
to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true,
or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was
true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified
in shooting him on sight.
Your disgusted, so-called father,
Queensberry |
Available at Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City - online;
accessed 23.02.2013. |
|
Queensberrys letter to the Star, April 25, 1895 |
In my time I have helped to cut up and destroy
sharks. I had no sympathy for them, but I may have felt
sorry and wished to put them out of their pain as soon as possible.
What I did say that as Mr. Wilde now seemed to be on his beam
ends and utterly down I did feel sorry for his awful position,
and that supposing he was convicted of those loathsome charges
brought against him that were I the authority that had to mete
out the punishment, I would treat him with all possible consideration
as a sexual pervert of an utterly diseased mind, and not as a
sane criminal. If this is sympathy, Mr. Wilde has it from
me to that extent.
|
|
Queensberrys note to Wilde after the libel trial |
If the country allows you to leave, all the better
for the country; but, if you take my son with you, I will follow
you wherever you go and shoot you.
|
Available at Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City -
online;
accessed 23.02.2013. |
[ top ]
G. K. Chesterton: Chesterton
distinguished between the real epigram which [Oscar Wilde] wrote
to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote
to thrill the tamest part of our tame civilisation, and speaks of
the charlatan aspect of his genius. (Essay, Daily News,
1909; collected in A Handful of Authors, 1953; cited in P. J. Kavanagh,
Bywords, Times Literary Supplement, 21 Sept. 2001,
p.16.)
[ top ]
James Joyce: the phrase,
in a relation to life than which none can be more immediate
which is to be found in Stephen Hero [1944] echoes another in Oscar
Wildes An Ideal Husband, viz., he stands in immediate
relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it (Lord
Goring, Act III). Note also Mrs Cheveleys remarks on her business
with Sir Robert Chiltern [to Lord Goring:] Oh, dont use big
words. They mean so little. It is a commercial transaction that is all
(Ibid., Act IV; The Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press
1987, p.519; idem.), and cf. Those big words that make us so unhappy,
in Joyces review of William Rooneys poems. (Critical Writings,
NY: Viking Press 1966, p.87.) [See further under James Joyce, Notes
> Oscar Wilde, supra.]
Lord Alfred Douglas [1]
, Oscar Wilde: A Summing-Up (London: Richards Press, 1940; reiss.
1950): Note that Lord Douglas at his most self-righteous in a passage
on the influence of J. H. Mahaffy on Wilde [see under Mahaffy, supra.]
End papers cite Four Plays (7th printing); The Picture of Dorian
Gray (4th); De Profundis [1st]; Salome [sic] (2nd);
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (4th); Intentions (3rd); Lord
Arthur Saviles Crime and other stories [1st]; A House of
Pomegranites with The Happy Prince [1st] & Poems
(in preparation).
Lord Alfred Douglas [2]: Note items written
by Douglas held in the Suppressed Safe of the British Library, including
Letters to my Father-in-Law, 1 (London 1914) [SS. A. 34], being
an attack on Colonel Frederic Hambleton Custance for engaging solicitor
George Lewis as as a catspaw in the interests of Robert
Ross the notorious Sodomite and Rosss secretary Christopher
Millard. Letter is headed 19, Royal Avenue: Sloane Square, S.W, March
20 1914; copy in the General Catalogue [C.194.a.235]. Also The Rossiad
(London 1916) [SS. B. 16], presumably a libelous satire on Robert Ross,
Oscar Wildes friend and executor; a copy of the second edition
as Galashiels (Robert Dawson & Son [1916], 15pp., 8°,
is shelved at X.909/20162; a fourth edn. (Galashiels 1921), pp. 23 shelved
at X.909/24366. [see Scissors and Paste online;
accessed 30.04.2010.]
Alfred Lord Douglas
(1870-1945), Impressions de Nuit - London |
|
See what a mass of gems the city wears
Upon her broad live bosom! row on row
Rubies and emerads and amethysts glow.
See! that huge circle like a necklace, stares
With thousands of bold eyes to heaven, and dares
The golden stars to dim the lamps below,
And in the mirror of the mire I know
The moon has left her image unawares.
Thats the great town at night: I see her breasts,
Pricked out with lamps they stand like huge black towers.
I think they move! I hear her panting breath.
And thats her head where the tiara rests.
And in her brain, through lanes as dark as death,
Men creep like thoughts ... The lamps are like pale flowers. |
- See The Other Pages - online
[accessed 24.09.2010]. |
Cf. also his poems -
|
[...] |
|
I fell a-weeping, and I cried,
Sweet youth,
Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth
What is thy name? He said, My name is Love.
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.
Then sighing, said the other, Have thy will,
I am the Love that dare not speak its name. [End] |
|
In Praise
of Shame |
Last night unto my bed bethought
there came
Our lady of strange dreams, and from an urn
She poured live fire, so that mine eyes did burn
At the sight of it. Anon the floating fame
Took many shapes, and one cried: I am shame
That walks with Love, I am most wise to turn
Cold lips and limbs to fire; therefore discern
And see my loveliness, and praise my name.
And afterwords, in radiant garments dressed
With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips,
A pomp of all the passions passed along
All the night through; till the white phantom ships
Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song,
Of all sweet passions Shame is the loveliest. |
|
- Available at University of Missouri-Kansas City - Law School -
online;
accessed 23.02.2013. |
[ top ]
Lord Alfred Douglas [3]: See remarks on Wildes
De Profundis and Douglass reprisal on Douglas on the Viereck
Project website in Wikispace. G. S. Vierecks provided
an account of his meeting and rapport with Douglas, together with his
estimate of the Wilde-Bosie relationship, in A Slim Gilt Soul
an undated typescript held in the University of Iowa Special Collections
( George S. Viereck Collection, Box 4, Folder 25): Viz., Wilde was
an Irish Protestant with a middle class conscience and pronouncedly Catholic
leanings who vainly tried to make himself believe he was a Greek. Douglas
was a Greek who vainly imagined himself to be a devout Catholic. [“devout”
is penciled into the typewritten manuscript as an afterthought.] The boot
does not fit. It is easy to discern under the monkish gown the cloven
hoof of Pan. (typescript p.10.) Viereck on Wilde suggests a profound
sympathy with the Irish writer: Wilde is splendid. I admire, nay,
I love him. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid and
evil. I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption. What
I hate is the inquisitive, cold, freezing rays of the sun. Day is nausea,
day is dullness, day is prose. Night beauty, love, splendor, poetry, wine,
scarlet, rape, vice and bliss. I love the night. (Quotin Elmer Gertz,
Odyssey of a Barbarian, NY: Prometheus Books 1978, p.37.) [See Viereck
Project, online
> Lord Alfred Douglas; accessed 14.09.2010.)
William Wilde [Willie; b. 26.09.1852],
a writer for the Daily Telegraph, marries Mrs Frank Leslie, an
America Widow, 1891, but is divorced when detected in adultery (d.1899,
aetat. 46); a dg. of Willie, Dorothy, died of heroin in Paris, having
befriended Djuna Barnes. Willies unwashed appearance inspire Oscar
to make the quip, He sponges on everyone but himself.
Rupert Hart-Davis, ed.,
Letters of Oscar Wilde (London 1962), notes that the edition De
Profundis (1905), ed. by Robert Ross, is less than half the MS letter
written by Wilde in January-March 1897 and handed to Ross on the day after
leaving Reading Gaol. Ross made two typed copies, sent one to Douglas,
the addressee (though the latter always denied having received it), and
bequeathed the second to Vyvyan, who published it in full in 1949; Ross
left the MS to the British Museum on condition that it was not read for
fifty years; it is this version which serves as copy-type for the Letters
. There are errors in the typescripts due to aural mistakes in dictation
to typist, and similar causes.
[ top ]
Robert Donovan, Prof.
of English at UCD, refused licence to student production of The Importance
of Being Earnest in 1930 on the grounds that it seemed to have the
students going out under the banner of Oscar Wilde.
Lionel Johnson: Johnson
wrote a poem in Latin thanking Wilde for the copy of Dorian Gray
that he received from him: Beneditus sis, Oscare! ... .
[See further under Johnson, q.v.]
[ top ]
Walter Pater (1): Art
for Arts Sake, the phrase so often associated with Wilde,
was actually coined by Swinburne and not by Pater, his Oxford tutor and
the author of The Renaissance which he so much admired, as often
alleged. But see the passage in The Decay of Lying in which
Wilde writes: [...] Art never expresses anything but itself. This
is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that
vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells,
that makes music the type of all the arts. (The Works of Oscar
Wilde, London: Galley Press 1987, p.926.)
Pater on Giordano Bruno: Bruno himself
tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it, that the monastic
life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its [235] silence and
self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom sufficiently explains
why a young man who, however well found in worldly and personal advantages,
was conscious above all of great intellectual possessions, and of fastidious
spirit also, with a remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have
espoused poverty, chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What
liberty of mind may really come to in such places, what daring new departures
it may suggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the
dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim
of Flora, reputed author of the new Everlasting Gospel,
strange dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later dispensation
of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away; or again by a
recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St. Francis, in the
so-called spiritual Franciscans, to understand the dogmatic
words of faith with a difference.(Giordano Bruno, Paris,
1586, in Fortnightly Review, Vol. XLVI, No. CCLXXII (1
August 1889), pp.234-44; pp.235-36; available at Gutenberg Project at
Internet Archive - online;
see also digital copy in RICORSO Library, Critics > International
- attached.)
[ top ]
Walter Pater (2): Even the work of Mr. Pater,
who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating
amongst us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in
music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of
words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical
life produces. (Critic as Artist; in The Works of
Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press 1987, p.955.)
[Note further remarks on blind Homer and Milton - viz.,
The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a
method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its
musical and metrical relations. [...] When Milton could no longer write
he began to sing. Who would match the measures of Comus with
the measures of Samson Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or
Regained?]*
See Pater page of NNDB - online.
|
[ top ]
Walter Pater (3): We cannot go back to the
saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner. We cannot go bacl
to the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. Who, as Mr. Pater
suggests somewhere, would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for
that formless intangible Being which Plato rates so high? (Critic
as Artist; in The Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press
1987, p.979.)
See also comments on Wildes indebtedness to Whistler,
Flaubert and Gautier, and his receipt of a loan of Paters copy
of Flauberts story Salomé while at Oxford, in Ciaran Murray,
Disorientalism (2009) - as in Commentary, supra.
Walter Pater (3): Nor, again, is the critic
really limited to the subjective form of expression. The method of the
drama is his, as well as the method of the epos. He may use dialogue,
as he did who set Milton talking to Marvel on the nature of comedy and
tragedy, and made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters beneath
the Penshurst oaks; or adopt narration, as Mr. Pater is fond of doing,
each of whose Imaginary Portraits - is not that the title of the book?
[...]. (The Critic as Artist, in Works of Oscar Wilde,
Galley Press 1987, p.985.)
Marius the Epicurean (1885): [T]owards
such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select sensation,
the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight.
Liberty of soul, freedom from all partial and misrepresentative doctrine
which does but relieve one element in our experience at the cost of
another, freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past
or calculation on the future […] (Marius the Epicurean,
2 vols. [1885] London: Macmillan 1921, p.123.)
Water Pater (4) - the word imperishable
[in Yeats and Joyce] - from ...
Paters Sir Thomas
Browne [1878], in Appreciations; with an Essay on Style
(London: Macmillan 1910) |
What a fund of open-air cheerfulness,
there! in turning to sleep. Still, even when we are dealing with
a writer in whom mere style counts for so much as with Browne, it
is impossible to ignore his matter; and it is with religion he is
really occupied from first to last, hardly less than Richard Hooker.
And his religion, too, after all, was a religion of cheerfulness:
he has no great consciousness of evil in things, and is no fighter.
His religion, if one may say so, was all profit to him; among other
ways, in securing an absolute staidness and placidity of temper,
for the intellectual work which was the proper business of his life.
His contributions to evidence, in the Religio Medici,
for instance, hardly tell, because he writes out of view of a really
philosophical criticism. What does tell in him, in this direction,
is the witness he brings to mens instinct of survival - the
intimations of immortality, as Wordsworth terms them,
which [159] were natural with him in surprising force. As was said
of Jean Paul, his special subject was the immortality of the soul;
with an assurance as personal, as fresh and original, as it was,
on the one hand, in those old half-civilised people who had deposited
the urns; on the other hand, in the cynical French poet of the nineteenth
century, who did not think, but knew, that his soul was imperishable.
He lived in an age in which that philosophy made a great stride
which ends with Hume; and his lesson, if we may be pardoned for
taking away a lesson from so ethical a writer, is the
force of mens temperaments in the management of opinion, their
own or that of others; - that it is not merely different degrees
of bare intellectual power which cause men to approach in different
degrees to this or that intellectual programme. Could he have foreseen
the mature result of that mechanical analysis which Bacon had applied
to nature, and Hobbes to the mind of man, there is no reason to
think that he would have surrendered his own chosen hypothesis concerning
them. He represents, in an age, the intellectual powers of which
tend strongly to agnosticism, that class of minds to which the supernatural
view of things is still credible. The non-mechanical theory of nature
has had its grave adherents since: to the non-mechanical theory
of man - that he is in contact with a moral order on a different
plane from the [160] mechanical order - thousands, of the most various
types and degrees of intellectual power, always adhere; a fact worth
the consideration of all ingenuous thinkers, if (as is certainly
the case with colour, music, number, for instance) there may be
whole regions of fact, the recognition of which belongs to one and
not to another, which people may possess in various degrees; for
the knowledge of which, therefore, one person is dependent upon
another; and in relation to which the appropriate means of cognition
must lie among the elements of what we call individual temperament,
so that what looks like a pre-judgment may be really a legitimate
apprehension. Men are what they are, and are not wholly
at the mercy of formal conclusions from their formally limited premises.
Browne passes his whole life in observation and inquiry: he is a
genuine investigator, with every opportunity: the mind of the age
all around him seems passively yielding to an almost foregone intellectual
result, to a philosophy of disillusion. But he thinks all that a
prejudice; and not from any want of intellectual power certainly,
but from some inward consideration, some afterthought, from the
antecedent gravitation of his own general character - or, will you
say? from that unprecipitated infusion of fallacy in him - he fails
to draw, unlike almost all the rest of the world, the conclusion
ready to hand. |
pp.160-61; available at Gutenberg Project [ online]. |
[Note: imperishable echoes 1 Peter 1:23: for
you have been born again not of seed which is perishable
but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding
word of God.
|
|
See also: |
Plato and Platonism - IX: The
Republic, Works of Pater (Cambridge UP 1901) |
The Republic, as we may realise it mentally
within the limited proportions of some quite imaginable Greek city,
is the protest of Plato, in enduring stone, in law and custom more
imperishable still, against the principle of flamboyancy
or fluidity in things, and in mens thoughts about them. (p.235.) |
[ top ]
Helena Callanan - was
author of a poem called The Shamrock which was later published
in The Weekly Sun on on Sunday, August 5th 1894 and attributed
there to Oscar Wilde. This was copied by The New York Sun on August
19th of the same year and was spotted there by a Rev. William J. McClure
who wrote to the editor calling attention to a copy of the poem in his
album taken from The Cork Weekly Herald of the early 1880s. Mr.
McClure pointed out some variations in the poem and asked how Wildes
name came to be associated with it. In late September Wilde himself wrote
to the Pall Mall Gazette (20 Sept. 1894) rebutting the accusation
of plagiarism. An assistant editor of The Weekly Sun wrote on the
following day that a correspondent had sent in the poem with the name
of Mr. Oscar Wilde appended and with a a covering letter explaining that
he had copied the poem from an old Irish newspaper, remarking his surprise
at such a piece so fine and tender coming from the flaneur
and a cynic Oscar Wilde. (Information contributed by Frank Callery;
for a copy of his full remarks, see under Callanan - as infra.)
John Todhunter: Constance
Wilde appeared in Helen at Troas (1886), Todhunters spectacle-play
performed at Henglers Circus, in which she played the part a figure
in the Parthenon frieze.
Gilbert & Sullivan
: Gilbert and Sulivan caricatured Wilde in Patience (1881)
as the preposterous aesthete as Bunthorpe with the lines: A most
intense young man, / A soulful-eyed young man; / An ultra-poetical super-aesthetical,
/ Out-of-the-way young man - ironicallly preparing the way for his
ten-month tour of the United States of America.
Sir Edward OSullivan:
OSullivan recorded young Wildes remarks in the course of a
discussion of an ecclesiastical scandal of the day: Oscar was present,
and full of the mysterious nature of the Court of Arches: he told us there
was nothing he would like better in after life than to be the hero of
such a cause celèbre and go down to posterity as the defendant
in such a case as Regina versus Wilde. (Quoted in Merlin Holland,
The Wilde Album, 1997, p.26.)
André Gide: Wilde
told André Gide: I have put only my talent into my works.
Ihave put all my genius into my life. (Gide, in Oscar Wilde:
A Study, trans. by Stuart Mason, Oxford: Holywell Press 1905.)
W. P. Frith: Frith was mocked
by Wilde for his photographic-style of painting in The Grosvenor
Gallery, a London exhibition review contributed to Dublin University
Magazine, 90 (July 1877), p.125. In the same review Wilde also mentioned
the Irish painters F. W. Burton and Richard Doyle. See also Wilde, The
Rout of the RA, in Court and Society Review, Vol. IV (27
April 1887); rep. in Ellmann, ed., The Artist as Critic (London:
W. H. Allen 1970).
[ top ]
Sundry topics
Oscars ambitions: A handwritten questionnaire
filled by Wilde as a student in the form of in a two-page entry of an
Album for Confessions or Tastes, Habits and Convictions, 1877,
declared that his most distinctive characteristic was inordinate
self-esteem; and listed self among four favorite poets; most disliked
in others vanity, self-esteem, conceit; Wilde said his idea
of misery would be living a poor and respectable life in an obscure
village; Further, Q: What are the sweetest words in the world?
A: Well done!; Q: What are the saddest words?
A: Failure. Q: What is your dream? A: Getting
my hair cut. A: What is your bête noir?
A: A thorough Irish Protestant. Q: What is your idea
of happiness? A: Absolute power over mens minds, even
if accompanied by toothache. Q: If not yourself, who would
you rather be? A: A cardinal of the Catholic church;
put on sale by descendant of Adderley Millar Howard, impresario and actor
who collected the questionnaires; includes a photograph of the 23-year-old
Wilde; auction at Christies (London), 6 June; estimated price, $4,800
(noticed in Irish Times ; copied from WWW Associated Press Bulletin).
Dublin journals: Wilde
published early poems and reviews in Kottabos (1876), and The
Irish Monthly, ed. Fr. Matthew Russell (do.). His reviews incl.
Froudes Two Chiefs of Dunboye, Gravess Fr.
OFlynn, and Yeatss Wanderings of Oisin.
Social graces: In London,
Wilde became confidant of such social ladies as Duchess of Westminster,
Lady Desart and Lady Lonsdale. Note that he subscribed the signature
Oscar F. OF. Wilde to his correspondence with friends
in Oxford.
Plagiarism? Oscar Wilde
commonly annexed [plagiarised] whole passages from works such as the
biographies of Thomas Chatterton for inclusion in his own lectures series.
(See Jerusha McCormack, review of Thomas Wright, A Wilde Read: Oscars
Books, in The Irish Times, 6 Sept. 2008, Weekend, p.11.)
Lost Pastoral: Karl Beckson
& Bobby Fong print Wildes last (and lost) pastoral found in
the Harry S. Dickey Collection, MS 72, Milton S. Eisenhower Library at
Johns Hopkins Univ. (See Times Literary Supplement, 17 Feb. 1995).
The article incls. a photo port. of Wilde taken by Napoleon Sarony (New
York, 1882), and rep. from Camera Portraits, Photographs from the National
Portrait Gallery, ed. Malcolm Rogers (Nat Port. Gall [q.d.]).
[ top ]
Acallamh na Senorach
[Colloquy of the Ancients]: In Acallamh na Senorach Cailte
says: Fair Youth was the horn Oscar brought to the feast, / He,
whom many girls smiled on, was also the joy of mens eyes.
(Roe/Dooley trans.).
[ top ]
Adapted Wilde:
Peter Harness, a DPhil student at Oriel College, adapted The Picture
of Dorian Gray for the Oxford Playhouse, November 13-16 2002. Note
that The Selfish Giant has been adapted for children in a
musical version with lyrics by David Perkins and additional lyrics by
Caroline Dooley; large variable cast; simple settings; libretto and piano
vocal score; optional band parts on hire (flute, Trumpet, bass guitar,
Glockenspeil, &c.); two succcessful seasons at Yvonne Arnaud Th.,
Guildford, by Youth Theatre Act 1 (1995, 2002).
Oscar in drag? (1): A photograph
presumed to be of Oscar Wilde im Kostüm als Salome,
taken from the Collection Guillot de Saiz, H. Roger Viollet, Paris,
appears in the bibliography of Ellmanns essay on Wilde in Jürgen
Schneider & Ralf Sotscheck, Ireland: Eine Bibliographie selbständiger
deutschsprachiger (Verlag de Georg Büchner Buchhandlung 1989,
pp.214-34, p. 219), is now know to be falsely identified with him. In
Wilde as Salomé?, in Times Literary Supplement
( 22 July 1994), p.14 [backpage], Merlin Holland questions authenticity
of the photograph of Wilde as Salomé, printed by Ellmann in Oscar
Wilde [1987] remarking that John Stokes wrote to London Review
of Books (Feb. 1992), provisionally identifying subject of picture
as Leonara Sengera [sic], a signed photo of whom appeared in the same
Paris collection (Roger-Viollet). Holland runs to earth in a periodical
Buhne und Welt pictures of soprano Alice Guszalewicz playing
in Strausss Salomé in Budapest in 1906 in identical
clothing. He then establishes the source of confusion between Sengern
and Guszalewicz: Leonore Sengern played Herodias to Pala Dongess
I, in Leipzig, five weeks before Guszalewicz (née Farkas) appeared
in the opera, on July 2 1906. Notes the first appearance of Wilde
as Salomé in Le Monde (20 March 20 1987), two weeks before
Ellmanns death; Ellmann was notified by his editor Catharine Carver
and was delighted. Further, Elaine Showalter reproduced the photo in
Sexual Anarchy (1990) in support of her reading of Iokanaan as
veiled homosexual desire while Marjorie Garber used it in
Vested Interests (1992) to illustrate Salomés story
as a transvestite dance. Even the Roger-Viollet archive recaptioned
it in accord with to Ellmanns book (later re-emending to Wilde?).
[See also Elaine Showalter, Its Still Salome, in Times
Literary Supplement (2 Sept. 1994), pp.13-14 - as in Commentary,
supra.]
Oscar in drag? (2): There
exists a childhood photograph of Oscar Wilde in a dress which is sometimes
taken to mean that his mother treated him a girl, thus inducing in him
a mentality that found its fulfilment in the homosexual bias of his adult
sexuality. In fact the custom was general, probably for the practical
reason that changing nappies as more convenient in a dress than any kind
of pants or trousers. (A photograph of Albert le Brocquy as a child of
one or two in my possession demonstrates this norm: BS.) The prevalence
of an equally wide-spread conjecture that the dressing of little boys
in skirts intended to ward off faeries is reflected in the
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy and may therefore have been part
of the folk-lore - or urban myths - of Ireland and Wildes social
class in Dublin. On the last page of a paper on Irish ethnography by A.
C. Haddon and C. R. Browne, there is a photograph of Aran boys, seemingly
aged 8 or 9, who are wearing dress-like garb - though one has plainly
got trousers under that apparel. The caption reads: Group of Three
Aran Boys. We have been informed that the reason why the small boys are
so dressed is to deceive the devil as to their sex. [The negative was
kindly lent to us by Mr. N. Colgan.] See Haddon & Browne, The
Ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway, in Proceedings of
the Royal Irish Academy (1889-1901), Vol. 2 [1891-93], pp.768-830; p.826
[online
at JSTOR; accessed 18.05.2010; and see further under Liam OFlaherty,
remarks on David OCallaghan, the model for Skerrett (1932)].
Wilde in Omaha: Ron Hansen,
She Loves Me Not (2012), a story collection, opens with an account
of Wildes visit to Omaha in March 1882. See New York Times
review by Sven Birkerts: [...] The first story, Wilde
in Omaha, is, as its title suggests, a playful reimagining of
Oscar Wilde’s actual visit to that city in March of 1882. Recounted
by a bumbling, fame-besotted journalist, the British writer’s short
stay among the arts-avid, cornfed Nebraska bourgeoisie becomes a delightful
anthology of some of this famed raconteur’s best bits. For Wilde will
make no conversational response to any question that isn’t an epigram,
as often as not a well-known one. Hansen’s setup lines can be almost
groaningly obvious. When a Mr. Rosewater of The Daily Bee asks
him, apropos of nothing, Are you a hunter? Wilde gets to
deliver one of his celebrated bons mots: Are you asking if I gallop
after foxes in the shires? Indeed not. I consider that the unspeakable
in pursuit of the uneatable. Didn’t Monty Python run a similar
shtick some years before? They did. But Hansen isn’t pretending otherwise.
(See Birkerts, review, in New York Times, 9 Nov. 2012,
Books - online;
accessed 09.11.2012.
[ top ]
Miss Prisms misprision:
Michael J. OShea [Fayetteville State U, ret.) writes in Facebook
[02.09.2017] that Lawrence ODonnell reported on his programme The
Last Word (MSNBC) on the previous night having learned that an additional
charge might be made against the Vice-President [Pence] for misprision
of a felony - an offence involving concealment of a crime
of which the accused had been aware. To this OShea adds that
the name of the character Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest
has echoes of the word misprision which seem apposite to him
because Lætitia Prism has concealed her having mislaid the
handbag in which she has absentmindedly placed (spoiler alert) Ernest
Moncrieff, whom we had known until the final act as John (Jack) Worthing.
His post includes an image of Margaret Rutherford as Ms. Lætitia
Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).
|
Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism in
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) |
On America: The epigram about America often ascribed to Wilde
to the effect that America is the only nation in history which miraculously
has gone from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of
civilisation was actually coined by Georges Clemenceau
|