Twenty-seven

Oscar Wilde was 27 years of age when left England for America on board the S.S. Arizona. By the time he reached New York eight days later he was 26—this being the age he insisted upon in press interviews.¹

A simple mistake for anyone to make who was awful at arithmetic or a victim to vanity; but it takes a declared genius to incorporate the error years later into his works, as we shall see.

First, there’s something fundamental about the number 27.

Never mind that the sum of the integers from 2 to 7 total 27. Nor that C.3.3. (Wilde’s prison number) is the perfect Cube 3³ which also equals 27. Also there is something curiously 27 about John Pentland Mahaffy, Wilde’s tutor at Trinity College: Ellmann says, “Mahaffy boasted he had taught Wilde the conversational art”; and David Friedman in Wilde in America says, “if Mahaffy had convinced him of anything, it was the power of good talk”; and The Wilde Album says that Oscar described Mahaffy as “a delightful talker, too”—curious because all of these similar references occur on page 27 of their respective books. We shall not dwell on the fact that the Oscar Wilde Bar in New York City is, needless to say, on 27th Street.

Returning to the famous collection of Sarony photographs of Oscar Wilde we note that the highest number in the series, and so inscribed on the potograph, is twenty-seven. Accordingly, it is often cited that there 27 Sarony photographs of Oscar Wilde from 1882, a notion that probablygoes all the way back to and including the Sarony Studios and probably Oscar himself.

The Two Number Nines

The problem arises with these two photographs included in my archive as photographs 9A and 9B.

They are extremely similar and could easily be mistaken for one another when not viewed together. And it appears that this is precisely what most people have done. Even the Sarony Studio inscribed a number 9 on both of them.

Evidently, in identifying prints the studio took both of these for the same pose and continued marking successive photographs 10, 11 and so on. The fact that the studio probably never noticed is borne out by continuing to issue copies of both as number 9—the number is usually in dark ink on the negative thus appearing white on the print. To compound the error, Sarony, continued to number the photographs sequentially when Wilde posed for the Last Four, probably taken at a later date to give the putative total of 27.²

However, when juxtaposed one can easily see that the photos are different: in one Wilde is holding his book of Poems (1881) and in the other he is not.

Any suspicion that the two number 9s might be the same photograph doctored (which was not unusual in Victorian times) can be dismissed because a close inspection shows differences in Wilde’s left hand—see the ‘Details’ at the foot of this page.

The total of 27 thus persisted unchallenged by most, if not all, accounts of the Sarony session to date. And, although The Wilde Album (the only other place where the Sarony photos can be found as a group) omits the one with Wilde holding the book, the author was wise enough to note that there were “at least” 27 pictures. And, as if to bear out this caution, one contemporary report I have says that Wilde had “30 sittings” which would be a more understandable number.

The Photographs of Dorian Gray

And what of Wilde? He too probably accepted the count and the number stayed with him. For why else would he record the following dialogue between Lady Henry and Dorian in his semi-autobiograhical novel The Picture of Dorian Gray:

‘You thought it was my husband. It is only his wife. You must let me introduce myself. I know you quite well by your photographs. I think my husband has got twenty-seven of them.’
‘Not twenty-seven, Lady Henry?’
‘Well, twenty-six, then. And I saw you with him the other night at the Opera.’

[Ch. III]

It seems a little beyond coincidental for Wilde to use a total of twenty-seven in connection with a random number of photographs in a conversation with no plot value.

Interesting, too, that Dorian questions the number twenty-seven, again for no apparent reason other than to have it changed to twenty-six, just as Wilde had done for the New York press.

Finally, and to complete the exchange from Dorian Gray which mentions the Opera, consider that the Sarony photographs were taken on January 5, 1882, the very night Wilde attended the Standard Theatre, in New York for a performance of the opera Patience.

After all that, it’s a pity there are 28, and more’s the pity even that is wrong—a twenty-ninth has been identified].

© John Cooper, 2018 

---

Footnotes:

1. The cute phraseology of this observation is credited to my Wildean friend Lily Rothenberg of New York. The facts are that Wilde was born in October 1854 and therefore was aged 27 in January 1882, not 26, as he told the press. ( , Jan 3, 1882, 1). ↩︎
2. Significantly, the inscribed numerals on the two versions of number 9 are in different styles suggesting two hands, which might explain the duplication. ↩︎

---

Related:

THE SARONY PHOTOGRAPHS OF OSCAR WILDE