Image courtesy of the Master and Fellows of University College Oxford: Ross b.9 (3).
Un Amant De Nos Jours
Third in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.
In the first article in this series we saw how a handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde, which came to light during a 2015 edition of the Antiques Roadshow, was making its third appearance in Wilde’s life—again with the probable intention of heralding a new love interest.
In this article we shall look briefly at the poem’s first appearance in 1887 at a crucial time during Wilde’s marriage to his wife Constance.
The sonnet was first published in The Court and Society Review on December 14, 1887 under the title ‘Un Amant de Nos Jours’—which translates to ‘A Lover of Our Time’.1
The first point to note is that ‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’ appeared when Wilde was an infrequent poet; so it is reasonable to infer it must have been written at a time that aroused some particular feeling. And, as relationships are clearly invoked, the marital context for Wilde was that by 1887 Constance had begun to lose her charm for Oscar and, after the recent birth of their second son, sexual relations between the two never resumed.2
It is perhaps no coincidence that it was around this time—in fact during Constance’s second pregnancy—that Wilde is generally understood to have embarked upon same-sex relationships. So our first suspicion is that the poem may signify a rite of passage.
This perspective would be coincident with Robert Ross’s stay of several months at Wilde’s home in Tite Street in 1887, and the likely time of Wilde’s ‘Swan & Edgar moment’ when he went shopping with Constance and saw rent boys soliciting on the pavement in Piccadilly Circus. ‘Something clutched at my heart like ice’, he said.3
In other words, the poem came at the point of Wilde’s self-realisation.
Thus, the poem’s subtext may be an acknowledgment of sexual reorientation—an idea congruent with Neil McKenna’s homoerotic reading of the poem.4
why the court and society review?
The Court and Society Review would have been appropriate place for Wilde’s love poem. It is worth noting, as Nicholas Frankel informs us, that the publication often became a medium for commenting on the state of what George Meredith termed ‘modern love’,5 indeed it had originally been launched in July 1884 as Orange Blossoms: A Marriage Chronicle.6 Frankel describes the magazine as ‘an important stepping stone’ for Wilde whose ‘contributions…in some ways foreshadow the critique of marriage that runs through his society comedies of the 1890s’, and who was able to use it as ‘a medium for imagining a new sexual era…of relative sexual freedom’.7
Nor should the appearance of the poem in The Court and Society Review come as a surprise. Wilde had a close relationship with the magazine’s editor, Alsager Vian, and he offered him many different pieces.8 In 1887 ‘The Canterville Ghost’ had appeared on February 23 and March 2; and ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ on May 11, 18 and 25, in addition to several reviews of books, exhibitions and plays. ‘Un Amant de Nos Jours’ appeared in the double Christmas issue on December 14, 1887 and was Wilde’s last contribution to the publication before it closed in June 1888.9
why the french title?
The French title could have been a symptom of high society Francophilia or a literary homage to French decadents.
But perhaps its purpose was to veil the poem’s meaning. This would probably have been intentional considering the graphic conflation of religious and sensual allusions, and would have augmented the poem’s already elusive quality. All of this might explain why the poem had received little scholarly attention prompting my analysis in the second article in this series.
In the last two articles in this series (Three Times Tried II and III) I shall describe the poem’s reappearance when it was given to Alfred Douglas in 1891, and again to Christian Gauss in 1899.
© John Cooper, 2025.
Footnotes:
- Mason, 23
↩︎ - Implied by remarks made by Constance’s brother Otho. See McKenna, 86-7. ↩︎
- Wilde recounted this to Reginald Turner who wrote about it in a letter to A. J. A. Symons, 26 August 1935. (William Andrews Clark Memorial Library & Ellmann, 258) ↩︎
- McKenna, 85–8 ↩︎
- Modern Love (1862) by George Meredith is a collection of fifty sonnets about the failure of his first marriage. Thanks to Nicholas Frankel for drawing this to my attention. ↩︎
- The title changed to The Court and Society Review in October 1885, ↩︎
- Frankel, 92, 95 ↩︎
- Mead, The Wildean 38. In 2010 an auction house in Derby announced the sale of five letters from Oscar Wilde to Alsager Vian, two of which had not been published before. Selective quotations were used to give the impression that Wilde was in passionate pursuit of Vian, who was only twenty-four – very young for a magazine editor. Don Mead and Merlin Holland, amongst others, objected to the way in which the text of the letters had been altered in such a way as to spice them up (Mead & Holland, 13-17). ↩︎
- Mead, 6-10. Amongst other pieces, ‘The American Invasion’ appeared on 23 March; ‘The Child Philosopher’ on 20 April; ‘The Rout of the R.A.’ on 27 April; and ‘Should Geniuses Meet?’ on 4 May. ↩︎
Works Cited In This Series
Joseph Bristow (2022) ‘Hyacinthe Adoré: The Spirit Lamp and Male Homoerotic Culture’, The Wildean, 60, January 2022, 37-60
Anya Clayworth (2004) Oscar Wilde: Selected Journalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Rupert Croft-Cooke (1963) Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies, London: W. H. Allen
Alfred Douglas (1929) The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, London: Martin Secker
Richard Ellmann (1987) Oscar Wilde, London: Hamish Hamilton
Nicholas Frankel (2014) ‘A New Poem by Christina Rossetti’, Notes and Queries, Volume 259, Number 1, March 2014, 92–95
Christian Gauss (1934) A Primer for Tomorrow: Being an Introduction to Contemporary Civilisation, New York and London: Charles Scribner and Sons
Josephine Guy (1998) ‘Self-plagiarism, Creativity and Craftmanship in Oscar Wilde’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 41, no. 1 (2005) ‘Oscar Wilde’s “Self Plagiarism”: Some New Manuscript Evidence’, Notes and Queries, December 2005, 485-8
George S. Hellmann (1952) ‘An Early Poem by Dean Gauss’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 13, no. 4, summer 1952, 195-7
Merlin Holland (2011) ‘A Blatant Attempt to Sensationalise’, The Wildean, 38, January 2011, 15-17
Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis (eds, 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, London: Fourth Estate
Katherine Gauss Jackson and Hiram Haydn(1957) The Papers of Christian Gauss, New York: Random House
Neil McKenna (2003) The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, London: Century
Gregory Mackie (2019) Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife, Toronto: Toronto University Press
J. Robert Maguire(2013) Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker and the Dreyfus Affair, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Stuart Mason (Christopher Sclater Millard) (1914) Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, London: T. Werner Laurie
Donald Mead (2011) ‘Oscar Wilde, Alsager Vian and The Court and Society Review’, The Wildean, 38, January 2011, 6-14
Jeffrey Meyers (2003) Edmund Wilson, A Biography, Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin
A Murray (2016) ‘The Dance of Death: Fitzgerald and Decadence’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, 387-411.
Ruth Robbins (2011) Oscar Wilde, India: Bloomsbury Academic
Matthew Sturgis (2018) Oscar: A Life, London: Head of Zeus
Oscar Wilde (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Volume 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Edmund Wilson (1952) ‘Portrait: Christian Gauss’, The American Scholar, vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer 1952) 345-55
Thomas Wright (2008) Oscar’s Books, London: Chatto & Windus
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the perspectives and information offered during discussion of these articles by Nicholas Frankel, Michael Seeney, and Mark Samuels Lasner. With thanks to Robert Whelan, editor of The Wildean, and the helpful textual suggestions of its anonymous peer reviewers, who assisted with the original article.
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