William Theodore Peters

The stereotype of 1890s decadence was perhaps best expressed in the introduction to The Letters of Ernest Dowson (1967) which described the movement thus:

… idle, penurious, drunken, promiscuous, living with its head in a cloud of artistic ambition but doing little towards its achievement, tempted towards drugs and perversion, often addicted to them, producing exquisitely fashioned small works, but doomed, after material failure, to an early death.¹

The editors responsible for that definition did concede it was a little too familiar, perhaps being perpetuated by survivors of the period, such as Arthur Symons and Frank Harris, who were eager to convince others of their own wicked youth.

But whatever the prescription may be, there is no denying that the American poet William Theodore Peters had all the symptoms, and more besides, suggesting that he might be the ultimate 1890s decadent.

Consider the case history of his credentials:

Firstly, Peters was resolutely qualified as a quintessential minor poet.

Although his slight verse was occasionally preserved in the short-lived American expatriate venture The Quartier Latin², (which supported the American literary colony in Paris) it was just as likely to be found discarded in the columns of yesterday’s newspapers.

Nevertheless, such “feeble straining” at poetry as Matthew Sturgis once put it, did not prevent Peters from producing the decadent prerequisite of an “exquisitely fashioned small work”.

This duly appeared in 1896 in the form of a dainty book of verse that evoked the title Posies Out of Rings. Naturally, it was published by John Lane under his decadent-friendly imprint of the Bodley Head, along with a title page designed by Patten Wilson.

To be fair to Peters, his fanciful expressions in Posies do not aspire to the intensity of poetry. They are, as the subtitle suggests, merely Conceits, which Bernard Muddiman, in a review of Peters, characterized as “harking back, not always satisfactorily, to the ancient form of the versified epigram.”³

ON THE EMBANKMENT.
The impassive stony Sphinx kissed by the amorous moon;
The little coster-girl, a Covent Garden rose;
Three thousand years apart ! And yet alike for once in this,—
To-night, each has a secret she will not disclose.

Fulfilling an essential French connection, Peters also devised a one-act play called Le Tournoy d’Amour. Consistent with his own obscurity, it is possibly the only drama ever set in an almond orchard in 1498—particularly one with a Doric temple in it.

The heroine of the piece is Clémence Isaure, the mythical presenter of poetic games and floral prizes. The Pall Mall Magazine at the time described the court scene as a nest of cynical and blasé poets given over to the cult of Oscar Wilde.⁴

In this self-styled “pastoral masque”, which he produced in Paris, Peters is Bertrand de Roaix, a medieval troubadour with big hair and a decorative cloak. Despite his outré courtship, the love-stricken Bertrand manages to triumph in the titular Tournament of Love—but the fickle Clémence proves too jaded and the minstrel must end it all tragically by his own hand. Apparently not too many critics regretted his demise, with one reviewer saying that Peters had done himself justice having died already in rehearsal.

But fortunately, the celebrated cloak lived on—and so seductive were its velvety embroideries that Ernest Dowson dedicated an entire poem to it. [Exhibit 1]

And speaking of Ernest Dowson, the only dramatic work that Dowson himself ever produced was written specifically for Peters to enact.

It was a two-hander titled Pierrot of the Minute in which our boyish clown with his sad, white-painted face woos the immortal moon maiden—but again with foreseeable fatalism:

Whom once the moon has kissed, loves long and late,
Yet never finds the maid to be his mate.

In attendance at the London debut of Peters’s Pierrot was the Dorianesque John Gray. And, equally needless to say, the play was brought out by that great emancipator of the decadents Leonard Smithers with illustrations, of course, by Aubrey Beardsley. [Exhibit 2]

Peters was perforce also well connected to the Rhymers’ Club being a “permanent guest” at their gatherings at ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Fleet Street—a literary watering hole since it was built after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

The Rhymers’ Club, founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys, was patronized by the tragic generation including Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, John Gray, John Davidson, Alfred Douglas, Selwyn Image, and others.

They would meet in a dingy upstairs room, and were joined by Oscar Wilde on occasions when they met more pleasantly, and less publicly, elsewhere.

Having invoked Wilde, we can see how the enigma of Peters was enhanced by his relationship to the 1890s doyen of decadence. His claims to Wilde are certainly unique, for who else could say that:

—he conducted a long, published interview with the Wildes at their Tite Street home which appeared under the heading of ‘Oscar Wilde at Home’ in a Chicago newspaper;⁵

—he had his portrait hanging in Oscar’s drawing room, as recounted by Robert Sherard who knew Wilde’s home and wrote several biographies of him; [Exhibit 3]

—he was one of the few people who had the grace to attend Wilde’s funeral. [Exhibit 4]

In obligatory decadent fashion, Peters himself lived and (of course, like Wilde) died young in Paris—possibly of starvation, probably of Bright’s Disease⁶, but in any event in poverty.

RE PETERS:

I first referenced the featured image of William Theodore Peters while conducting research for the Oscar Wilde Society in 2021 (see Intentions No. 120). The photograph is by Eustace Calland and is taken from the Photoseed archive showing the original plate in the portfolio of The Photo-Club de Paris’ first exhibition in 1894.

The photograph was reproduced the same year in The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art. That magazine can be seen here and here with variations noted in all the repeated images (above) owing to printing methods, the tilt of the photograph, and possible retouching.

Photoseed describes this picture as “possibly being the sole surviving image known of Mr. William Theodore Peters.”

Until now. I have recently found two other rarer images of Peters which will feature in forthcoming articles.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Exhibits:

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Footnotes:

1. The Letters of Ernest Dowson: Collected and edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas Rutherford, England: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1967. ↩︎
2. A magazine devoted to the arts, published monthly from 1896 until 1899. It was compiled in Paris by the American Art Association of Paris, an organization of American expatriates, [Wikipedia] ↩︎
3. Bernard Muddiman, The Men of the Nineties (G, P. Putnam, New York, 1921). 97. ↩︎
4. The Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. 4 September to December, 1894. 352. ↩︎
5. Peters, W. T., ‘Oscar Wilde at Home’, The Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), 16 Dec. 1894, 31, repr. Marland, R. (Ed.) (2022) Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews, Jena: Little Eye, 617–21. repr. Intentions (Oscar Wilde Society newsletter), February 2022. ↩︎
6. A historical classification of kidney diseases that are described in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis. Other people of the period diagnosed with Bright’s disease include Emily Dickinson, Helena Modjeska, Gregor Mendel, Howard Pyle, Henry Hobson Richardson, Mathew B. Brady, and the President of the United States when Oscar Wilde arrived there in 1882, Chester A. Arthur. [Wikipedia ↩︎

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