Basil Ward

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If you are new to the myth of Basil Ward see my previous articles:
Basil Hallward and Faulty Basil

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So far in our investigation of Basil Ward we have reached A. R. Keller & Co. and its uniform collection The Writings of Oscar Wilde (1907).

This is where the Basil Ward story first appeared in book form. It seemed fair to pause at that point because previous biographers could reasonably have looked in Keller for his existence—although none did.

But the researcher’s mantra is to keep digging and the question remained: where did A. R. Keller & Co. get the story from?

A. R. Keller & Co. (1907)

It seemed unlikely to me that Keller would have fabricated the story. Their business model was plagiarism not creative writing, so it was worth looking for an even earlier source. But the field was narrowing.

By now in our timeline we were back to 1907, and so quite close to where Basil Ward had mutated from the original Basil Hallward preface in the Charterhouse Press edition of Dorian Gray in 1904.

It made sense to focus on the only other entity known to be involved during that interval: Brentano’s. If you recall, Brentano’s was the publisher that had taken over Charterhouse and issued its own edition in 1906.

Brentano’s (1906)

Brentano’s was not, by reputation, a pirate publisher and its Dorian Gray of 1906 is best understood as an inherited oddity. Brentano’s simply reproduced the Charterhouse text along with the preface by “Basil Hallward”.

Consequently, there was no still no sign of Basil Ward.

But when one is approaching a dead end it makes sense to slow down. The next step needed to be incremental.

It occurred to me that new books need to be promoted and Brentano’s, as a Fifth Avenue house with a network for advance publicity, would have issued press releases for their Dorian Gray.

Of course, newspaper editors might not necessarily have wished to feature a reprint of a fifteen-year-old novel by an author whose name was still a delicate matter. But some did, and some also referred to the frontispiece illustration purporting to be the artist’s original painting. None of these press notices, however, altered the identification of the artist. Except one.

The Indianapolis News (June 1906)

Only one newspaper report preceding the Keller edition has been found to date that mentions Basil Ward.

In its issue of June 9, 1906, The Indianapolis News carried a notice saying that Brentano’s new definitive edition of Dorian Gray “is to have a preface by Mr Basil Ward, the painter, who tells us how the novel came to be written”.

With this article The Indianapolis News previewed a book with a preface by “Basil Hallward” that had no mention of Basil Ward—and gave us the precise opposite. Evidently, this is the birthplace of Basil Ward.

How did this come about? And why only in midwest Indianapolis?

This latter point is less curious than it might seem. Unlike hard news, book notices were not wire copy in 1906—they tended to be locally produced. The extent of a newspaper’s book coverage was subject to the literary leanings of the publication. And it seems The News had a spirited book editor for it unusually carried a full page Saturday feature titled Review of the New Books.

The News also had a New York office enabling it to pick up early gossip about the book. Significantly, the date of the article precedes other press notices as well as the printed announcements.

Accordingly, from the future tense of the wording “it is announced” and “is to have” we can infer that they did not yet have a copy of of the book.

All of this suggests that The News received the story by word-of-mouth and transcribed what it was told the preface would say.

Whether the Hallward-to-Ward corruption was a result of misinterpretation or misrepresentation we might never know. Our spirited book editor could have been more spirited than we imagined; or he may simply have been hard of hearing.

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Finally we need to return to A. R. Keller & Co.

The essay on Dorian Gray in the Keller edition (see my article Faulty Basil) appeared about a year after The Indianapolis News story.

Examining the text of the essay is revealing. Keller tracks Basil Ward from The News which we know the Brentano’s book does not contain. But it also uses wording that could only have come from Brentano’s book, which we know The News had not yet seen.

The conclusion is that the Keller editors must have had both the book and the newspaper article, and knew what they were doing. They could have explained the discrepancy but chose to synthesize the two sources. There was some immunity in this because the archness of the whole “Basil Hallward” puffery suggests the name could be read as an alias for a real unnamed painter.

In any event, the laundering of the story into the biographical record really begins here, and were it not for A. R. Keller & Co., “Basil Ward” might have died in Indianapolis.

© John Cooper, 2026.

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Footnotes:

1. Other newspaper reports of the edition carried similar claims from the publisher:
   —”frontispiece of the portrait by Basil Hallward that inspired the story” (The Inter Ocean, May 12, 1906, 5.
   —”there is a reproduction of the portrait that is said to have inspired the tale” (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 12, 1906, 5.— ↩︎
2. Nickerson, Charles C. (Professor of English Emeritus, Bridgewater State University). ‘”Vivian Grey” and “Dorian Gray””, TLS, August 14, 1969, p. 909

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Breantano’s Announcements

Brentano’s printed announcements which came after The Indianapolis News story make no mention of Basil Ward.

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