Oscar Wilde’s Lecture Tour 1882 A New Landing Page
On his lecture tour of North America Oscar Wilde conducted 141 lectures over 11 months of 1882.
Now with a new landing page by digital creator Jon Darby, these lecture tour pages document a detailed, comprehensive, and accurate record of Wilde’s tour.
Each lecture has its own page dedicated to illustrating the lecture with details of the date, location, subject, lecture venue, and Wilde’s lodging, along with related ephemera—the standard being that all information is verified by primary sources.
My recent article The ‘Jeweled Style’ focused on the literary device of that name “in which authors created jewel-like effects by the ordering and juxtaposition of individual elements”.1 And I noted how Lord Alfred Douglas and the poet Charles Kains Jackson had found the stylistic practice present in Oscar Wilde’s writing.
To those two observers I can now add the novelist and short story writer Angus Wilson: a kindred soul who used the same expression about Wilde’s prose over 60 years later, when he wrote:
“It is in his jewelled phrases, his poetic prose that Wilde leaves logic and abstraction behind…”
Angus Wilson was an interesting character and not a little ornate himself.
Back in 2012 I rediscovered Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Philosophy of Dress” and published it the following year in a limited hardback bibliophile edition. That publication represented the essay’s first appearance in book form, and the first posthumous release of a lost work by Wilde.
I am now pleased to introduce the book in an updated and expanded softcover artisan edition.
David and Jonathan: “La Somme le Roi”, AD 1290 French illuminated manuscript (detail); British Museum
“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan…
Oscar Wilde
The sentiment “I am the love that dare not speak its name” comes from the poem “Two Loves” by Alfred Douglas, which debuted in the only issue of the Oxford university magazine The Chameleon in 1894. It appeared alongside other same-sex verse and a notorious love story by John Bloxam titled “The Priest and the Acolyte.”
Oscar Wilde had been prevailed upon to also support The Chameleon and he obligingly furnished the publication with a series of witty “Phrases And Philosophy For Use Of The Young.” Despite these aphorisms being tame compared with the rest of the issue, and constituting only three out of the 60 pages, it suited Wilde’s detractors to associate him with the content of the magazine as a whole.
Whether there was any actual homoerotic alignment among the contributors in private can be debated; what is certain is that it was not an alliance Wilde would have wanted aired in open court.
Unfortunately for Oscar, that is precisely what happened.
“No man in modern times has dared to dress as he pleased, except Oscar Wilde…”
The commentary below appeared in a fashion issue of Life magazine in 1916. It is styled as the “manly confession” of a sentiment still so unmanly that its exemplar was Oscar Wilde, sixteen years after his death.
Unsurprisingly, it appeared above an amusingly transparent pseudonym in keeping with the light-hearted tone of the magazine.
And yet, given its reference to the “craven hisses” that greeted Wilde’s demise and the condemnation of cowardice, I suspect a little earnest belief lay hidden in plain sight.
William Cody (Buffalo Bill) and Oscar Wilde [See cartoon at the foot of the page]
The Fiction of the Wilde West
Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!
The American expression “horse feathers” is a quaint riposte of contemptuous disbelief to foolish or untrue claims deemed to be as unlikely as feathers on a horse.
Oscar meant this kindly—he favored the folklore of the American frontier, and as we know, often welcomed the opportunity for the facts and fiction of his life to become conflated. As Jan Wellington observed in the article Oscar Wilde’s West: “Wilde and the West were myths in process.”
In this article we shall see how those old myths were eventually processed into modern fiction.
The Spirit Lamp was an Oxford University magazine of the 1890s described by the Pall Mall Gazette at the time as “free from the narrowness and banality which mark the greater part of English university literature and has a pleasing air of cultured bohemianism.”1
The magazine ran to 15 issues in total and became associated with Oscar Wilde—particularly the last six which were edited by Alfred Douglas during whose tenure the “cultured bohemianism” evolved into decadent homoeroticism.
