🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
“The Best Franc’s Worth I Ever Had”.
As noted in my recent article Last Rites, Oscar Wilde died in the Hôtel d’Alsace on the Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris, on November 30, 1900. One of the few people present on that occasion was Robert Ross.
Continue reading “Robert Ross”
Feasting With The Greeks
The pathways of the poets are often traversed by dreamers destined to wake up one day to the dangers of the real world.
One such idealist in Victorian London was Oscar Wilde who, in the homophobic 1890s, was often to be found obliviously “feasting with panthers”1 in fashionable restaurants such as Kettner’s.
Continue reading “Dream World”
“it is not in my system to moralize, [or] to abandon a friend”
Le Havre is a French port city on the English Channel at the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy—which is where one might expect it to be located given that Le Havre means “the harbor”.
What might also be self-evident is that when Alfred Douglas visited this pleasant coastal resort, in August 1895, it was not long before he became combative with the local press.
Continue reading “The Friend of Oscar Wilde”
The day before he died.
Oscar Wilde died at ten minutes to 2 PM on November 30th, 1900. We know this from a detailed letter, citing the precise time of death, written by Robert Ross who was with Wilde when he died.1 But less certain is what happened immediately before and after that moment.
Continue reading “Last Rites”
Oscar Wilde on Dress
by John Cooper
If you missed my Dress Lecture given on December 6 or wish to view it again (!) the Victorian Society in America has extended availability until January 3, 2026.
Continue reading “Fashion Statement”
Summer’s loss seems little…on days like these.
In October 1892, Ernest Dowson wrote to his friend Victor Plarr1 to say:
“My muse awoke from her torpor of many months yesterday, here is her feeble utterance, but she may run to another verse by and by.”
Oscar Wilde on Dress
by John Cooper
DATE: Saturday, December 6 at 2pm EST
(Eastern Standard Time in the US is five hours behind GMT)
Click here to Register: Zoom Webinar.
Welcome to the sixth season of online lectures presented by the Victorian Society in America inspired by their internationally-acclaimed Summer Schools.
This season’s speakers will address a wide variety of subjects including Los Angeles in the Victorian era, the evolution of resort architecture, Oscar Wilde’s philosophy on dress and fashion, a behind-the-scenes look at the preservation of Gilded Age Newport, the Saturday Evening Girls’ club and the Paul Revere Pottery, and the work of British preservationist and architectural historian Gavin Stamp.
Continue reading “Dress Lecture”
No, not that White House. But still topical because, coincidentally, Merlin Holland’s new book, Oscar Wilde, The Legacy of a Scandal, tells of a spat between another Whitehouse and the BBC—and a group of perverse individuals.
Continue reading “End of the Innocence”
Merlin Holland’s new retrospective of the societal and family legacy of Oscar Wilde has been over two decades in the making—which is understandable given the research necessary to counter what Holland describes as “…one of the longest continuous acts of hypocrisy in British history.”
The result is a historical accounting that alternates between biography and autobiography into a 700 page feat of storytelling.
Continue reading “After Oscar”
Various Likenesses of William Theodore Peters
Including a Discovered Sketch
The young and ill-fated American poet William Theodore Peters was integral to the clique of 1890s British decadents. One fact upholding this claim is that even the doyen of the movement, Oscar Wilde, had a portrait of him hanging in his Tite Street drawing room.
But which portrait of Peters was it?
Continue reading “Peters Portraits”