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Author: Oscar Wilde Blog
John Cooper is a researcher, author, and documentary historian who has spent 30 years in the study of Oscar Wilde. He is a long-standing member of the Oscar Wilde Society and a former manager of the Victorian Society In America.
For the last 25 years John has specialized in Wilde’s 1882 U.S. lecture tour becoming a consultant on Wilde’s American experience to biographers and the wider media.
John also lectures on Wilde and has conducted new and unique research into Oscar Wilde visits to New York, and rediscovered Wilde's essay The Philosophy Of Dress that forms the centerpiece to his book Oscar Wilde On Dress (2013).
Materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Photo: University of Delaware Library.
Exhibition and Symposium
Mark Samuels Lasner has long been recognized as an authority on the literature and art of the late Victorian era. He is also a collector, bibliographer, typographer, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library.
To those offices he can now add the honorific of benefactor.
For recently Mark donated his private library, the extensive Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, to the University of Delaware. It has been housed since 2004 in the Morris Library, and now becomes largest and most important gift of its kind in the university’s history.
If I am to find Wildean relevance in topical US culture, there is a latter-day Nellie the Elephant in the room. And before proceeding, I should explain that twisted metaphor for the uninitiated.
I refer to the UK children’s novelty song entitled Nellie the Elephant and in particular to the eponymous pachyderm who was celebrated in the oft-repeated chorus for going off with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, TRUMP! “Trump” apparently being the sound an elephant makes.
And trump, like any other annoying refrain stuck in one’s head, it’s a word currently hard to ignore. So reluctantly I must face it—the capitalized version that is—before we send in the clowns and say goodbye to the circus that is becoming politics in America.
Here is some America TV footage I recently discovered of Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland.
It is in the form of an interview alongside Brian Reade, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, during a segment on the CBS TV arts program Camera Three about a V&A Aubrey Beardsley exhibition which had transferred to New York’s (then-named) Gallery of Modern Art.
The rare TV showing was a opportunity for Vyvyan to rival his more media savvy wife, Thelma, who had made her latest appearance on American TV earlier in the month discussing fashion on the ABC show Girl Talk.
It provides a chance to see Vyvyan’s unassuming manner as he reveals personal experiences such as shooting moose and witnessing a bedridden bearded Beardsley. [this latter story was deemed a fabrication by Vyvyan’s son Merlin Holland in his retrospective After Oscar (2025), pp. 427/8.]
I recall learning the word polyonymous from this Word-a-Day web site—it means having many names. It resonates because I always suspected Oscar of being a confirmed and secret polyonymist, freely dispensing with at least three of his five birth names which he considered too much ballast for the heights he soared, and then changing his name altogether when he came back down to earth.
When we think of the name Douglas in connection with Oscar Wilde we usually have in mind Oscar’s golden lover-Boy of that ilk—we do not necessarily conjure up visions of the rugged American screen legend, Kirk Douglas.
But today there are two reasons why we should.
First, it is actor Kirk‘s 100th birthday; so congratulations to him.
Second, we need to turn to Kirk because our theme is self-sacrifice, and it’s difficult to imagine the lordly Alfred, that over-privileged lily of lilies, sacrificing anything never mind imagining him as an enslaved gladiator—which we need to do, as therein lies our story.
Expanding on comments made as a member of a panel discussion at the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway, Ireland, 2014.
by John Cooper
(I) RISE AND FALL
Finding Oscar Wilde during his lecture tour of America in 1882 presented few difficulties. Throughout the year he made hundreds of appearances in public and thousands in the press. But his transatlantic sojourn was not merely prolific, it was a surprisingly formative time that saw Wildean firsts in all aspects of his career. Professionally, he nurtured the art of public speaking, began lecturing, and conducted his first press interviews. In his personal life he entered a new sphere of poets, writers, and statesmen; and he embarked upon a lifelong pattern of occasionally earning, but of always spending, large sums of money. Creatively, he became increasingly familiar with formulating his thought into thesis, while socially he was gathering material and honing epigrams for use in his early essays, short stories, and dramatic dialogues. Perhaps most surprisingly, it was in America that he staged the first ever production of a Wilde play.1 And lastingly, it was in New York City that the predominant image we have of him was formed with a series of photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony. After America, one might say, Oscar had become famous for more than just being famous.
Not surprisingly, given this degree of exposure and experience, contemporary opinion was that America had made a greater impression on Wilde than vice-versa. Supporting this view is the fact that his audiences, although they had attended his lectures, came to see rather than to hear him; and even though he was often personally liked, he was more often publicly ridiculed. Wilde’s maligned persona was so widespread that the ability to locate him in the abstract sense, even for those who had not seen him, also presented few difficulties. In sum: the breadth of his presence made Wilde familiar in person, and the stereotype of his character provided the measure of him as a personality.
We now see that Wilde cannot be so easily pigeon-holed.
Below is an excerpt from Current Literature—a journal of the Current Literature Publishing Co. (New York) which published monthly periodicals from 1888 to 1912.
No longer a theater, it may have been just another empty converted office building symbolic of a Midwest hollowed out by recession, but it was still there. Unlike so many of the Wilde’s lecture venues which were lost to fire in gaslit days, surely, one thought, this building had survived that fate.
Gutted
But no, and here’s what makes the loss a little more personal.
Just a day earlier I had been discussing which city from Wilde’s lecture tour that I would most like to visit. No kidding. I said St Joseph, Missouri. One reason was that both Wilde’s hotel and lecture theater were extant, and very few cities that can boast that—although there is one fewer now.
Philadelphia Library Acquires Rare Typescript of “De Profundis”
On a balmy Sunday lunchtime last Spring I found m yself in the refreshment area of the prestigious New York Antiquarian Book Fair. A kindly stranger asked me: “Are you a dealer or a collector?” with an air of inevitability that suggested a third alternative did not exist. As I was such a third alternative my response: “I’m just browsing.” was designed to replace the probability of being neither with the possibility of being either.
However, it soon became apparent to me, if not to my new friend, that even the self-imposed rank of ‘browser‘ wildly overstated my standing as a potential customer.
