Category: Article

Article

About Face

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The Howard Coster photographs of Alfred Douglas
At the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Speaking of Alfred Douglas, as we were in the latest article about Three Times Tried, he came onto my radar recently during the festive period.

You may recall a minor kerfuffle last year about various errors in a label to an Oscar Wilde photograph at the National Portrait Gallery in London, that I highlighted and which were subsequently corrected. So perhaps to atone for that censure, I decided to visit the gallery’s online shop for gift-giving ideas.

I alighted upon four interesting and lesser-known images of the noble Lord—part of a collection of photographs taken in the 1940s by the renowned celebrity photographer Howard Coster.1

There was a problem, however.

It’s pedantic, I know, but didn’t somebody once say: we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously.

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Article

Three Times Tried—II

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From The Spirt Lamp, Vol. 2 No. 4. December 6, 1892.

The New Remorse

Fourth in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.

Previous articles in this series

  1. A handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde appears on the Antiques Roadshow,
  2. A critical analysis of the poem.
  3. Three Times Tried—I: The poem’s first appearance as Un Amant De Nos Jours.

In this article we shall look at the second appearance of Wilde’s sonnet in 1892.

As had been the case with its first publication, five years earlier in The Court and Society Review, it was Wilde’s probable intention for the sentiment to herald a new romantic interest.

On this occasion, the poem reemerged shortly after he met his preeminent male paramour Lord Alfred Douglas—who was to become Wilde’s lover and a consequential influence over his life, work, and eventual fate—indeed the poem was republished by Douglas himself not long after Wilde had presented it to him.

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Article

Three Times Tried—I

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The poem as it appeared in The Court and Society Review, 1877.
Image courtesy of the Master and Fellows of University College Oxford: Ross b.9 (3).

Un Amant De Nos Jours

Third in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.

In the first article in this series we saw how a handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde, which came to light during a 2015 edition of the Antiques Roadshow, was making its third appearance in Wilde’s life—again with the probable intention of heralding a new love interest.

In this article we shall look briefly at the poem’s first appearance in 1887 at a crucial time during Wilde’s marriage to his wife Constance.

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Article

Double Take III

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THE HILLS ARE ALIKE
Another match in the Hills & Saunders photographs of Oscar Wilde.

You will recall the article Double Take II which featured the Hills & Saunders photographs of Oscar Wilde and his fellow students taken at Magdalen College. In that article I identified five “pairs” of photographs alluding to the fact there are TWO similar versions of each photograph taken a few seconds apart [see Repeating Back below].

There was, however, another photograph for which I concluded there was no known counterpart.

Now, thanks to the astute eye and memory of fellow Wilde scholar Rob Marland, we can reveal a match for that photograph as well.

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Article

Oscar Wilde Poem — Analyzed

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The Yet Unravished Roses Of Thy Mouth

Second in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.

In the first article in this series we saw how a handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde titled ‘Ideal Love’ had come to light during a 2015 edition of the U.S. version of Antiques Roadshow. No not at all but thank you for your interest

Wilde had signed and dedicated the poem to an American journalist named Christian Gauss—a young man with whom he had become acquainted during his exile in Paris. But the poem was not new. Wilde had presented the same poem to a former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, eight years earlier as ‘The New Remorse’.1 And four years before he met Douglas. he had already published it obscurely under the French title ‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’ (A Lover of Our Time) in the short-lived, literary magazine The Court and Society Review.2

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Article

Oscar Wilde Poem — Video

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THREE TIMES TRIED

First in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.

The above appraisal is from a 2015 edition of the U.S. version of Antiques Roadshow and features a handwritten document by Oscar Wilde dating from 1899 which had recently come to light.1

The item is a single page containing a complete manuscript sonnet, which Wilde also signed and dedicated to an American journalist named Christian Gauss—a young man with whom he had become acquainted during his post-prison exile in Paris.

Everything we know about the document, from the visual evidence and provenance of its inherited ownership, to accounts of Wilde’s encounters with Gauss and other gifts he made to him, attests to its authenticity.

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Article

Web Sight (unseen)

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The Guggenheim Photographs
of Oscar Wilde and Friends

Including a recovered photograph of Oscar Wilde.

In a recent article I featured the university photographs of Oscar Wilde taken by Hills and Saunders.

Now it is the turn of another Oxford photographer, J. Guggenheim, whose photographs include one which, I believe, has never before appeared online.

The full photograph is shown below.

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Article · News

Divided Opinion

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Civic Monument or Public Art?

All statues are sculpted, but not all sculptures are statues.

A bronze bust titled ‘The Head of Oscar Wilde’ was installed recently on Dovehouse Green—a small London park not far from where Wilde lived in Tite Street, Chelsea,

It is a posthumous work by the Scottish sculptor and graphic artist, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924—2005), made possible by a charitable foundation to mark the centenary of his birth, and its unveiling was also timed appropriately to occur on Oscar Wilde’s birthday.

The physical configuration of the piece renders our man of letters as a fallen and fractured figure. Metaphor this may be—but, absent a meaningful reading, its composition is inclined to suggest itself, ironically, as a symbol of divided opinion.

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Article

Double Take II

Oscar Wilde Blog7 Comments

The Hills & Saunders Photographs
of Oscar Wilde and Friends

The current exhibition of Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College prompts me to extend an idea begun last year in an article titled Double Take—in which I featured two similar photographs by Hills & Saunders of Oscar Wilde and his fellow students at Magdalen.

That article highlighted only one of the series; now we take a look at the other known examples.

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Article

Faith

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THIS WAS THEIR LIFE

“Stand together yet not too near together…
The oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

In this recent article we saw how Compton Mackenzie, after unveiling the blue plaque at Oscar Wilde’s home in Tite Street, proceeded to fictionalize the pressures of leading a closeted life in an era of homosexual oppression with his novel Thin Ice (1956).

Ironically for Compton Mackenzie himself, that lifestyle was no fiction—it was a life that he and his wife knew only too well.

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