Late Victorians began to contemplate a bold, astonishing idea: that perhaps women might simply be free to dress… freely.
Continue reading “Oscar Wilde On Dress (2025)”
Oscar Wilde On Dress (2025)
Continue reading “Oscar Wilde On Dress (2025)”
Tag: 19th century
Continue reading “Oscar Wilde On Dress (2025)”
On Dress
Oscar Wilde On Dress
Now in a New Updated and Expanded Artisan Edition.
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.
Continue reading “On Dress”Making (Up) Oscar Wilde
“Making Oscar Wilde” by Michèle Mendelssohn
Oxford University Press (2018)
—Reviewed by: John Cooper—
As its title suggests, Making Oscar Wilde is an attempt to establish a premise for the shaping of Oscar Wilde’s persona—the latest in a history of such perspectives which has included disquisitions of his Irish roots, his American experience, his men, his women, his friends, his enemies, his wit, his letters, his published works, his unpublished works, his recorded life, his unrecorded life, and, for good measure, his legacy after life.
Now Michèle Mendelssohn takes a potentially useful and probably unique view through the prism of Wilde’s racial profile. On surface reading the work has much to commend it—but to discover whether it works as a construction we will have to disassemble it.
Continue reading “Making (Up) Oscar Wilde”Oscar Wilde on Irish Poets
Oscar Wilde’s lecture in San Francisco on Irish Poets
As San Francisco was the only city in America where Wilde lectured four times, he needed an additional lecture to add to the three he was already giving, which were: The English Renaissance, its evolutionary successor The Decorative Arts, and his usual alternative The House Beautiful.
[See Lecture Titles for the development of Wilde’s lecture topics].
Wilde chose as his subject Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (referred to in some texts as The Irish Poets of ’48), an idea he had hinted at on St.Patrick’s Day in St.Paul, where he made a rare expression of Irish nationalist sentiment.
On that earlier occasion in St. Paul Wilde was called upon to give only an impromptu speech, and he talked in general terms about Irish achievement and how the English occupation had arrested, but not dimmed, the development of Irish art.
Now in San Francisco he created a full lecture1, in which he focused on an aspect of the arts closer to his knowledge and his mother’s heart: nineteenth century Irish poetry.
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