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Basil Ward

August 12, 2026August 12, 2026 Oscar Wilde BlogLeave a comment

If you are new to the myth of Basil Ward see my previous articles:
Basil Hallward and Faulty Basil

So far in our investigation of Basil Ward we have reached A. R. Keller & Co. and its uniform collection The Writings of Oscar Wilde (1907).

This is where the Basil Ward story first appeared in book form. It seemed fair to pause at that point because previous biographers could reasonably have looked in Keller for his existence—although none did.

But the researcher’s mantra is to keep digging and the question remained: where did A. R. Keller & Co. get the story from?

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Article

Faulty Basil

July 24, 2026August 9, 2026 Oscar Wilde BlogLeave a comment

My recent article Basil Hallward showed how Charterhouse Press in the era of unauthorized publications added a preposterous preface to their 1904 edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

To summarize: their idea with this so-called “Artist’s Preface” was to pass off the novel’s fictional painter, Basil Hallward, as a real person who in 1884 had known Wilde and a Radiant Youth—a “Dorian” prototype—and this meeting was supposedly the origin of Wilde’s novel released six years later.

The problem with the preface, apart from its implausibility, was that it would be slightly more plausible had it been written by someone other than the fictitional Basil Hallward.

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Article

Basil Hallward

June 1, 2026August 9, 2026 Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

In Chapter XIII of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray the painter, Basil Hallward, is brutally murdered by the still innocent-looking Dorian Gray whose “gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art”¹ eighteen years earlier.

But Basil, creator as he was of Dorian’s parallel life, was a resourceful fellow, and he was not about to let the mere fact of a frenzied knife attack, fatal though it was, prevent him from conducting his own secondary existence.

And so it was that Basil Hallward reappeared in 1904. His mission? To write the preface to a new edition of the very book in which he had died.

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Article

One By One

May 21, 2020March 31, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

In a recent post I highlighted the difference between an illustration and a photograph of Oscar Wilde in the same pose—the result being that the photograph was the more authentic.

But what happens when there are differences between two versions of the same photograph?

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