The summer game is upon us
With the reminder that Oscar Wilde mentions cricket in his earliest surviving letter and in his final poem.
In 1868, Oscar Wilde proudly wrote to his Mother that his school had beaten the visiting 27th Regiment at cricket by 70 runs1. Thirty years later, at the other extremity of his writing career, the first description Wilde gives us of Charles Thomas Wooldrige, the tragic dedicatee of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), is that a cricket cap was on his head.
What, you may ask, do these bookends portend? Well, precisely nothing.
Or so I thought.
Continue reading “Indecent Postures”