Tag: cello

Article

Cello Encore

Oscar Wilde Blog12 Comments
More Of The Cello Mystery Solved

—Corroborating Research—

In a recent article I established the literary source for the cello coat worn by Oscar Wilde at the Grosvenor Gallery. However, I left it open to interpretation whether Wilde actually did have such a coat tailored or, perhaps, he just happened to have one like it. After all, ask you may recall, there was only one report of the “cello” shape.

However, we can now be definitive.

Further research allows us to make the coat story complete—although, as we shall see, the archaic variant word compleat might make for a better fit.

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Article

Oscar Wilde’s Cello Coat

Oscar Wilde Blog12 Comments
A Literary Mystery Solved

—A Research Piece for Scholars—

While there continues to be a welcome variety of approaches to Oscar Wilde’s life, many of the incidents in the Wilde story tend to remain the same.

One of the recurring plot points in most studies and biographies of Wilde and his circle, over the last 30 years, is the occasion of the opening night of the Grosvenor Gallery, when Wilde purportedly wore a coat in the shape of a cello.

This intriguing story became the subject of conversation I had at the recent annual dinner of the Oscar Wilde Society in London. Because of my work on Wilde and dress, I was asked by an academician engaged on a related theme whether I knew the earliest reference to Oscar’s cello coat—as current research could only trace the story back to Ellmann (1987).1

I confessed I did not know. So I decided to investigate.

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