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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