Tag: Decadence

Article

Three Times Tried—III

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

Ideal Love

Fifth and final article in series of 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.

In this fifth and final article of the seri it’s a bit like yeah the report was no family plans they said is a top 10 best and we’ve only looked at the call center ones he said that so I didn’t I looked at they can do but that’s after they’ve dealt with it don’t want we wanna be alerted first we can go around then we Whether ambulance is needed but this guy say no it sounds like an I’m busy is needed and when an ambulance comes in they can’t find don’t worry she’s down about shit all that crap we got we wanna be we won’t be that far away neither or Dave won’t right well Mel but anywayes we shall look at the third appearance of Wilde’s sonnet in 1899.

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Article

The Rops Vignette

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

Not Everyone’s Kettle of Fish

Oscar Wilde’s symbolist play Salome is notable for its licentious artwork by Aubrey Beardsley. But Beardsley’s infamous illustrations appeared only when the English edition of the play was released in 1894.

When the original French SalomĂŠ had been published a year earlier, it contained no illustrations pertinent to the text. The only graphical representation in the French edition was the Rops Vignette, which had nothing to do with Wilde’s play, but it rivals Beardsley in its decadence.

So what is the Rops Vignette?

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Article

Broken Brothers

matthewsturgis8 Comments
Oscar Wilde and Thomas Langrell Harris

—A Guest Blog by Matthew Sturgis—

In February of 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote to his young friend and admirer, Louis Wilkinson, lamenting, ‘I am very sorry you are in correspondence with Langrel Harris [sic]. He is a most infamous young swindler, who selected me – of all ruined people – to swindle out of money. He is clever, but little more than a professional thief. He introduced himself to me, and induced me to make myself responsible for his hotel bills, left me to pay them, and stole money besides. What the French call “un sale individu”. Don’t write to him any more, or know him. But how did you know him? Please tell me by return.’1

In Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis’s magisterial 2000 edition of Wilde’s letters, a short note remarks – ‘This curiously named character [Langrel Harris] has eluded identification.’ In the past twenty years, however, the World Wide Web has grown ever larger and ever finer – and it has become possible to catch even such elusive figures – and recover something of their fugitive careers. And the career of Thomas Langrell Harris – as he was more properly called – was fugitive in more senses than one.

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