Article

Oscar Wilde Poem — Video

December 17, 2024July 9, 2025 Oscar Wilde Blog4 Comments

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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Rediscovered

November 1, 2020March 31, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog10 Comments

A Rediscovered Photograph of Oscar Wilde

In my last article I alluded to how that erstwhile sinner, Oscar Wilde, had achieved the exalted air of sainthood. Unfortunately, for collectors of Wildean memories, with that classification comes the saintly cliché that a good man is hard to find.

And nowhere is that maxim manifested more in Oscar Wilde’s case than in the promised land of lost pictures. On the artifact scale of hardness-to-find, the rarest commodities are gold dust, hen’s teeth, and, hardest of all, previously unseen photographs of Oscar Wilde.

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Article

Bridgeton, NJ

September 3, 2019September 12, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog19 Comments

ANOTHER DISCOVERED LECTURE

In verifying Oscar Wilde’s tour of America, one occasionally comes across previously unrecorded lectures, such as the ones at the seaside resort of Narragansett Pier, RI, a second talk given by Wilde in Saratoga Springs, and another he gave for the YMCA in Yorkville, New York City.¹

This last lecture in New York redefined what biographers thought had been Wilde’s final lecture in North America at St. John, in New Brunswick, Canada.

Now another lecture has emerged which also post-dates Wilde final Canada visit.

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Article

Narragansett Pier

November 4, 2018March 31, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog5 Comments

—A Newly Discovered Lecture—

In verifying Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of North America, it was prudent to begin with the four published itineraries¹. Unfortunately, none of those chronologies agreed with any other, and all were incomplete and occasionally incorrect—so it was necessary to make numerous additions and corrections to dates, locations and lecture titles.

Apart from verification, there is the more pleasing opportunity to discover previously unrecorded lectures: one such is an appearance made by Wilde at Narragansett Pier.

Where is Narragansett Pier?—you might ask.

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Article

The Last Four

September 11, 2018March 31, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog5 Comments

The Sarony Photographs

It has long been assumed that all of the 1882 photographs of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony were taken during the same visit to his studio. Indeed, in all of Wilde studies there does not appear to be any record of an assertion to the contrary.

However, there is a convincing case to be made that the LAST FOUR photographs were taken at a later date.

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