🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
“The Best Franc’s Worth I Ever Had”.
As noted in my recent article Last Rites, Oscar Wilde died in the Hôtel d’Alsace on the Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris, on November 30, 1900. One of the few people present on that occasion was Robert Ross.
Continue reading “Robert Ross”
Feasting With The Greeks
The pathways of the poets are often traversed by dreamers destined to wake up one day to the dangers of the real world.
One such idealist in Victorian London was Oscar Wilde who, in the homophobic 1890s, was often to be found obliviously “feasting with panthers”1 in fashionable restaurants such as Kettner’s.
Continue reading “Dream World”
The day before he died.
Oscar Wilde died at ten minutes to 2 PM on November 30th, 1900. We know this from a detailed letter, citing the precise time of death, written by Robert Ross who was with Wilde when he died.1 But less certain is what happened immediately before and after that moment.
Continue reading “Last Rites”
Various Likenesses of William Theodore Peters
Including a Discovered Sketch
The young and ill-fated American poet William Theodore Peters was integral to the clique of 1890s British decadents. One fact upholding this claim is that even the doyen of the movement, Oscar Wilde, had a portrait of him hanging in his Tite Street drawing room.
But which portrait of Peters was it?
Continue reading “Peters Portraits”
Oscar Wilde’s Lecture Tour 1882
A New Landing Page
On his lecture tour of North America Oscar Wilde conducted 141 lectures over 11 months of 1882.
Now with a new landing page by digital creator Jon Darby, these lecture tour pages document a detailed, comprehensive, and accurate record of Wilde’s tour.
Each lecture has its own page dedicated to illustrating the lecture with details of the date, location, subject, lecture venue, and Wilde’s lodging, along with related ephemera—the standard being that all information is verified by primary sources.
Continue reading “Lecture Tour 1882”
Sir Angus Wilson, CBE (1913—1991)
One of England’s first openly gay authors.
My recent article The ‘Jeweled Style’ focused on the literary device of that name “in which authors created jewel-like effects by the ordering and juxtaposition of individual elements”.1 And I noted how Lord Alfred Douglas and the poet Charles Kains Jackson had found the stylistic practice present in Oscar Wilde’s writing.
To those two observers I can now add the novelist and short story writer Angus Wilson: a kindred soul who used the same expression about Wilde’s prose over 60 years later, when he wrote:
“It is in his jewelled phrases, his poetic prose that Wilde leaves logic and abstraction behind…”
Angus Wilson was an interesting character and not a little ornate himself.
Continue reading “Angus Wilson”
Late Victorians began to contemplate a bold, astonishing idea: that perhaps women might simply be free to dress… freely.
Back in 2012 I rediscovered Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Philosophy of Dress” and published it the following year in a limited hardback bibliophile edition. That publication represented the essay’s first appearance in book form, and the first posthumous release of a lost work by Wilde.
I am now pleased to introduce the book in an updated and expanded softcover artisan edition.
Continue reading “On Dress”
“No man in modern times has dared to dress as he pleased, except Oscar Wilde…”
The commentary below appeared in a fashion issue of Life magazine in 1916. It is styled as the “manly confession” of a sentiment still so unmanly that its exemplar was Oscar Wilde, sixteen years after his death.
Unsurprisingly, it appeared above an amusingly transparent pseudonym in keeping with the light-hearted tone of the magazine.
And yet, given its reference to the “craven hisses” that greeted Wilde’s demise and the condemnation of cowardice, I suspect a little earnest belief lay hidden in plain sight.
Continue reading “A Manly Confession”
Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!
Oscar Wilde, The American Invasion.1
The American expression “horse feathers” is a quaint riposte of contemptuous disbelief to foolish or untrue claims deemed to be as unlikely as feathers on a horse.
Much the same could be said about accounts Oscar Wilde’s visits to various one-horse stops on his American lecture tour—and not least by Wilde himself who acknowledged the West’s “boundless mendacity” in the quotation above.
Oscar meant this kindly—he favored the folklore of the American frontier, and as we know, often welcomed the opportunity for the facts and fiction of his life to become conflated. As Jan Wellington observed in the article Oscar Wilde’s West: “Wilde and the West were myths in process.”
In this article we shall see how those old myths were eventually processed into modern fiction.
Continue reading “Horse Feathers”