Tag: gay

Article

Basil Hallward

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

In Chapter XIII of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray the painter, Basil Hallward, is brutally murdered by the still innocent-looking Dorian Gray whose “gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art”1 eighteen years earlier.

But Basil, creator as he was of Dorian’s parallel life, was a resourceful fellow, and he was not about to let the mere fact of a frenzied knife attack, fatal though it was, prevent him from conducting his own secondary existence.

And so it was that Basil Hallward reappeared in 1904. His mission? To write the preface to a new edition of the very book in which he had died.

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Article

Dream World

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Oscar Wilde : The Artist as Dreamer

—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.

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Article

Peters Portraits

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments
As Bertrand de Roaix
As The Pierrot
A Sketch

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?

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Announcement · Article

Lecture Tour 1882

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

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.

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Article

Angus Wilson

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

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.

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Article · News

On Dress

Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

Oscar Wilde On Dress
Now in a New Updated and Expanded Artisan Edition.
www.oscarwildeondress.com

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.

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Article

A Manly Confession

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“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.

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