Article

The Pegram Sketch



SKETCH OF OSCAR WILDE
By Frederick Pegram


Frederick Pegram (1870-1937), was an English illustrator and cartoonist for various publications including Pall Mall Gazette, Punch, The Idler, The llustrated London News, Tatler, and The Daily Chronicle.

It seems that he made drawings wherever he went.

For such was the case between 1888—89 when he attended sessions of the Parnell Special Commission at the Royal Courts of Justice—which was a judicial inquiry investigating allegations against Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish-born member of the UK Parliament.

While Pegram was at the hearings he made a set of 17 portrait sketches—mostly of the lecturer Alexander Gow, but also at least one of Oscar Wilde, who was frequently in attendance during Parnell’s testimony.1

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Article · Review

Oscar Wilde’s Birthday Dinner

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A Review of the Oscar Wilde Birthday Dinner, 2017

This Article First Appeared in Intentions,
(New Series No. 105, Feb. 2018)
Published by the Oscar Wilde Society

http://oscarwildesociety.co.uk

The twenty-sixth Oscar Wilde Society annual birthday dinner was held on October 13, 2017 at the National Liberal Club in Whitehall — a now familiar home for the Society and its regulars. However, for one delinquent expatriate member it was a first visit to this ‘new’ venue, a fact which prompted the surprised realisation that my previous birthday dinner was almost twenty years ago.

On that distant occasion the dinner was held at the Cadogan Hotel, an experience now so far removed from The National Liberal Club that it might have happened to an invented younger brother. This Wildean idea seemed apt because, if we condense the intervening two decades into the perspective of successive events, the two places emerge as opposite sides of the same coin of the Oscar realm.

Let me explain.

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