Tag: lecture

Announcement

Dress Lecture

Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

Free Online Lecture

Oscar Wilde on Dress
by John Cooper

DATE: Saturday, December 6 at 2pm EST
(Eastern Standard Time in the US is five hours behind GMT)

Click here to Register: Zoom Webinar.

Welcome to the sixth season of online lectures presented by the Victorian Society in America inspired by their internationally-acclaimed Summer Schools.

This season’s speakers will address a wide variety of subjects including Los Angeles in the Victorian era, the evolution of resort architecture, Oscar Wilde’s philosophy on dress and fashion, a behind-the-scenes look at the preservation of Gilded Age Newport, the Saturday Evening Girls’ club and the Paul Revere Pottery, and the work of British preservationist and architectural historian Gavin Stamp.

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Article

Sharon Springs, NY

Oscar Wilde Blog1 Comment

My research into Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of North America has often found me in his large, and daunting, footsteps.

It began over 20 years ago with a guided tour of New York City where Oscar spent more time than anywhere else on the continent; and my work has since encompassed journeys to many places Oscar knew, several of which have including speaking engagements in places ranging from the same theatre of the upscale Newport Casino in Rhode Island where Oscar ushered in Mrs Vanderbilt with a witty remark, to the good folk of the Agriculture Resource Council at their Sunflower Soirée in a field in Maryland.

But never before I have replicated Oscar’s tour so closely as I shall on August 11, 2022, when, 140 years to the day that Oscar Wilde gave a talk in Sharon Springs, NY, as part of a Summer vacation in the Catskills, I shall be doing precisely the same. Or, more formally, I shall be delivering the Klinkhart Hall Arts Center’s inaugural Oscar Wilde Memorial Lecture.

The event is allied to the Arts Center’s wider Poetry Festival, an annual tradition established by Festival founder Paul Muldoon, the award-winning Irish poet and professor of poetry, at which distinguished poets are invited to read, talk about their work, and conduct poetry workshops, all free to the public.

© John Cooper, 2022.

Article

Narragansett Pier

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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News

Wilde Fire

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments
tootles1
SAY IT AIN’T SO, ST. JOE.

What a shame. The venue where Oscar Wilde lectured in St. Joseph, Missouri in April 1882, was destroyed by fire on Monday this week.

No longer a theater, it may have been just another empty converted office building symbolic of a Midwest hollowed out by recession, but it was still there. Unlike so many of the Wilde’s lecture venues which were lost to fire in gaslit days, surely, one thought, this building had survived that fate.

Gutted

But no, and here’s what makes the loss a little more personal.

Just a day earlier I had been discussing which city from Wilde’s lecture tour that I would most like to visit. No kidding. I said St Joseph, Missouri. One reason was that  both Wilde’s hotel and lecture theater were extant, and very few cities that can boast that—although there is one fewer now.

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Article

Niagara Falls

Oscar Wilde Blog4 Comments
Prospect-house-TC

Next month I go to speak at the Oscar Wilde conference “Wilde on the Borders” at Niagara University in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Whenever I travel to give a talk on Wilde, especially to places such as in New York City, Brooklyn, or Philadelphia, where Wilde also lectured, I always feel that I am following in his footsteps. After all, we share the same mission: that of promoting Oscar Wilde.

Going With The Flow

It is the now the turn of Niagara Falls, and, although Wilde did not speak publicly there (he lectured in nearby in Buffalo, New York), he did take a sojourn from his tour to visit Niagara and play tourist for a couple of days.

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Article

Executive or Decorative

Oscar Wilde Blog9 Comments
durleyhall
Oscar Wilde’s Bloomington lecture

Local councillors in Bloomington, IL had a committee meeting arranged for the evening of March 10, 1882. The order of business was the town drainage: no doubt an event that would have passed without too much strain had Oscar Wilde not been announced to lecture on the same evening.

Inevitably the question arose for councillors with twin duties: which was the lesser of two evils? The tedium of Oscar’s lecture on art decoration, or, maintaining a quorum currently contemplating the size of local sewage lines.

Admittedly, it was a tough choice.

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