Tag: Lord Alfred Douglas

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The Friend of Oscar Wilde

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A Letter From Lord Alfred Douglas

“it is not in my system to moralize, [or] to abandon a friend”

Le Havre is a French port city on the English Channel at the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy—which is where one might expect it to be located given that Le Havre means “the harbor”.

What might also be self-evident is that when Alfred Douglas visited this pleasant coastal resort, in August 1895, it was not long before he became combative with the local press.

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Angus Wilson

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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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The ‘Jeweled Style’

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“The Glory That Was Greece“

Alfred Douglas on Wilde’s prose style and his place in the ‘new culture’.

In September 1893, Lord Alfred Douglas wrote a letter to the poet Charles Kains Jackson in which he used two moderately coded expressions.

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Article

The Spirit Lamp

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THE SPIRIT LAMP
“The Desiderata of Collectors”

The Spirit Lamp was an Oxford University magazine of the 1890s described by the Pall Mall Gazette at the time as “free from the narrowness and banality which mark the greater part of English university literature and has a pleasing air of cultured bohemianism.”1

The magazine ran to 15 issues in total and became associated with Oscar Wilde—particularly the last six which were edited by Alfred Douglas during whose tenure the “cultured bohemianism” evolved into decadent homoeroticism.

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Three Times Tried—II

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Cover page of The Spirt Lamp, Vol. 2 No. 4. December 6, 1892.
From The Spirt Lamp, Vol. 2 No. 4. December 6, 1892.

The New Remorse

Fourth 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.

Previous articles in this series

  1. A handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde appears on the Antiques Roadshow,
  2. A critical analysis of the poem.
  3. Three Times Tried—I: The poem’s first appearance as Un Amant De Nos Jours.

In this article we shall look at the second appearance of Wilde’s sonnet in 1892.

As had been the case with its first publication, five years earlier in The Court and Society Review, it was Wilde’s probable intention for the sentiment to herald a new romantic interest.

On this occasion, the poem reemerged shortly after he met his preeminent male paramour Lord Alfred Douglas—who was to become Wilde’s lover and a consequential influence over his life, work, and eventual fate—indeed the poem was republished by Douglas himself not long after Wilde had presented it to him.

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Oscar Wilde Poem — Analyzed

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The Yet Unravished Roses Of Thy Mouth

Second 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.

In the first article in this series we saw how a handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde entitled ‘Ideal Love’ had come to light during a 2015 edition of the U.S. version of Antiques Roadshow. No not at all but thank you for your interest

Wilde had signed and dedicated the poem to an American journalist named Christian Gauss—a young man with whom he had become acquainted during his exile in Paris. But the poem was not new. Wilde had presented the same poem to a former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, eight years earlier as ‘The New Remorse’.1 And four years before he met Douglas. he had already published it obscurely under the French title ‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’ (A Lover of Our Time) in the short-lived, literary magazine The Court and Society Review.2

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Article

Oscar Wilde Poem — Video

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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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The Spectator

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Max Beerbohm

Having begun a personal resurgence of interest in Max Beerbohm (exhibition, article) it would be remiss not to also allude to the special role he had with regard to Oscar Wilde.

Max Beerbohm first met Oscar in 1888 while a student at Charterhouse School, but it was not a moment likely to engender an immediate affinity. For Max it was just a brief campus introduction. Whereas Oscar, now a decade removed from the callowness of college days, was about to seriously decamp for a term of decadent Bunburying.

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Article

Your Slim Gilt Sole

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Here are Oscar and Bosie in May 1893 posing at the studio of the photographer Gillman & Co. of Oxford, whose establishment was at 107 St Aldate’s Street. That location today is a Ladbrokes Off Track Betting Shop.

This well known picture is seemingly unposed: the two are both smoking and seemingly distant—perhaps between arguments. 

But upon inspection you’ll see that, in keeping with their lives, all was not as it seems.

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