🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
Summer’s loss seems little…on days like these.
In October 1892, Ernest Dowson wrote to his friend Victor Plarr1 to say:
“My muse awoke from her torpor of many months yesterday, here is her feeble utterance, but she may run to another verse by and by.”
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.
Continue reading “Dress Lecture”
No, not that White House. But still topical because, coincidentally, Merlin Holland’s new book, Oscar Wilde, The Legacy of a Scandal, tells of a spat between another Whitehouse and the BBC—and a group of perverse individuals.
Continue reading “End of the Innocence”
Merlin Holland’s new retrospective of the societal and family legacy of Oscar Wilde has been over two decades in the making—which is understandable given the research necessary to counter what Holland describes as “…one of the longest continuous acts of hypocrisy in British history.”
The result is a historical accounting that alternates between biography and autobiography into a 700 page feat of storytelling.
Continue reading “After Oscar”
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”
In its third year, Oscariana celebrates the birth of Oscar Wilde at his childhood home and other locations in Dublin.
The fabulous festival of Cinema, Shows, Tours, and Exhibitions takes place from October 16-20, 2025.
Continue reading “Oscariana In Dublin III”
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”