Editorial Journal of John Cooper on Oscar Wilde
My recent post about Whistler’s long ladies of the six marks featured the famous Du Maurier cartoon, from Punch magazine in 1880, about a couple longing to live up to the blue china of their ‘Six-Mark Tea-Pot’. The cartoon was widely understood to be channeling Wilde because he is reported to have done the same thing in his rooms at Oxford.
But doting couples cradling tea-pots was nothing new even then.
Continue reading “Tea in China”
WILLIAM SCHWENK GILBERT
Here is W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the prolific musical partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, shown in Punch magazine aboard his second yacht, Chloris—a 110 ton yawl.
In April 1881, Gilbert wrote to Lady Katharine Coke about the new boat and his latest opera Patience, both of which were about to be launched that month: 1
Continue reading ““Idi-Yacht-Ical””
The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip (American Edition)
by Neil Titley
(Dan Shepelavy, Vanessa Heron, Editors)
Universal Exports of North America. (Philadelphia), 2023.
ORDER ONLY FROM THE PUBLISHER’S WEBSITE
If you are about to start reading hundreds of biographies, memoirs, and diaries in search of informative or amusing (and preferably salacious) anecdotes about the Victorians in general, and Oscar Wilde in particular, then Stop!—you don’t have to. Neil Titley has done that for you.
Continue reading “Gossip”
Speaking of copyright, as I was in my recent post about The Sarony Case reminds me that the 1880s was a vexed period for authorship rights, and matters could get a little fraught.
Continue reading “Fleeced”