Tag: oscar wilde

Article

Pony Tale

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Rare postmark of the short-lived Pony Express (1860-61)

Today is April 14, a date noted in history for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the sinking of the Titanic. Not that Oscar Wilde had much to do with either event, although he once met the former President’s widow, Mary Lincoln, when she was living in retirement in New York City; and two of his friends died in the Titanic disaster.

But April 14 is also the 161st anniversary of the opening of the short-lived but historic Pony Express, and this, surprisingly, does give me an opportunity to talk a little about Oscar Wilde.

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Article · News

Rediscovered

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Restored by John Cooper © 2020
A Rediscovered Photograph of Oscar Wilde

In my last article I alluded to how that erstwhile sinner, Oscar Wilde, had achieved the exalted air of sainthood. Unfortunately, for collectors of Wildean memories, with that classification comes the saintly cliché that a good man is hard to find.

And nowhere is that maxim manifested more in Oscar Wilde’s case than in the promised land of lost pictures. On the artifact scale of hardness-to-find, the rarest commodities are gold dust, hen’s teeth, and, hardest of all, previously unseen photographs of Oscar Wilde.

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Article

Deepo

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I am not going to alleged that an allegiance to alliteration is actually alluring, but I allude to it in this little Oscar Wilde story, as it is about a Liberal politician, the Lord of Language, and the ladies Labouchère and Langtry.

Or perhaps it would be even more obscure, and thus more intriguing, to say it is about Henrietta Hodson, Hester & The Two Henrys, and The Home Depot.

Either way, we must first place the tale in context.

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Article

Bridgeton, NJ

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ANOTHER DISCOVERED LECTURE

In verifying Oscar Wilde’s tour of America, one occasionally comes across previously unrecorded lectures, such as the ones at the seaside resort of Narragansett Pier, RI, a second talk given by Wilde in Saratoga Springs, and another he gave for the YMCA in Yorkville, New York City.1

This last lecture in New York redefined what biographers thought had been Wilde’s final lecture in North America at St. John, in New Brunswick, Canada.

Now another lecture has emerged which also post-dates Wilde final Canada visit.

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Article

I Can Wait (Revisited)

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Lotos Club New York.jpg
Oscar Wilde’s After-Dinner Rebuke to his Press Critics

It is pleasing to see that recent Wilde studies continue to highlight the emergent nature of Oscar’s American experience, during which time he nurtured the art of public speaking, conducted his first press interviews, staged his first play, had his iconic photographs taken, and stockpiled—to use an American word—material for his future epigrams and works.

But there is a crucial American beginning for Oscar that has been under-appreciated: I refer to his first brush with literary society. It occurred during an event at 149 Fifth Avenue in New York City, the then home of an organisation of journalists known as the Lotos Club.

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Review

Making (Up) Oscar Wilde

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“Making Oscar Wilde” by Michèle Mendelssohn
Oxford University Press (2018)

—Reviewed by: John Cooper—

As its title suggests, Making Oscar Wilde is an attempt to establish a premise for the shaping of Oscar Wilde’s persona—the latest in a history of such perspectives which has included disquisitions of his Irish roots, his American experience, his men, his women, his friends, his enemies, his wit, his letters, his published works, his unpublished works, his recorded life, his unrecorded life, and, for good measure, his legacy after life.

Now Michèle Mendelssohn takes a potentially useful and probably unique view through the prism of Wilde’s racial profile. On surface reading the work has much to commend it—but to discover whether it works as a construction we will have to disassemble it.

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