Tag: oscar wilde

Article

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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Article

Oscariana In Dublin III

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Oscariana in Dublin 2025

https://oscariana.ie

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.

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Article · News

On Dress

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Oscar Wilde On Dress
Now in a New Updated and Expanded Artisan Edition.

www.oscarwildeondress.com

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.

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Article

David and Jonathan

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David and Jonathan: “La Somme le Roi”, AD 1290
French illuminated manuscript (detail); British Museum

“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan…

Oscar Wilde

The sentiment “I am the love that dare not speak its name” comes from the poem “Two Loves” by Alfred Douglas, which debuted in the only issue of the Oxford university magazine The Chameleon in 1894. It appeared alongside other same-sex verse and a notorious love story by John Bloxam titled “The Priest and the Acolyte.”

Oscar Wilde had been prevailed upon to also support The Chameleon and he obligingly furnished the publication with a series of witty “Phrases And Philosophy For Use Of The Young.” Despite these aphorisms being tame compared with the rest of the issue, and constituting only three out of the 60 pages, it suited Wilde’s detractors to associate him with the content of the magazine as a whole.

Whether there was any actual homoerotic alignment among the contributors in private can be debated; what is certain is that it was not an alliance Wilde would have wanted aired in open court.

Unfortunately for Oscar, that is precisely what happened.

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Article

A Manly Confession

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“No man in modern times has dared to dress as he pleased, except Oscar Wilde…”

The commentary below appeared in a fashion issue of Life magazine in 1916. It is styled as the “manly confession” of a sentiment still so unmanly that its exemplar was Oscar Wilde, sixteen years after his death.

Unsurprisingly, it appeared above an amusingly transparent pseudonym in keeping with the light-hearted tone of the magazine.

And yet, given its reference to the “craven hisses” that greeted Wilde’s demise and the condemnation of cowardice, I suspect a little earnest belief lay hidden in plain sight.

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Article · Review

Horse Feathers

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William Cody (Buffalo Bill) and Oscar Wilde
[See cartoon at the foot of the page]

The Fiction of the Wilde West

Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!

Oscar Wilde, The American Invasion.1

The American expression “horse feathers” is a quaint riposte of contemptuous disbelief to foolish or untrue claims deemed to be as unlikely as feathers on a horse.

Much the same could be said about accounts Oscar Wilde’s visits to various one-horse stops on his American lecture tour—and not least by Wilde himself who acknowledged the West’s “boundless mendacity” in the quotation above.

Oscar meant this kindly—he favored the folklore of the American frontier, and as we know, often welcomed the opportunity for the facts and fiction of his life to become conflated. As Jan Wellington observed in the article Oscar Wilde’s West: “Wilde and the West were myths in process.”

In this article we shall see how those old myths were eventually processed into modern fiction.

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Article

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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Article

I See Thee With Angels

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Portrait of Lady Jane Wilde by Bernard Mulrenin
Watercolor for the Royal Hibernian Academy Exhibition, 1864

“TO A CHILD IN HEAVEN”
A Translation by Lady Wilde

In June 1877, the short-lived Dublin magazine The Illustrated Monitor notably published a poem that Oscar Wilde had written in Rome titled: “Urbs Sacra Æterna” (Sacred and Eternal City).

However, that was not the only Italian connection. Elsewhere in the same issue there appeared a now forgotten and uncollected verse in translation provided by Oscar’s mother. It carried the auspicious title “To a Child in Heaven”.1

Here it is as it appeared when reprinted in Donahoe’s Magazine:

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