🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
The current exhibition of Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College prompts me to extend an idea begun last year in an article entitled Double Take—in which I featured two similar photographs by Hills & Saunders of Oscar Wilde and his fellow students at Magdalen.
That article highlighted only one of the series; now we take a look at the other known examples.
Previously published as The 16th Green
on Oscar’s birthday in 2016 and 2018.
October 16 is a noted birthday in Ireland.
I do not refer solely the young man above—followers of this blog should need no reminding that Oscar Wilde was born on this day,
But consider also a curiosity about this date in Irish lore.
Continue reading “Same Day Delivery”
“It had to be complete self-denial, or complete surrender…
Walking about for ever on thin ice does not appeal to me.”
Henry Fortesque, in Thin Ice (1956)
This week marks the 170th anniversary of the birth of Oscar Wilde. With it comes the realization of round numbers that seventy years have now passed since the historic centenary in 1954, when a commemorative plaque was placed on the wall of his former home in Tite Street, Chelsea.
For that occasion there had been a fraught search for someone to conduct the unveiling of the plaque.1 The task was eventually, but gladly, accepted by Sir Compton Mackenzie, the writer and commentator best known for two comic novels set in Scotland: The Monarch of the Glen (1941) and Whisky Galore (1947).
More to the point of Wilde’s memory, however, is a novel Mackenzie wrote immediately after that unveiling ceremony.
Continue reading “Thin Ice”
Oscar Wilde’s American visits resulted in mixed fortunes: he failed to achieve too much literary advance, and although his tour met with a mixed reception critically, it was a great commercial success. We can see these fortunes reflected in the above cartoon from Judge magazine of September 1883.
Continue reading “Not A Joy Forever”
The Gallery of selected images from the blog has been updated.
To view go to Gallery or click on the link in the menu.
You can select an image and scroll through all of them!
© John Cooper, 2024
Perhaps all playwrights since Shakespeare have succumbed to the lure of influence—at least that seems to be the view of cynical Punch cartoonists. Above we see parallel depictions of the theatrical reliance: George Bernard Shaw resting on his inner bard and ditto Oscar Wilde additionally propped up by French literature.1
We all lean on our progenitors, admittedly—even Wilde was not averse to the occasional borrowing, although it was often from himself.
But what of Shaw?
Or, put another way: what of downright plagiarism by a playwright of accepted genius now that his fellow countryman is safely beyond the pale?
Continue reading “Stealing The Show”
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”
Given that the most familiar impression of Oscar Wilde derives from photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony, a retrospective of the famous nineteenth-century portraitist should be much anticipated by Wildeans, particularly as Sarony has for some time been a neglected figure. Erin Pauwels’s new book attempts to redress the balance.
Continue reading “Penn Pictures”
In my recent article about the Whistler painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I admitted to being no expert in art appreciation. I now realize that was a needless confession.
Apparently, the amateur aesthete can abandon artistic authenticity.
Continue reading “How To View Art”
AMENDMENT ACT
You will recall the recent label to an Oscar Wilde photograph at the National Portrait Gallery (UK) that contained several errors. It has now been fixed!
Continue reading “Criminal Label”