Tag: #oscarwilde 1882

Announcement · Article

Lecture Tour 1882

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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.

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Announcement · Article · News

The Gilded Gentleman

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—A Podcast Interview with John Cooper—

Whitman and Wilde Part 2:
Oscar Wilde in New York, 1882

The Gilded Gentleman is a history podcast hosted by Carl Raymond in New York City that launched in 2021–and already it has garnered a million downloads.

In a series of bi-weekly interviews with academics, authors, and experts in their relevant fields, The Gilded Gentleman tells the story of the society, culture, architecture, food, fashion, design, music, and literature of Paris’ Belle Époque and England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras.

I was asked to contribute to a two-part episode contrasting how—thirty years apart—Oscar Wilde’s and Walt Whitman’s arrivals in New York inspired them to move onto greater fame and celebrity.

Click on the link below to listen to the show on the Gilded Gentleman Episodes page of the web site, or it can be found wherever you download your podcasts:

© John Cooper, 2023.

Article

Destroyed By Fire

Oscar Wilde Blog10 Comments

In my now completed itinerary of Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of across North America in 1882, you will find logged more than one hundred hotels or houses where Oscar stayed while lecturing, along with illustrations of all the different lecture theatres, music halls, or opera houses where he spoke.

A commonality emerges among most of these venues, and it is exemplified in the phrase most often repeated in the chronicle: Destroyed by Fire—a common occurrence for many public buildings during an era of open hearths, gas lighting, indoor smoking, and a general lack of fire-resistant materials.

Some of the buildings Oscar visited suffered this fate more than once, but none were burned down more times than his hotel in Belleville Ontario: the Dafoe House.

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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 · Review

Young Fry

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Stephen Fry as a Younger Oscar Wilde (in America)

Screenwise, Stephen Fry is best known for playing Oscar Wilde in the 1997 movie Wilde.

The opening of that film shows Oscar arriving in town on horseback for his lecture in Leadville, Colorado, but the scene gives a false impression. Not because he actually arrived in Leadville by train. The point is that the 1997 film is not about Wilde’s time in America. Its story arc is the period of Oscar’s relationship with Alfred Douglas in Europe ten years later.

So why do they show Wilde in Leadville?

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