Tag: #oscarwilde

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Basil Ward

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If you are new to the myth of Basil Ward see my previous articles:
Basil Hallward and Faulty Basil

So far in our investigation of Basil Ward we have reached A. R. Keller & Co. and its uniform collection The Writings of Oscar Wilde (1907).

This is where the Basil Ward story first appeared in book form. It seemed fair to pause at that point because previous biographers could reasonably have looked in Keller for his existence—although none did.

But the researcher’s mantra is to keep digging and the question remained: where did A. R. Keller & Co. get the story from?

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Article

Faulty Basil

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My recent article Basil Hallward showed how Charterhouse Press in the era of unauthorized publications added a preposterous preface to their 1904 edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

To summarize: their idea with this so-called “Artist’s Preface” was to pass off the novel’s fictional painter, Basil Hallward, as a real person who in 1884 had known Wilde and a Radiant Youth—a “Dorian” prototype—and this meeting was supposedly the origin of Wilde’s novel released six years later.

The problem with the preface, apart from its implausibility, was that it would be slightly more plausible had it been written by someone other than the fictitional Basil Hallward.

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Article

Basil Hallward

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

In Chapter XIII of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray the painter, Basil Hallward, is brutally murdered by the still innocent-looking Dorian Gray whose “gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art”1 eighteen years earlier.

But Basil, creator as he was of Dorian’s parallel life, was a resourceful fellow, and he was not about to let the mere fact of a frenzied knife attack, fatal though it was, prevent him from conducting his own secondary existence.

And so it was that Basil Hallward reappeared in 1904. His mission? To write the preface to a new edition of the very book in which he had died.

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Article

Dream World

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Oscar Wilde : The Artist as Dreamer

—Feasting With The Greeks—

The pathways of the poets are often traversed by dreamers destined to wake up one day to the dangers of the real world.

One such idealist in Victorian London was Oscar Wilde who, in the homophobic 1890s, was often to be found obliviously “feasting with panthers”1 in fashionable restaurants such as Kettner’s.

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Article

The Friend of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde Blog5 Comments

A Letter From Lord Alfred Douglas

“It is not in my system to moralize, [or] to abandon a friend.”

Le Havre is a French port city on the English Channel at the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy—which is where one might expect it to be located given that Le Havre means “the harbor”.

What might also be self-evident is that when Alfred Douglas visited this pleasant coastal resort, in August 1895, it was not long before he became combative with the local press.

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News · Review

After Oscar

Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

‘After Oscar’ by Merlin Holland
Reading Between the Lies1

Merlin Holland’s new retrospective of the societal and family legacy of Oscar Wilde has been over two decades in the making—which is understandable given the research necessary to counter what Holland describes as “…one of the longest continuous acts of hypocrisy in British history.”

The result is a historical accounting that alternates between biography and autobiography into a 700 page feat of storytelling.

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Article

Peters Portraits

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments
As Bertrand de Roaix
As The Pierrot
A Sketch

Various Likenesses of William Theodore Peters
Including a Discovered Sketch

The young and ill-fated American poet William Theodore Peters was integral to the clique of 1890s British decadents. One fact upholding this claim is that even the doyen of the movement, Oscar Wilde, had a portrait of him hanging in his Tite Street drawing room.

But which portrait of Peters was it?

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Announcement · Article

Lecture Tour 1882

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

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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