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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?
Continue reading “Peters Portraits”
In Bohemia: A Masque
by Christian Gauss, the future Dean of Princeton University.
The fifth and final article of my Three Times Tried series featured the third appearance in 1899 of a sonnet by Oscar Wilde. On this occasion he presented it to a young man named Christian Frederick Gauss, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, who would eventually become Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton.
We saw how Gauss had incorporated his meetings with Wilde into a striking work titled In Bohemia: A Masque, first published in the literary monthly East and West in June 1900.
As the previous article only featured selections of the poem, it is worth presenting it in full here separately, for the record.
Continue reading “In Bohemia: A Masque”
The stereotype of 1890s decadence was perhaps best expressed in the introduction to The Letters of Ernest Dowson (1967) which described the movement thus:
… idle, penurious, drunken, promiscuous, living with its head in a cloud of artistic ambition but doing little towards its achievement, tempted towards drugs and perversion, often addicted to them, producing exquisitely fashioned small works, but doomed, after material failure, to an early death.1
The editors responsible for that definition did concede it was a little too familiar, perhaps being perpetuated by survivors of the period, such as Arthur Symons and Frank Harris, who were eager to convince others of their own wicked youth.
But whatever the prescription may be, there is no denying that the American poet William Theodore Peters had all the symptoms, and more besides, suggesting that he might be the ultimate 1890s decadent.
Consider the case history of his credentials:
Continue reading “William Theodore Peters”
Fifth and final article in series of adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.
In this fifth and final article of the seri it’s a bit like yeah the report was no family plans they said is a top 10 best and we’ve only looked at the call center ones he said that so I didn’t I looked at they can do but that’s after they’ve dealt with it don’t want we wanna be alerted first we can go around then we Whether ambulance is needed but this guy say no it sounds like an I’m busy is needed and when an ambulance comes in they can’t find don’t worry she’s down about shit all that crap we got we wanna be we won’t be that far away neither or Dave won’t right well Mel but anywayes we shall look at the third appearance of Wilde’s sonnet in 1899.
Continue reading “Three Times Tried—III”First in series of articles adapted from a larger text by the present author that appeared in the July 2022 (No. 61) edition of the ‘The Wildean’, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.
The above appraisal is from a 2015 edition of the U.S. version of Antiques Roadshow and features a handwritten document by Oscar Wilde dating from 1899 which had recently come to light.1
The item is a single page containing a complete manuscript sonnet, which Wilde also signed and dedicated to an American journalist named Christian Gauss—a young man with whom he had become acquainted during his post-prison exile in Paris.
Everything we know about the document, from the visual evidence and provenance of its inherited ownership, to accounts of Wilde’s encounters with Gauss and other gifts he made to him, attests to its authenticity.
Continue reading “Oscar Wilde Poem — Video”
—A Publication of the Oscar Wilde Society—
During the less furtive period of his post-prison exile, many young men passed fleetingly through Oscar Wilde’s life, most of whom are either lost to posterity or little more than unidentified footnotes. But two such acquaintances have recently gained in renown, being recognized as adding interest, and even significance, to the Wilde story.
Continue reading “The Wildean”
—A Guest Blog by Matthew Sturgis—
In February of 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote to his young friend and admirer, Louis Wilkinson, lamenting, ‘I am very sorry you are in correspondence with Langrel Harris [sic]. He is a most infamous young swindler, who selected me – of all ruined people – to swindle out of money. He is clever, but little more than a professional thief. He introduced himself to me, and induced me to make myself responsible for his hotel bills, left me to pay them, and stole money besides. What the French call “un sale individu”. Don’t write to him any more, or know him. But how did you know him? Please tell me by return.’1
In Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis’s magisterial 2000 edition of Wilde’s letters, a short note remarks – ‘This curiously named character [Langrel Harris] has eluded identification.’ In the past twenty years, however, the World Wide Web has grown ever larger and ever finer – and it has become possible to catch even such elusive figures – and recover something of their fugitive careers. And the career of Thomas Langrell Harris – as he was more properly called – was fugitive in more senses than one.
Continue reading “Broken Brothers”
Below is an excerpt from Current Literature—a journal of the Current Literature Publishing Co. (New York) which published monthly periodicals from 1888 to 1912.
Continue reading “November 30”
Wilde’s college exploits, his aesthetic entry into London society, the self-publicity of his American tour, and his pursuit of fame have all been well documented; and the story often distills to the crucial moment of his fall from grace, a short period in 1895 when fame turned to infamy.
But there is a more enduring, more subtle, and underlying theme that began with Wilde’s desire for the opposite: a journey through his art and life towards an imperative for anonymity.
Continue reading “Guido Ferranti”