Tag: Rob Marland

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Bonhams

Oscar Wilde Blog1 Comment

Bonhams Catalogue, February 24, 1998.

No apostrophe in Bonhams, apparently.

In my last blog post about a picture that was Not Oscar, I related the story of how an image purporting to show a young Wilde in an assembly of pupils at Portora Royal School, had to be withdrawn from an auction at Bonhams in 1998.

Merlin Holland explained the reasons for the removal in his recent book After Oscar (pp. 576-578), also confirming that the withdrawal was made immediately prior to the sale.

On account of this last fact, I was asked whether the late decision had left Bonhams time to amend the offering of the withdrawn items, or had the catalogue already been printed?

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Double Take III

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THE HILLS ARE ALIKE

Another match in the Hills & Saunders photographs of Oscar Wilde.

You will recall the article Double Take II which featured the Hills & Saunders photographs of Oscar Wilde and his fellow students taken at Magdalen College. In that article I identified five “pairs” of photographs alluding to the fact there are TWO similar versions of each photograph taken a few seconds apart [see Repeating Back below].

There was, however, another photograph for which I concluded there was no known counterpart.

Now, thanks to the astute eye and memory of fellow Wilde scholar Rob Marland, we can reveal a match for that photograph as well.

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Some Common Prisoner

Oscar Wilde Blog1 Comment
Oscar Wilde Visits Two U.S. Prisons

—Updated from its original posting in 2015—

State penitentiaries are not generally considered tourist destinations.

Yet in a curious twist in Oscar Wilde’s conventional social activity during his lecture tour of North America in 1882, he took the opportunity to visit TWO American state prisons within the space of three days: one during a train stop on his way to lecture in Atchison, KS; and a second (along with its insane asylum) before his next evening lecture in Lincoln, NE.

Did Wilde have a special interest in places of incarceration? Or, aware of his appeal to notoriety, was fate prefiguring for him a life on the inside?

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