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.
Back in 2012 I rediscovered Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Philosophy of Dress” and published it the following year in a limited hardback bibliophile edition. That publication represented the essay’s first appearance in book form, and the first posthumous release of a lost work by Wilde.
I am now pleased to introduce the book in an updated and expanded softcover artisan edition.
OUR NATIONAL THEATRE of 1885 How Many Can You Recognize?
Funny Folks was a London periodical published between 1874—1894 by the Scottish newspaper proprietor James Henderson.
In the Christmas number of 1885 there appeared a two page cartoon1 depicting Father Christmas introducing a débutante to the assembled elites of ‘Our National Theatre’—the débutante in question being the year 1886.
Among the audience are familiar luminaries such as Henry Irving and Queen Victoria. But how many more can you find?
Materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Photo: University of Delaware Library.
Exhibition and Symposium
Mark Samuels Lasner has long been recognized as an authority on the literature and art of the late Victorian era. He is also a collector, bibliographer, typographer, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library.
To those offices he can now add the honorific of benefactor.
For recently Mark donated his private library, the extensive Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, to the University of Delaware. It has been housed since 2004 in the Morris Library, and now becomes largest and most important gift of its kind in the university’s history.
Richard Le Gallienne is the subject of an exhibition in his home town of Liverpool to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. The event is being curated by two stalwart supporters of late-Victorian authors and artists, Mark Samuels Lasner and Margaret D. Stetz—authors and artists themselves.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Liverpool Central Library will bring together these and other scholars and collectors from the UK and the US for a one-day symposium about the city as a literary and cultural centre at the end of the 19th century.
Speakers at the symposium will address topics such as Liverpool and the late-Victorian lecture circuit; the actress Dame Ellen Terry and her theatrical tours in Liverpool; Robert Louis Stevenson’s connections to Liverpool; the career of Sir William Watson as a poet from Liverpool; J. M. Whistler’s links to Frederick Leyland and to Speke Hall; Gerard Manley Hopkins’s years as a priest in Liverpool; bibliomania and the book-collecting culture of late-Victorian Liverpool.
A signature focus of the exhibition, however, is the connection between Oscar Wilde and the Liverpool-born writer, Richard Le Gallienne—a relationship that began with their exchanging books of poetry, Wilde inscribing his: “To Richard le Gallienne, poet and lover, from Oscar Wilde / a summer day in June ’88.”
Much has been made by Neil McKenna of this early liaison. Indeed, the pair continued to exchange poetry and, along with it, much sentiment. One such was a poem given by Le Gallienne to Wilde as a ‘love token’, as he put it. However, the case for reorientation is that Le Gallienne was thrice married and wrote erotic poetry about women too, such as this homage to the olfactory appeal of their undergarments, as the euphemist might describe it.
Le Gallienne visited United States several times, eventually becoming a resident, and while the focus on him will no doubt enhance an appreciation of the relationship between Wilde and his acolyte, few will realize how close Le Gallienne came, on one such visit, to undermining it [1]:
To coin a phrase, to lose one book may be regarded as a misfortune, however, a more informed observer of Le Gallienne’s habits would simply conclude the likely carelessness of his being absinthe minded.
I prefer the more prosaic view that by seemingly carrying Wilde’s Poems around with him for thirty-odd years Poor Richard had eventually fallen under the thrall of its contents:
I did but touch the honey of romance — And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? Helas!, Oscar Wilde, 1881.
The exhibition runs through the end of October.
[1] The Publishers Weekly, Volume 101. F. Leypoldt, 1922.
Oscar Wilde’s lecture in San Francisco on Irish Poets
As San Francisco was the only city in America where Wilde lectured four times, he needed an additional lecture to add to the three he was already giving, which were: The English Renaissance, its evolutionary successor The Decorative Arts, and his usual alternative The House Beautiful.
[See Lecture Titles for the development of Wilde’s lecture topics].
Wilde chose as his subject Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century(referred to in some texts as The Irish Poets of ’48), an idea he had hinted at on St.Patrick’s Day in St.Paul, where he made a rare expression of Irish nationalist sentiment.
On that earlier occasion in St. Paul Wilde was called upon to give only an impromptu speech, and he talked in general terms about Irish achievement and how the English occupation had arrested, but not dimmed, the development of Irish art.
Now in San Francisco he created a full lecture1, in which he focused on an aspect of the arts closer to his knowledge and his mother’s heart: nineteenth century Irish poetry.
