The Gilded Gentleman

June 28, 2023September 21, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog1 Comment

—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:

Article

Bridgeton, NJ

September 3, 2019September 12, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog19 Comments

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

Doubtful as Men

August 1, 2015December 2, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog5 Comments

How the effeminate Oscar Wilde
was likened to women in 1882

During his lecture tour of America in 1882, Oscar Wilde was often described in interviews and articles as effeminate.

It has often been thought that Oscar was acting the part of the effeminate; certainly, he was playing up to it: his dress and manner coinciding with the “namby-pamby” image of Bunthorne from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience that preceded him.

But, given our knowledge that Wilde continued to display the same effeminate sensibilities throughout his life, how much of his 1882 pose was an act?

Perhaps rather than his being landed with an effeminate role, Wilde gravitated towards it.

Indeed, he portrayed his role so convincingly that, as we shall discover, the ever-anticipatory Wilde was conceptualized as female.

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Announcement · News

Mickle Street: Preview

February 25, 2015March 31, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

Next up in Philadelphia’s Oscar Wilde season is Mickle Street

Mickle Street is a new play about the famous meeting of 1882: Oscar Fingal O’fflahertie Wills Wilde and Walt Whitman.

As it happens, the encounter between Wilde and Whitman took place not in Mickle Street, but at the home of Walt’s brother, George, in nearby Stevens Street, two years before Whitman purchased the house in Mickle Street that is now a house museum to his memory.

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