Editorial Journal of John Cooper on Oscar Wilde
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”WILLIAM THEODORE PETERS
As Ernest Dowson’s ‘The Pierrot of the Minute’
William Theodore Peters—remember him?
He is the American poet and actor with recent claims on this blog to be the ultimate decadent of the 1890s.
Peters’s decadent persona is supported by a photograph featured in that article which was thought to be the only one of him known to exist. However, I concluded by hinting at the existence of two other images of Peters that have recently come to my attention.
The first of these is the photograph below of Peters in Pierrot costume.
Continue reading “The Pierrot of the Minute”
THE ULTIMATE 1890s DECADENT?
William Theodore Peters (1862–1905)
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”