INTRODUCTION
1. Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 27 April 1895.
2. See A.N.L. Munby (ed.), Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, Vol. I (London, 1971), p.372, and also Lily Wilde to More Adey, 8 May 1897 ‘A great many things were stolen in Tite Street’, Bodleian, MS. Walpole d. 18. Munby reproduces a facsimile of the ‘Tite Street Catalogue’ which lists some of the books from Wilde’s library.
3. Stuart Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London, 1914), p. 8. See also Freeman’s Journal and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Dublin) 25 April 1895.
4. Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 27 April 1895.
5. Robert Ross, Introduction to A Florentine Tragedy (John W. Luce, Boston, 1906).
6. Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (London, 1954), p. 62.
7. De Profundis, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford, 1979) p. 179. Wilde’s prison letter, which was penned to his lover Alfred Douglas, is not called De Profundis in this, or in any other, collection of Wilde’s letters. The letter was given the name when it was partially published in 1905, five years after Wilde’s death. As it is the title by which the letter is most commonly known, I have used it throughout this book for the sake of convenience.
8. These figures have been arrived at by an examination of the annotated catalogue reproduced in Munby and the notes relating to the sale written by the book dealer H. Parsons. These form part of the Eccles Bequest, which is in the British Library. I am extremely grateful to Sally Brown, Laura Fielder and Dr Elizabeth James of the British Library for giving me access to the Eccles Bequest. For Wilde’s weekly expenditure see De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 157.
9. Catalogue of the collection of H. Montgomery Hyde (1948), item 383. Eccles Bequest, the British Library. ‘Most of the people, excepting a knot of artists, were brokers.’ Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 28 April 1895.
10. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 180.
11. E.H. Mikhail (ed.), Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, Vol. II (London, 1979), p. 375.
12. M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis (eds.), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London, 2000), p. 647. This volume is hereafter referred to as Complete Letters.
13. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 180.
14. Complete Letters, p. 190, n. 1.
15. Ibid., p. 911.
16. Lady Windermere’s Fan and Dorian Gray, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware, 1997), p. 504 and p. 29.
17. Complete Letters, p. 553.
18. George Fleming, Mirage (London, 1877), p. 135.
19. Complete Letters, p. 880.
PART I: BUILT OUT OF BOOKS
CHAPTER 1
1. Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray, Collected Works, p. 134.
2. E.H. Mikhail (ed.), Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, Vol. I (London, 1979), p. 224.
3. Macpherson claimed that his poetry was compiled from the writings of Ossian, the ancient Celtic bard. The first of his Ossianic books was Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books; Together with Several other Poems by Ossian, Son of Fingal (London, 1762).
4. This is how W.B. Yeats describes the scene in his Fairy and Folk-tales of the Irish Peasantry (London, 1889), a book Wilde reviewed. See Reviews by Oscar Wilde (London, 1908) p. 406. For Wilde’s markedly different oral version of this tale see ‘Le Pays de la Jeunesse’, in Guillot de Saix, Contes et propos d’Oscar Wilde, Les Oeuvres Libres, Nouvelle Série, no. 40. pp. 7–9 (Paris, 15 September 1949).
5. Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin, 1994) p. 26.
6. Lady Wilde, letter to John Hilson, 16 December 1869, University of Reading archives.
7. Ibid., November 1852.
8. Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Impressions of an Irish Sphinx’, in Wilde the Irishman, ed. J. McCormack (New Haven and London, 1998), p. 50.
9. Speranza included a number of tales concerning Oscar, the ‘Lion hearted’ hero, in her collection of Irish peasant folk tales, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (London, 1888). She was particularly fond of a poetic retelling of Oscar’s death entitled ‘The Cromlech of Howth’, written by her friend Samuel Ferguson. (See Coakley, p. 24.) The young Wilde may have been familiar with another retelling of Oscar’s death from Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1816), a copy of which was owned by Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde. See the Catalogue of the Library of the Late Sir William Wilde (Dublin, 1879). I am very grateful to Davis Coakley for sending me a copy of the catalogue.
10. R. Sherard, The Real Oscar Wilde (London, 1917?), p. 250.
11. Lady Wilde, letter to John Hilson, Monday, 1850, University of Reading archives.
12. Sherard, Real, p. 250.
13. R.D. Pepper (ed.), Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (San Francisco, 1972), p. 29. Wilde gave this lecture in San Francisco in 1882.
14. ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ (extended version), in R. Ellmann (ed.), The Artist as Critic (Chicago, 1968), p. 152.
15. Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde. A Certain Genius (London, 2000), p. 3.
16. Coakley, p. 25.
CHAPTER 2
1. See Coakley, pp. 29–30.
2. Quoted in D. Upchurch, Wilde’s Use of Celtic Elements in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (New York, 1992), p. 11.
3. They were published in the anthologies Ancient Legends and Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland (London, 1890). Wilde often revised his mother’s prose and probably helped her with the preparation of some of his father’s posthumous publications. See the letter from Robert Ross to Walter Ledger, 11 December 1907. Bodleian, Walpole, Ross Ms. 4 and Complete Letters, p. 25.
4. Anon., ‘A Batch of Books’, reproduced in Notes and Queries, August 1983, pp. 314–5. See also Reviews, pp. 406–11.
5. Wilde and his parents were extremely superstitious. Merlin Holland has suggested that in the earliest surviving photograph of Wilde, he is dressed as a girl in order to ward off the fairies. According to popular superstition, fairies preferred stealing beautiful boys to girls. See Complete Letters, opposite p. 694.
6. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, pp. 256–8.
7. Joy Melville, Mother of Oscar Wilde (London, 1994), p. 228.
8. ‘The Critic as Artist, Part II’, Collected Works, p. 1008. These words are uttered by Gilbert, Wilde’s spokesman in the dialogue.
9. Wilde used the word ‘mythopoetic’ in his review of Sketches and Studies in Italy by J.A. Symonds, in the Athenaeum, 14 June 1879, p. 755. He quotes Symonds’s definition of it as that ‘apprehension of primeval powers in man, growing into shape and substance on the borderland between the world and the keen human sympathies it stirs within us’.
10. Reviews, p. 187.
11. Upchurch, p. 12.
12. See Complete Letters, p. 85.
13. ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph, Vol. 4, (London, 1880) p. 132.
14. It now forms part of the Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
15. Vyvyan Holland, p. 54.
16. Complete Letters, p. 60.
17. Ibid., p. 31. I am indebted to Richard Pine for this comparison of the West of Ireland to Tír na nOg and for identifying Wilde’s pun. See Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde & Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1995), p. 121.
18. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, pp. 7–8 and 143–5.
19. Biograph, pp. 130–5.
20. ‘The Critic as Artist, Part II’, Collected Works, p. 1007.
21. Complete Letters, p. 316. Irish folk tales are political in a more general sense, representing, in Yeats’s words, ‘the innermost heart of the Celt in moments he has grown to love through years of persecution, cushioning himself about with dreams’. Wilde quoted this phrase in his review of Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Reviews, p. 407.
22. R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), p. 332. All footnote references in notes to ‘Ellmann’ are to this biography.
23. Pepper (ed.), p. 28.
24. Some of the Irish tales Wilde narrated are reproduced in Guillot de Saix, Contes et propos d’Oscar Wilde, pp. 5–9.
25. ‘The Star Child’ is a traditional changeling narrative and the conclusion of ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ owes a considerable debt to ‘The Priest’s Soul’, a folk tale Wilde particularly liked.
26. See Upchurch’s discussion of the Celtic elements in Dorian Gray.
27. William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin, 1852), p. 99.
28. Vyvyan Holland, p. 54.
CHAPTER 3
1. Biograph, pp. 130–5.
2. Lady Wilde, letter to John Hilson, 16 Dec. 1869, University of Reading archives.
3. For a portrait of Wilde the storyteller see T. Wright, (ed.), Table Talk: Oscar Wilde (London, 2000), which anthologises many of Wilde’s spoken stories. See also T. Wright, ‘The Talker as Artist: the Spoken Stories of Oscar Wilde’, in G. Franci (ed.), L’importanza di essere frainteso: omaggio a Oscar Wilde (Bologna, 2001). Paul Kinsella’s unpublished thesis ‘We Must Return to the Voice: Oral Traditions and Values in the Works of Oscar Wilde’ (University of British Columbia, 2003) offers a fascinating discussion of this unjustly neglected part of Wilde’s oeuvre, and a brilliant analysis of the oral residue contained in some of his written works. The seminal work of criticism, in this context, is D. Toomey’s ‘The Story-Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality’, in J. McCormack (ed.). Some of the arguments in this chapter are derived from Kinsella and Toomey.
4. Poems by Speranza (Dublin, 1907).
5. Coakley, p. 73.
6. Lady Wilde, letter to John Hilson, 1855, University of Reading archives.
7. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 47.
8. Ibid., p. 139.
9. Letter to John Hilson, June 1848, University of Reading archives. Apropos of Macaulay’s ‘Battle of Naseby’, she writes ‘I could chant it forever.’ Speranza is probably referring to solitary reading here which suggests that, even in private, she habitually read verse aloud.
10. ‘The Critic as Artist, Part I’, Collected Works, p. 973.
11. Dorian Gray, Collected Works, p. 17.
12. ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, Ellmann (ed.), p. 199.
13. Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, p. 182.
14. Pepper (ed.), p. 28.
15. ‘The Decay of Lying’, Collected Works, p. 942.
16. V. O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (London, 1936), p. 32.
CHAPTER 4
1. Ellmann, p. 5.
2. Complete Letters, p. 606.
3. Pepper (ed.), p. 27.
4. Ibid. Wilde was probably introduced to the works of the poets he mentions in his lecture through volumes in his parents’ libraries. Their sizeable book collections also contained anthologies of older Irish verse such as Dermody’s Harp of Erin (1807), Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1816) and Hayne’s Ballads of Ireland. Speranza was reading the last of these in 1858 and may have entertained the four-year-old Oscar with recitations from it (letter to John Hilson, 18 May 1858, University of Reading archives.) Dermody and Brooke are listed in the Catalogue of the Library of the Late Sir William Wilde.
5. ‘Inisfail’, a poetic chronicle of the whole of Irish history, contains Bardic songs, ballads, an ode on ‘The Curse of Cromwell’, and verses that relate folk legends. De Vere inscribed a copy of Antar and Zara, An Eastern Romance, Inisfail, and Other Poems (London, 1877) to ‘Oscar Wilde from A de V. May 21, 1877’. See the cuttings from auctioneer’s and book dealers’ catalogues contained in the Eccles Bequest, the British Library. These cuttings appear to have been compiled by Christopher Millard, possibly with the help of Robert Ross. Wilde’s De Vere volume is now at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
6. Complete Letters, p. 26.
7. E. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 14th edn (London, 1876). It is now in the Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
8. Ibid., p. 15.
9. Complete Letters, p. 26. See also Wilde’s enthusiastic comments on Barrett Browning in Miscellanies by Oscar Wilde (London, 1908), pp. 110–15.
10. These passages appear on pp. 392, 196 and 32 of Aurora Leigh.
11. Page 88 of Wilde’s unpublished lecture on Thomas Chatterton (1886?), William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, W6721M3 E78.
12. Tite Street Catalogue (London, 1895) p. 5.
13. This may be the volume that Wilde later recalled in De Profundis. Selected Letters, p. 200.
14. Reviews, p. 519.
15. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. II, p. 379.
16. ‘Draft Review of Rossetti’s Poems (1881)’, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, W6721M3 D758 (early 1880s?).
17. Wilde singled them out for praise in his draft review of Rossetti’s Poems. See also, Miscellanies, p. 253.
18. Complete Letters, p. 157.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 1133.
21. Tite Street Catalogue, p. 6.
22. Complete Letters, p. 880.
23. Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (New York, 1981), p. 204.
24. Miscellanies, p. 66.
25. Coakley, p. 40.
26. Letters from Lady Wilde to her son. Lot 186, Sotheby’s catalogue, 13 December 1990.
27. Melville, p. 139.
CHAPTER 5
1. Coakley, p. 38.
2. Biograph, pp. 130–5.
3. Catalogue of the Library of the Late Sir William Wilde.
4. Melville, p. 183.
5. Ibid., p. 246.
6. J.S. Laurie, The First Steps to Reading (London, 1862), p. 2.
7. Wilde frequently misplaced apostrophes and added an extra ‘r’ to certain words. See the introduction to J. Bristow (ed.), The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Oxford, 2000), p. lxiii.
8. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. II, p. 294.
9. Wilde, ‘Chatterton lecture’ (1886?), pp. 10 and 21.
10. Complete Letters, p. 556.
11. Reviews, p. 388.
12. Wilde purchased a copy of the book from the dealer David Nutt on 22 February 1895. See Wilde’s Nutt invoice in the Public Records Office File: B9/428.
13. Complete Letters, p. 204.
14. Sidonia also influenced Wilde’s fairy tales. See I. Murray’s introduction to I. Murray (ed.), The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde (Oxford, 1979), p. 3.
15. Complete Letters, pp. 1169–70.
16. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. II, p. 373.
17. Complete Letters, p. 1106.
18. A. Curse, The Victorians and their Books (London, 1935), p. 70.
19. D. Pryde, The Highways of Literature (Edinburgh, 1882), pp. 41–3.
20. Complete Letters, p. 789.
CHAPTER 6
1. G.L. Craik, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language (New York, 1869), p. 8. Wilde’s copy is mentioned by O’Sullivan, p. 143.
2. Ellmann, p. 21. For Wilde’s derogatory reference to the book see Appendix I, p. 317.
3. Clippings from auctioneers’ and book dealers’ catalogues, the Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
4. Heather White, Forgotten Schooldays (Gortnaree, 2002), p. 92.
5. R. Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (New York, 1906), p. 31.
6. Ibid., p. 154.
7. ‘The Critic as Artist, Part I’, Collected Works, p. 973.
8. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 211.
9. F. Harris, Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions (New York, 1930), p. 19.
10. Review of J.P. Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought (London, 1887) in Reviews, p. 211. I am indebted to Iain Ross for drawing my attention to this issue.
11. C. Stray, The Classics Transformed, (Oxford, 1998).
12. White, p. 72.
13. Complete Letters, p. 366.
14. Coakley, p. 133.
15. Harris, p. 17.
16. Ibid.
17. These editions, which belonged to series such as F.A. Paley’s Biblioteca Classica, were specifically aimed at ‘the lower-reaches of the public school market’, Stray, p. 100.
18. White, p. 124.
19. Tite Street Catalogue, p. 9.
20. Harris, p. 19.
21. Coakley, pp. 82–3.
22. Harris, p. 20.
23. Melville, p. 109.
24. Mason, p. 295.
25. Harris, pp. 18–19.
CHAPTER 7
1. Harris, pp. 18–9.
2. Ibid., p. 17.
3. W.E. Henley, Views and Reviews (London, 1890), p. 20.
4. Coakley, p. 40.
5. Curse, p. 331.
6. Melville, p. 204.
7. Complete Letters, p. 139.
8. Reviews, p. 440.
9. Coakley, p. 73.
10. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 230.
11. Biograph, p. 132.
12. Ibid. See also Ellmann, p. 26.
13. Sherard, The Life, p. 92.
14. O’Sullivan, p. 36.
15. ‘The Decay of Lying’, Collected Works, p. 934.
16. Reviews, p. 79.
17. Harris, p. 48, Mikhail (ed.), Vol. II, p. 420, ‘The Decay of Lying’, Collected Works, p. 927.
CHAPTER 8
1. This bore the inscription ‘Portora Royal School – Carpenter Prize – awarded to Oscar Wilde’. Clippings from auctioneers’ and book dealers’ catalogues, the Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
2. Dublin University Calendar, 1873, p. 28.
3. Dublin University Calendar, 1872–74, and Dublin Examination Papers, 1873–75.
4. Dublin University Calendar, 1873, p. 46.
5. Clippings from auctioneers, and book dealers’ catalogues, the Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
6. (Oxford, 1868). The Eccles Bequest, The British Library.
7. Sherard, Real, p. 126.
8. (London, 1871). The Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
9. Wilde’s annotations also attest to some broader aesthetic interests. Next to Tyrrell’s comment that it is ‘remarkable that Pentheus goes to spy on the Bacchantes’, Wilde queries ‘the weak point of the play?’
10. The book was edited by F.A. Paley and published in London in 1871. It is now owned by Julia Rosenthal, who very kindly allowed me to examine it, along with all the other items in her Wildean collection.
11. I am indebted to Iain Ross for this information.
12. Wilde’s notes on The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets (edited by Meineke) are held in the Berg Library in New York. I am grateful to Iain Ross for allowing me to consult his transcription of the notes and for his expert elucidation of them.
13. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 16.
CHAPTER 9
1. Complete Letters, p. 562.
2. Ellmann, p. 27.
3. J.P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (London, 1874), pp. 1–2.
4. It is anachronistic to refer to love between men, both in Greek society and in the late Victorian period, as ‘homosexual’. I have, however, used the term throughout this book for the sake of convenience.
5. Ibid., p. 305.
6. Ibid., pp. 305–12.
7. Harris, p. 23.
8. Studies of the Greek Poets was published in two volumes: First Series (London, 1873) and Second Series (London, 1876). Wilde’s copies of these books are now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. PML 125894 and PML 125905.
9. Complete Letters, p. 20. This particular comparison is marked in Wilde’s copy of Studies (Second Series, p. 210).
10. See, for example, Philip E. Smith III and Michael S. Helfand (eds.), Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (Oxford, 1989), pp. 138–9.
11. Studies (Second Series), p. 129.
12. ‘If the hammer,’ Wilde paraphrased Aristotle’s Politics in one of his Oxford notebooks, ‘and shuttle [could] move themselves, slavery would be unnecessary’ (Smith II and Helfand [eds.], pp. 155 and 204). It is, however, extremely difficult to accurately gauge the influence of Symonds and Mahaffy on Wilde’s vision of the past. He was also encouraged to bring ancient ideas to bear on modern issues, and to compare and contrast different historical periods, by the Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’ course he studied at Oxford. See W. Shuter, ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of “Greats”’, English Literature in Transition, 46:3 (2003).
13. Alexander Grant (ed.) The Ethics of Aristotle, 2 Vols (London, 1857), Vol. I, p. 210.
14. J.E.T. Rodgers (ed.), Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, ed. J.E.T Rodgers (London, 1865). The Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
15. Ibid., opposite p. 183 and opposite p. 152.
16. Ibid., on the initial blank pages of the book.
17. Ibid., opposite p. 122.
18. Notes on the Ethics of Aristotle, William Andrews Clark Library, W6721M3 N911.
19. Aristotle, Ethica, opposite p. 67.
20. See Appendix I of this book (p. 317).
21. Benjamin Jowett, the architect of the ‘Greats’ course at Oxford, despised classical archaeology. Even as late as 1890, Oxford University rejected a proposal to include the discipline as part of their famous course. Harris, p. 23.
22. Rambles and Studies in Greece, enlarged edn (London, 1878), p. 18.
23. ‘Notes on Travel in Greece’ (c. 1877), Coll. MSS Wilde, Berg Library, New York. I am indebted to Iain Ross for showing me his transcription of Wilde’s fragmentary notes. See also Complete Letters, p. 52.
24. Complete Letters, p. 45.
25. I am indebted to Iain Ross for this interpretation of the punishment meted out to Wilde.
26. Ellmann, p. 75.
27. Biograph, p. 134.
28. See Complete Letters, p. 79. Wilde’s complex and often ambivalent attitude to historicism and to the past is discussed in Iain Ross’s unpublished D.Phil. thesis, ‘The New Hellenism: Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece’, Magdalen College, University of Oxford (2007).
29. J.P. Mahaffy, History of Greek Literature, Vol. I (London, 1880), p. 264.
30. Melville, p. 121.
31. Harris, p. 17.
CHAPTER 10
1. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 12.
2. Ibid., p. 13. See also Ellmann, p. 42.
3. Ellmann, p. 37.
4. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 19.
5. The idea of the Celt as protean, imaginative, humorous, myriad-minded and intellectually agile was a commonplace of the period. It can be found in the anthologies of folklore produced by Wilde’s parents, and also in scholarly works such as Ernest Renan’s The Poetry of the Celtic Races (London, 1896)and Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867), both of which Wilde knew.
6. Reviews, p. 22.
7. Harris, pp. 26–7.
8. Reviews, p. 23.
9. Ibid., p. 538.
10. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 4.
11. Ibid., p. 47.
12. Complete Letters, p. 20.
13. Ibid., p. 27.
14. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (London, 1875). Inscribed ‘Oscar F.O’F. Wills Wilde, S.M. Magdalen College, Oxford July 6th 76’. The Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
15. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 5.
16. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 199.
17. Complete Letters, p. 25.
18. Ibid., p. 452.
19. An Oxford contemporary quoted in Ellmann, p. 52.
20. Complete Letters, p. 39.
21. It is reproduced in Mason, p. 245.
22. Complete Letters, p. 41.
23. Phillip E. Smith II, ‘Wilde in the Bodleian, 1878–1881’, English Literature in Transition (1878-1881), 46:3 (2003), pp. 279–95. I am indebted to Merlin Holland for alerting me to the article’s existence.
24. Ibid., pp. 282–9.
25. Ibid., p. 286.
26. See J. Newman, The Idea of a University (London, 1873), p. 7. Wilde was certainly familiar with this book.
27. Miscellanies, p. 177.
28. ‘The Critic as Artist, Part II’, Collected Works, pp. 1012–3.
29. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 155.
30. See Shuter, pp. 250–4. See also Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca and London, 1994), p. 119.
31. Complete Letters, pp. 102–3.
32. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
33. Ibid., p. 430.
34. In his letters to fellow Oxonians Wilde often includes Greek and Latin quotations; he also peppered his conversation with them, to the annoyance of those who had not received a classical education.
35. Ellmann, p. 302.
36. R. Shewan (ed.), ‘A Wife’s Tragedy’, Theatre Research International, 7:2 (1982), pp. 86–8.
37. Dowling, pp. 72–3.
CHAPTER 11
1. Miscellanies, p. 60, and Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 5.
2. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 4.
3. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 5 vol (Oxford, 1875).
4. Sold as part of lot 47 at the Tite Street auction, the book passed through several hands before it entered the Eccles Collection, now in the British Library.
5. Phaedrus, Gorgias and Protagoras, the Republic and the Laws were on the Greats syllabus. Statutes of Oxford University, 1878 (Oxford, 1878), p. 55.
6. The Platonic quotation regarding children’s education in ‘The Critic as Artist Part II’, is, for example, taken, almost verbatim, from a passage in Jowett’s translation of the ‘Republic’. Collected Works, p. 1007. Wilde marked these lines in his copy of the Dialogues.
7. ‘Ion’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, p. 248.
8. I am indebted to Paul Kinsella for drawing my attention to the similarities between the two dialogues. In the light of Kinsella’s description of the two works as defences of oral literary values, it is interesting that Wilde marked the famous passage in ‘Phaedrus’ where Socrates argues that the written word is inferior to the spoken. See ‘Phaedrus’, Dialogues of Plato, vol. II, p. 154.
9. Letter from Frank Harris to Wilde, 1 September 1892, the Eccles Bequest, the British Library.
10. Complete Letters, p. 911.
11. Ibid., p. 40. I am indebted to Linda Dowling for pointing out the Socratic resonance of this phrase.
12. Ellmann, pp. 334–5.
13. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. II, pp. 291–3.
14. ‘Symposium’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. II, p. 67.
15. ‘Phaedrus’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. II, p. 154.
16. See Book VIII of the ‘Republic’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, p. 451.
17. ‘Lysis’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, p. 62.
18. One critic accused Symonds of encouraging ‘the worst passions and most carnal inclinations of humanity’, see Dowling, p. 116, and p. 91.
19. Studies (First Series), p. 8. Wilde has written the word ‘good’ next to another passage in which Symonds argues that Achilles and Patroklos’ ‘fraternity in arms’ played for the Greek race ‘the same part as the idealisation of women for the knighthood of feudal Europe’. Studies (Second Series), p. 60.
20. These arguments actually come from the mouth of the goddess Diotima, but Socrates reports her speech with palpable approval.
21. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (London, 1983), pp. 99–100.
22. Ibid., p. 99.
23. Ibid., p. 102.
24. ‘Charmides’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, p. 10 and p. 12.
25. Harris, p. 273. Wilde also marked a reference to this episode in his copy of Symonds’s Studies (First Series), p. 406.
26. ‘Protagoras’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I, p. 121.
27. Smith II and Helfand (eds.), pp. 121 and 147. Wilde has used the Greek equivalents for the words that appear in italics.
28. ‘Symposium’, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. II, p. 20.
29. Stray, p. 82.
30. Dorian Gray, Collected Works, p. 84.
31. ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ inEllmann (ed.), p. 184.
32. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 154.
33. Selected Letters, p. 169.
34. See Lord Alfred Douglas, A Plea and a Reminiscence, introduced by Caspar Wintermans (Woubrugge, 2002), p. 33.
35. Ellmann, p. 435.
36. Ibid., p. 57.
CHAPTER 12
1. Wilde mentions his mother’s passion for Schopenhauer in Complete Letters, p. 25. In Sidonia the Sorceress, Wilde’s favourite reading in boyhood, there are several footnotes which refer to German philosophy and, in particular, to Hegel.
2. Reviews, pp. 476–82.
3. Smith II and Helfand (eds.), p. 150.
4. Ibid., p. 128.
5. The markings in Wilde’s copy of Symonds’s Studies (Second Series) evince his fascination with Hegelian dialectic, which Symonds alludes to on several occasions. See, for example, Studies (Second Series), p. 389), which Wilde marked.
6. Mason, p. 245.
7. Dorian Gray, Collected Works, p. 12.
8. Smith II and Helfand (eds.), p. 169.
9. Dialogues of Plato, Introduction to ‘Parmenides’, Vol. IV, p. 155.
CHAPTER 13
1. Waler Pater: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Glasgow, 1961); first published (London, 1873), pp. 122–3.
2. ‘The Critic as Artist. Part I,’ Collected Works, p. 984.
3. Pater, pp. 222–4.
4. Quoted in K. Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopaedia (New York, 1998), p. 2.
5. Algernon Swinburne, Essays and Studies, 2nd edn (London 1876), p. 380. Wilde copied out these phrases in an undergraduate notebook. See Smith II and Helfand (eds.), pp. 145, 196–7.
6. Harris, p. 24. The Philosophy of Kant, Mahaffy’s introductory work on the German philosopher, was a set text on the Classics course Wilde took at Trinity.
7. Studies (First Series) exemplifies ‘aesthetic criticism’, offering impressionistic and emotionally charged evocations of works of art rather than detached scholarly analysis. It also uses the word ‘aesthetic’ on a number of occasions.
8. Ellmann, p. 43.
9. Mikhail (ed.), Vol. I, p. 249.
10. Pater, p. 189; see also Dowling, p. 108.
11. Pater, p. 220, n.
12. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 199.
13. Reviews, p. 539. See also Sherard, The Life, p. 81.
14. De Profundis, Selected Letters, p. 199.
15. Dorian Gray, Collected Works, pp. 88–9.
16. Ibid., p. 102.
17. Ibid., p. 89.
18. Miscellanies, p. 12.
19. Complete Letters, p. 59.
20. Reviews, p. 538.
21. See B. Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading (New York, 1981), p. 405 and Ellmann, p. 353.
22. L. Evans (ed.), The Letters of Walter Pater (Oxford, 1970), p. 26.
23. Harris, p. 29.
24. [John Paul Raynaud] and Charles Ricketts, Oscar Wilde: Recollections, (London, 1932), p. 37.
25. Complete Letters, p. 349.
26. Miscellanies, pp. 31–2.
27. Ibid., p. 32. For an excellent discussion of Wilde’s engagement with Pater and Ruskin, and their influence on him, see Ellmann, pp. 46–50.