IT IS HARDLY surprising that there was a voice training primer on the bookshelves at Tite Street, as Wilde is known to have carefully styled for himself a smooth and seductive voice that struck listeners as at once natural and artificial. Nor is it at all peculiar that he possessed a copy of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, and several other books on angling, because he had been a keen fisherman in the west of Ireland during his youth.1
Our virtual tour of Wilde’s multi-coloured bookshelves does, however, offer a few surprises. What are we to make of the presence of a book on violin-making, or his history of the study of music in Germany or his guide to the art of mixing American cocktails?2 These volumes were presented to Wilde by their authors, the last perhaps in recognition of the extraordinary drinking feats he performed during his 1882 lecture tour of America, when he would often drink his fellow party guests under the table. As Wilde kept a plentiful supply of spirits in his library, he may have attempted to concoct some of the book’s two hundred recipes.
Wilde is not known to have mastered, or even to have essayed, another intricate art represented in his collection – he owned a copy of a book on theatrical dancing.3 His copy of The Orchid Grower’s Manual may, however, reveal a genuine interest in the art of cultivating that fragrant flower.4 Wilde was famous for having green fingers – quite literally, for he was the inventor of that ‘magnificent flower’, the green carnation.5 The presence of the manual on his shelves puts one of his lesser-known epigrams in a new, and rather literal light. ‘I have never sown wild oats,’ he wrote ‘but I have planted a few orchids.’6
Wilde was exceptionally superstitious: he believed in ghosts, attended seances and frequently visited fortune tellers. Nevertheless, the appearance of Madame Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy among his books comes as something of a surprise, if only because his interest in that spiritualist philosophy has hitherto been unknown.7 The Key is a hand book of the Theosophical movement’s central beliefs, which include reincarnation and the notion that all humans have dormant psychic and spiritual powers. It is a heady concoction of Plato, Buddhism and the ideas of Renaissance alchemists such as Paracelsus. It may have been the alchemical element of Theosophy that particularly attracted Wilde: his library also contained Franz Hartmann’s Paracelsus, an anthology of that philosopher’s writings.8 The magus’s musings on magic, sorcery, astrology and theosophy give eloquent expression to his belief in the invisible spiritual powers present in the material world and in the godlike power of the human imagination.
Perhaps, like the theosophist W.B. Yeats, who also owned Hartmann’s book, Wilde found in these teachings an antidote to the materialistic vision of nineteenth-century science. Hartmann suggests that this is precisely why Paracelsus’ writings remain evergreen: ‘We think we know a great deal more than Socrates and Aristotle,’ he writes, ‘because we have learned a few superficial things’; yet ‘if we know more about steam-engines . . . they knew more about the powers that move the world.’9
Yet, despite his possible interest in these and other arguments, Wilde is very unlikely to have been seduced by spiritualist philosophy, on account of its emphasis on the vague and the ethereal. ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘would exchange the curve of a single rose leaf for that formless intangible being that Plato rates so high?’ Such things are ‘far less than the meanest of the . . . arts.’10
We like to think of Wilde as the most un-Victorian of men so it is rather astonishing to find on his bookshelves so many volumes that embody and celebrate the values of that era. It is impossible to know why Wilde bought certain books, or to recover, in the absence of annotations, something of the spirit in which he read them. Yet the sheer number of quintessentially Victorian volumes makes it fairly unlikely that they were ‘ironic’ purchases bought to laugh over with friends.
Wilde owned at least one issue of the Boy’s Own Annual, which he presumably read to his two young sons.11 With its sensational and moralistic tales of heroism set in the distant corners of the British Empire, and its sentimental doggerel written for boarding-school boys who pined for home, it is typical of Victorian boys’ literature. Even more surprisingly, Wilde’s library contained an intensely earnest book of practical and moral advice for young boys entitled The Sunny Days of Youth: A Book for Boys and Young Men.12 Boys are urged to read the Bible and Shakespeare in order to learn the virtues of civility, industry and manliness – the quality which, above all others, they should strive to acquire. A companion volume to Sunny Days entitled The Five Talents of Woman: A Book for Girls and Women also stood on Wilde’s shelves.13 The girl reader is offered counsel on ways to lure a potential husband, ‘by means not unworthy of her’. She is then instructed on how to fulfil to perfection, and ‘by the grace of God’, the role of ‘a helpful wife’.14 As Wilde was married to an activist for women’s rights, and was himself something of a proto-feminist, his possession of this book seems inexplicable.
Wilde owned numerous three-volume novels, the popular literary genre so dear to the Victorian middle class, despite the fact that he took a mischievous delight in ridiculing it throughout his writings. Of one example of the genre he declared, ‘The book can be read without any trouble and was probably written without any trouble also’; another inspired the epigram ‘the nineteenth century may be a prosaic age . . . [but] we fear that, if we are to judge by the general run of novels, it is not an age of prose’.15 The form had, he suggested, only produced masterpieces of the ‘genre ennuyeux, the one form of literature that the English people seems thoroughly to enjoy’.16
Miss Prism, Cecily Cardew’s governess in The Importance of Being Earnest (1899), is the authoress of what Lady Bracknell describes as a ‘three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality’. Prism offers a spirited defence of her literary efforts and the genre as a whole. After upbraiding her pupil for speaking disrespectfully of ‘all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us’, she extols such novels for their faithfulness to the cardinal principle of fiction – ‘The good end . . . happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’17 Mudie’s was an enormously successful Victorian circulating library that specialised in the triple-decker. Established in the middle of the century by a nonconformist, it was famous for its respectability, sending out to its subscribers only those novels that passed its rigorous censors.
Margaret Maliphant, Eugenia and Hazel Fane were among the many three-volume novels on Wilde’s shelves.18 They are shoddily written, slushy and didactic productions eminently worthy of Miss Prism’s pen. Their style, however, is positively Greek and graceful, compared to that of S.R. Crockett’s The Lilac Sunbonnet, another novel Wilde owned.19 A typical line of that justly forgotten book reads: ‘In the young man’s heart there was no answering gladness, though in sooth she was an exceeding handsome maid.’20 Perhaps these books were presented to Wilde by their authors, or he may have written reviews of them that have remained untraced. It is almost impossible to imagine him perusing them for pleasure – the guiding principle of so much of his reading. Another principle that strongly influenced Wilde’s choice of books was their appearance. Here, too, his triple-deckers are a shocking anomaly. Their heavy and gaudy formats must have been offensive to such a fastidious connoisseur of beautiful covers and bindings. A typical three-volume novel in Wilde’s collection has a cloth cover the colour of mud, and is adorned with a hideous design of a thistle done in scarlet.21
Their heavy bindings and florid decorations made three-volume novels relatively expensive at 31 shillings 6 pence. From the middle of the century, cheaper novels were issued by publishers such as Cassell and Routledge, in an attempt to loosen the triple-decker’s hold on the fiction market. These books were sold from new outlets such as W.H. Smith’s, which opened its first railway bookstall at Euston station in the 1850s. Wilde sometimes affected to despise these cheap editions, and was at great pains to ensure that the format of his own books immediately distinguished them from such tradesman-like productions. ‘I don’t want a “railway bookstall” book,’ he told one of his publishers. ‘I should like [something] dainty . . . and nice’.22
None of these reservations prevented Wilde from purchasing a number of cheap mass-market literary productions for his own library. He owned Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, a particularly plain and economical edition of the plays, complete with adverts for Cazeline oil and Thompson’s Kalydor soap in its end leaves. He possessed a number of volumes from John Morley’s cheap bio graphical series English Men of Letters, and from Bohn’s Standard Library of Modern Classics, as well as several Tauchnitz British Authors paperbacks.23 In the endpapers of his copy of George Meredith’s novel One of Our Conquerors there is the label of W.H. Smith’s, whose book stalls no self-respecting bibliophile would have been seen dead in.24
Wilde devoured the cheap popular literature of his day. He enjoyed the magazine stories of Frank Harris, and relished W.H. Pollock’s horror tales; he thrilled to the terrifying stories of the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann and to the spine-chilling fiction of that ‘Lord of Romance’, Edgar Allan Poe.25 Wilde gorged himself on popular genres such as the ‘mesmeric’ and the ‘magic picture’ novel, too, appropriating countless scenes and motifs from them for his own works.26 None of these predilections are, however, at all out of character: as a youth, Wilde had adored the gossipy and sensational productions of Maturin and Disraeli, so it is clear that he had a genuine partiality for good, honest literary trash.
Perhaps then, it was not entirely with his tongue in his cheek that Wilde once told a friend that he wished he had written The Dolly Dialogues more than any other book.27 On other occasions, when Wilde had considered this issue, he had nominated Pater or Swinburne; this time he selected Anthony Hope’s best-selling novella about the pretty young society girl Dolly Foster. The book is almost entirely made up of delightfully inconsequential chit-chat: ‘I met him,’ Dolly says, apropos of a young man, ‘three years ago. He was – oh, quite unpresentable. Everything he shouldn’t be. A tee-totaller, you know, and he didn’t smoke. Oh, and he wore his hair long, and his trousers short.’28 Dolly’s conversation is reminiscent of the exquisitely trivial talk of the dowagers in many of Wilde’s own social comedies.
Like a good Victorian too, Wilde appears to have enjoyed a healthy helping of melodrama now and again. A three-volume novel he owned called Alison is comprised of painfully stilted society dialogue interspersed with the most gushing passages imaginable. ‘But life is strong,’ the author reassures us at the denouement, in which the hero and heroine are silhouetted against the sunset: ‘hope is strong too – but love is strongest of all . . . and love and life for a moment stood transfigured in the golden glory.’29
In Dorian Gray the eponymous hero takes down ‘a volume at hazard’ from his bookshelves: it is the ‘Japanese-paper edition’ of Gautier’s famous verse collection Émaux et Camées [Enamels and Cameos] issued by Charpentier in a binding ‘of citron green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates’.30 Had Wilde imitated his fictional creation by selecting a book at random from his library, he is just as likely to have discovered a triple-decker in his hand.
On Wilde’s shelves you would have probably found a book by Carlyle within speaking distance of a mawkish Victorian novel, and a dainty edition of Pater shaking with fear next to Melmoth the Wanderer. What was true of the collection as a whole was also true of individual items: Wilde adored works from the ‘streaky bacon’ school of writing. He owned several books by the American novelist Bret Harte, who appealed to him precisely because he offered a rich and heterogeneous literary feast: ‘Wit, pathos, humour, realism, exaggeration, and romance,’ wrote Wilde of one of Harte’s novels, ‘are in this marvellous story all blended together, and out of the very clash and chaos of these things comes life itself.’31
Wilde’s motley taste in literature is of a piece with his temperament. A born actor, he had an unparalleled ability to enter entirely into a role or an emotion, only to discard it for another a few seconds later. Wilde’s library was truly his portrait.