DAVID NUTT’S WAS at No. 270 the Strand, in the very heart of bookish Victorian London, a city which then boasted over four hundred independent book dealers. Just off the Strand was Holywell Street, popularly known as ‘Booksellers’ Row’. After his visits to Nutt’s, Wilde may have browsed the multi-coloured shelves of the Holywell Street dealers. Perhaps he was tempted to enter J. Poole & Co., at No. 39, which specialised in classical texts, or H.R. Hill & Sons, at No. 1, which stocked books on science and art.1 He certainly frequented Paternoster Row, near St Paul’s, another warren of London bookshops.2
Sometimes Wilde engaged a dealer in a bookish conversation.3 Perhaps it was in this manner that he struck up his acquaintance with Alfred Nutt or his friendship with the dealer and publisher Arthur Humphreys. A generous and intellectually precocious man, Humphreys had, at the age of only twenty-six, become a partner in the famous bookshop, Hatchard’s, which then, as now, occupied 187 Piccadilly.* Mayfair was another nest of bookshops Wilde explored. He certainly knew Bernard Quaritch’s shop at 15 Piccadilly and the Bodley Head outlet in Vigo Street, just north of the Albany; he also frequented Franz Thimm’s at 24 Brook Street, Grosvenor Square.
Nutt frequently posted books to Wilde;5 on occasion, he also had Humphreys send him books. ‘Would you kindly send Cyril,’ Wilde asked him, ‘a copy of Butcher and Lang’s translation of [the] Odyssey – from me . . . I am very anxious he should read the best book for boys, and those who keep the wonder and joy of boyhood, ever written.’6 The price of the Odyssey was charged to Wilde’s Hatchard’s account, which, by the time of his bankruptcy in 1895, amounted to £60 17s. 11d.7 – an enormous sum if we consider that the average price of books Wilde purchased from Nutt was only six shillings. Wilde must have bought around two hundred and fifty books from Hatchard’s – over a tenth of his entire library.
Humphreys published Oscariana (1895), the first collection of Wilde’s epigrams, which had been selected by Constance. A contract for the volume was signed on 18 August 1894 at Hatchard’s, with Alfred Douglas as one of the witnesses.8 The pair dropped in again on 13 February 1895, to buy a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics. We can imagine Wilde and Douglas wandering contentedly around the lavishly furnished Piccadilly shop, with its plush leather seats, large display cabinets and its imposing wooden Doric columns.
Wilde is also likely to have been a habitué of several Soho bookshops. His friend Leonard Smithers sold rare editions, literary curios and erotica, first at 174 Wardour Street, and later at 3 Soho Square. Wilde often scoured the shelves of the Librairie Parisienne in Coventry Street, near Leicester Square, in the company of friends; browsing for books was evidently a pleasure he liked to share.9
As his library contained a number of book dealers’ catalogues, it seems likely that Wilde ordered volumes from some of them.10 In a letter to Bernard Quaritch he thanked the dealer for sending him his latest list of choice items but added that he was not rich enough to rob him of his ‘treasures’.11
Some Victorian gentlemen fainted with joy at the sight of their favourite volumes; others compared their libraries to their mothers, lovers or wives.12 In the 1890s, anthologies of rapturous poems in praise of books were published; one of these, edited by Gleeson White, was called Book-Song.13 Wilde himself contributed to the collection, but his poem is by no means as impassioned as some of its companion pieces, which are breathless love lyrics written to libraries.
Gleeson White, who knew Wilde, is fairly representative of the 1890s bibliophile. The author of some of the verses in Book-Song, and a collector of valuable volumes, White pasted his personalised book plate into each of his tomes and carefully noted the circumstances in which it had been bought.14 Edmund Gosse likewise adorned his volumes with a specially designed book plate; he also had many of his favourite books rebound in expensive bindings, on the principle that ‘a Jewel deserves a jewel-case’.15 In contrast, Wilde never com missioned a personalised bookplate, and he is known to have rebound only a couple of his books.
Indeed, when it came to his collection, Wilde was often guilty of extreme negligence. Surviving copies of his books are generally in an extremely poor condition: their spines are often fragile and their corners knocked and bumped. Their pages have frequently been cut in such a rough manner that Wilde may have lazily used his finger instead of a paperknife. Friends sometimes remarked on his disregard for his volumes: one was appalled to find a rare copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims at the bottom of his cupboard.16 Other Wildean offences against books included placing flowers between their pages17 and leaving volumes in other people’s houses.18
Wilde showed no compunction about writing in books either, annotating them copiously and inscribing them. This latter habit struck horror into the hearts of arch-bibliomanes. Charles Ricketts, the ‘subtle and fantastic’ artist,19 who designed the gorgeous edition of Wilde’s poem The Sphinx (1894), shuddered when he opened up his presentation copy of the book – Wilde had desecrated the title-page with an inscription. Ricketts ripped out the offending page, and cursed ‘the vulgar beast’ to his face.20
Wilde’s most heinous crime against books was perpetrated in 1886 when he prepared a lecture on the poet Thomas Chatterton. Only about a quarter of his lecture notes are made up of his own observations. The remainder consist of paragraphs, and sometimes entire pages, that he cut out from two Chatterton biographies in his library: Daniel Wilson’s Chatterton: A Biographical Study and David Masson’s Chatterton: A Story of the Year 1770.21 Wilde pasted these extracts into his lecture notes, linking them with a brief commentary.
Wilde’s sabotage was the work of a readerly Jack the Ripper. Such vandalism is not, however, without precedent among writers. It was a common practice among scholars in pre-modern times, and even lingered on into the nineteenth century. Edward Fitzgerald excised from the books in his library all of the passages that failed to give him pleasure. Similarly, Darwin is said to have torn out, from each of his books, every page that bore no relevance to his own work.22 Like Darwin, Wilde was evidently an author-reader, regarding certain books chiefly as sources for his own writings.
Perhaps a pair of scissors permanently rested on Wilde’s library desk next to his cigarettes. In preparing his other works he may have habitually sliced and slashed his way through books. To be fair, though, the Chatterton lecture notes are the only surviving evidence of Wilde’s malpractice, which is further mitigated by the consideration that he did not have a photocopier at his disposal.
* Humphreys and Wilde often exchanged book gifts. The dealer sent Wilde an inscribed copy of Love’s Garland: A Book of Posy Gift Mottoes and Old Rhymes (London, 1894), a reprint of a collection of seventeenth-century courtly poems that Humphreys himself issued in a beautiful miniature volume. Wilde reciprocated with a copy of his poem Ravenna, which he inscribed ‘Oscar Wilde in London, 4 July 94’. When the book was auctioned in the 1920s a pink needlework cover with pomegranate designs and the initials ‘AH’ and ‘CW’ was found inside. It must have been sewn by Constance Wilde, who was very close to Humphreys, and may even have been his lover.4