57 George E. Woodberry to C. Eliot Norton, 25 April 1882 (Houghton), in Ellmann, 192.
58 Harris, 38.
59 Harris, 47; JMW to S. W. Paddon, 22 March 1882 (Library of Congress), re. OW calling JMW’s attacks on Howell ‘really too brutal’; also JMW to T. Waldo Story (Morgan Library), ‘Oscar, too, always says, “Jimmy, you are a devil.”’
60 William Rothenstein, quoted in Count Harry Kessler, Journey to the Abyss (2011), 293. Rothenstein called OW ‘much the richer character’ and said JMW only ‘made a witticism from time to time’.
61 Harris, 38. Whistler had told the critic Humphrey Ward that ‘you must never say that this painting’s good or that bad… Good and bad are not terms to be used by you; but say, I like this, and I dislike that, and you’ll be within your right.’
62 JMW to Fox [April/May 1881] proposing ‘next time [to] bring Oscar Wilde with me’; JMW to OW [9 October 1881]; there is no evidence that OW made either trip.
63 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 60.
64 J. Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (1981), 328; Robert Garthorne-Hardy, ed., Ottoline (1964), 82; JMW to George Grossmith (GUL).
65 Alice Kipling to Rudyard Kipling, 18 March 1881, quoted Ian Taylor, Victorian Sisters (1987), 136–7, where the letter is misdated 1882.
66 Mrs J. Comyns Carr, Reminiscences (1926), 85.
67 E. Burne-Jones to Charles Eliot Norton, 12 December 1881, CL, 132: ‘[OW] really loves the things you and I love.’
68 Edward Burne-Jones to Mrs George Lewis, ‘Friday’ [July 1883]; Edward Burne-Jones to Mrs George Lewis, 27 June 1881 (Bodleian); it seems to have been OW’s joke to dub the church of St Peter, Vere Street, for which Burne-Jones was designing a stained glass window, ‘the church of SS Marshall & Snelgrove’ – after the department store next door.
69 Edward Burne-Jones to Mrs George Lewis, 20 Jun 1881 (Bodleian).
70 Violent Hunt to OW, July 1881, in Ellmann, 221, ‘you quite deserve your four Burne-Jones drawings’; it is not directly stated that they were a gift from Burne-Jones, but it seems likely.
71 Comyns Carr, Reminiscences, 85–6; George Lewis, ms notebook, ‘Parties 79–80’ (in fact covering 1879 to 1884) (Bodleian) lists guests chez Lewis, including: 19 May 1881, ‘Mr & Mrs Langtry, Mr & Mrs [Comyns] Carr, Mr Burne-Jones, Mr [Alexander] Wedderburn, Oscar Wilde, Frank Miles’; 27 October 1881, ‘Mr & Mrs Burne-Jones, Mrs Langtry, Oscar Wilde’. Wilde’s only other appearance at dinner chez Lewis in 1881 was on 8 March with ‘Mrs Phillips, Mr & Mrs Perugini, Mr O[scar] Clayton, [and] Brill.’
72 Norman Kelvin, ed., The Collected Letters of William Morris, 2:38, William Morris to Jane Morris, 31 March [1881].
73 George Bernard Shaw to Robert Ross, 13 September 1916, in Dan H. Lawrence, ed., Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw 1911–1925 (1985), 414.
74 Violet Hunt, ‘My Oscar’, quoted in ‘Aesthetes and Pre-Raphaelites’, 402.
75 Hake and Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, 180; Edmund Yates to OW, 8 July 1881 (Houghton), refers to Morris among ‘other of your friends’.
76 Ford Madox Ford, Memories of Oscar Wilde (1939); Sondra Stang, ed., The Ford Madox Ford Reader (1986), 139.
77 Hake and Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, 175; Lord Houghton to Theodore Watts[-Dunton] (Houghton); the letter is marked ‘Whistler – 9 July 1881 – meeting between ACS and Wilde’. A. C. Swinburne to E. C. Stedman, 4 April 1882, in Cecil Y. Lang, The Swinburne Letters (1959–62), 4:226.
78 Hake and Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, 175–6.
79 O’Sullivan, 209–11. OW enjoyed William Morris’s account of how, when telling Rossetti about his plans for a poem involving a medieval knight who had a dragon for a brother, Rossetti kept expostulating, ‘A dragon for a brother!’; until, losing patience, Morris had retorted, ‘Well, Gabriel, it is better than having a fool for a brother.’ To which Rossetti had said, thoughtfully, after a pause, ‘Ah yes. There’s not much to be said for William Michael.’
80 It was at his house that William Morris met OW; see above.
81 ‘Distinguished Esthetes’, Argus (Melbourne), 27 August 1881.
82 ‘Feminine Fashion and Fancies’, Newcastle Courant, 11 March 1881; other guests included Edmund Gosse, brother-in-law of the hostess; Mr and Mrs George Lewis, Mr and Mrs John Collier, Mr and Mrs Comyns Carr, Edmund Yates, Frederick Macmillan, Sydney Colvin and Johnston Forbes Robertson. George Lewis to OW (Austin), 25 January 1882, mentions ‘[Mrs Tadema’s] Tuesdays go on as usual’. Edmund Gosse to Hamo Thornycroft, in Thwaite, Edmund Gosse, 211.
83 CL, 105–6; Laurence Alma-Tadema’s letter to OW, asking for his assistance, dated 18 March 1881, is at Austin, where it is catalogued as from ‘unidentified’.
84 Shane Leslie, Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley (1930), 74; Mrs Julian Hawthorne, Harper’s Bazaar, quoted in Ellmann, 123.
85 Leslie, Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley, 74; World, 21 December 1881; reproduced in Mason, 233: ‘Albeit nurtured in democracy / And liking best that state Bohemian / Where each man borrows sixpence and no man / Has aught but paper collars; yet I see / Exactly where to take a liberty. / Better to be thought one, whom most abuse / For speech of donkey and for look of goose, / Than that the world should pass in silence by. / Wherefore I wear a sunflower in my coat, / Cover my shoulders with my flowing hair, / Tie verdant satin round my open throat, / Culture and love I cry, and ladies smile, / And seedy critics overflow with bile, / While with my Prince long Sykes’s meal I share.’
86 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 213–4 refers to a dinner with OW, the Prince of Wales, Arthur Sullivan, George Grossmith and others; ‘An Interview with Oscar Wilde’s Brother’, New Zealand Herald, 8 April 1882, 2, reprinting an article from the London Cuckoo (1881). Willie told the interviewer: ‘I had a letter from dear Oscar, this morning to say that the Prince has been to tea with him.’ Asked whether the prince really had, he replied, ‘Ah, that I cannot say – but he says he has and whether he has or not people will believe it... I would show you the letter, only I have just sent it to Lady Wilde.’
87 The Times, 4 June 1881, 7; World, 8 June 1881, 14; Dundee Courier & Argus, 6 June 1881.
88 Edwin Ward, Recollections of a Savage (1923), 50.
89 The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 23 July 1881, quoting Life, says that the crowd that gathered to watch the departing guests ‘seemed specially interested in the picturesque appearance of Mr Oscar Wilde’.
Chapter 4: An English Poet
1 CL, 110; Harris, 39. It is not known who, or what, led OW to David Bogue, but several of his friends had brought out books with the publisher, including Welbore Saint Clair Baddeley, Legend of the Death of Antar and Other Poems (1881) and Zadel Barnes Gustafson, Genevieve Ward: A Biographical Sketch from Original Material Derived from Herself and Friends (1881), which included two letters by OW. The firm also produced an English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1881).
2 George Moore, Wilde’s near contemporary, contributed £25 towards the costs of producing his Pagan Poems early in 1881. OW’s expenses were likely to have been rather more. He presented a copy of the book, ‘To Oscar Wilde, with the author’s compliments’ (Adrian Frazier, George Moore (2000), 77). It is even possible that Wilde was stirred by rivalry to secure a publisher for his own poems on receipt of the gift. He held the literary abilities of his old Connemara neighbour in sovereign contempt: see Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession (2000), 84–8. The manuscript of the memorandum is in the Clark. The amended Clause IV states: ‘That the said David Bogue shall account for all the copies he may dispose of at half the published price the trade sale price and thirteen as twelve deducting a commission of ten per cent.’ The expression ‘thirteen as twelve’ denoted a discount given to booksellers; they received thirteen copies for the price of twelve. William Hale White, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (188
1), 150. Hostile critics claimed that David Bogue accepted the poems without reading them, simply impressed by OW’s notoriety. Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, Oscar Wilde (1907), 18–19.
3 Mason, 281–3; Although the book was advertised as ‘Handsomely Bound in Parchment’ (i.e. animal skin) it was, in fact, covered with ‘Japanese vellum’, a treated paper.
4 Sherard, SUF, 72; see also OWIA for early (1884) variants of the anecdote in the press.
5 ‘Personalities’, National Republican, 25 January 1881, 2; ‘Literary Notes’, New York Tribune, 2 March 1881, 6; Worthington Advance (Minnesota), 3 March 1881, 4.
6 Mason, 324–5. An advert in the New York Tribune, 25 July 1881, 6, describes the book as ‘Ready July 26’. That OW had been striving for some time to get his poems published (in both Britain and the US) is suggested by an article in the New York Tribune, 2 March 1881, 6, quoting the Boston Courier: it mentions that OW, ‘being about to publish a volume of poems in England wrote to a Boston house proposing that the volume be issued here at the same time. The house wrote back that they should be pleased to examine the work with a view to deciding upon Mr. Wilde’s proposal, but the poet-aesthete was so disgusted with the impertinent presumption of an American… that he broke off negotiations at once.’
7 World, 6 July 1881, 20; Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 214.
8 World, 6 July 1881, 13. The exact date of publication is unknown; Mason gives it as 30 June 1881 (see CL, 111); PMG, 25 June 1881, announced OW had a book of poems in the press ‘which will be published next week by Mr. David Bogue’.
9 CL, 113, 65n; Harris, 44; W. B. Richmond to OW (Austin); OET I, 157. Gladstone, in his diary for 26 July, records that he wrote to OW on receipt of the book, and also that met OW at Burne-Jones’s studio shortly afterwards (3 August). H. C. G. Matthew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries (1990), 10:98, 10:104.
10 J. A. Symonds to Horatio F. Brown, 31 July 1881, in Horatio F. Brown, ed., Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds (1923), 120.
11 OW to J. A. Symonds, quoted in Ellmann, 138–9; Symonds endorsed these judgements in private, telling his friend Horatio Brown, ‘There are good things in the book, and he [OW] is a poet – undoubtedly, I think.’ He considered ΓΛΥΚΥΠΙΚΡΟΣ ΕΡΩΣ ‘one of the best’. Brown, ed., Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, 120, 132.
12 Matthew Arnold to OW, 9 July 1881 (Austin).
13 ‘Literary Notes’, New York Tribune, 20 August 1881, 6: ‘It is said that the author received complimentary letters, after the appearance of his book, from William Morris, Mr. Swinburne, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Mr. Gladstone and others.’
14 CL, 111, 112.
15 Punch, 23 July 1881, 26.
16 Punch, 23 July 1881, 26; Athenaeum, 23 July 1881, 103–4; Saturday Review, 23 July 1881, lii, 118; ‘Our London Correspondence’, Liverpool Mercury, 13 July 1881.
17 Variants of the word ‘clever’ appear in almost every review: Saturday Review, 23 July 1881, lii, 118; Spectator, 13 August 1881, liv, 1050; ‘Recent Poetry and Verse’, Graphic, 23 July 1881.
18 Saturday Review; see also Spectator on the ‘very curious medley of inconsistent flowers’; and Morning Post, 8 August 1881, 6: ‘Before closing this necessarily brief notice we must draw the author’s attention to a few phases of nature which he has misunderstood, e.g. the traveller’s joy (clematis vitalba), is not yellow but white; sops-in-wine, i.e. the clove gillyflower, does not bloom till long after the daffodil; the corn-crake is mute when the almond-tree blossoms; and “boy’s love,” by which he probably means “lad’s love” the old North-country name for Southernwood, is not pale. By the by, what flower is meant by “bellamour” – we really ask for information, and in no carping spirit, as the implied association has its interest.’
19 World, 3 August 1881, 15–16
20 Saturday Review, 23 July 1881, lii, 118
21 ‘Current Literature’, Daily News, 23 July 1881; ‘Current Literature’, Argus (Melbourne), 19 November 1881.
22 Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury, 3 September 1881; New North-West (Montana), 26 August 1881, 1; The Daily Cairo Bulletin (Cairo, Illinois) 7 September 1881. World, 21 September 1881, 14, selected a passage from ‘Panthea’ for satirical treatment: suggesting that in it ‘the secrets of the great hereafter’ which ‘vex and trouble the mind of man’ have been revealed by ‘the recognized genius of the day’: ‘Mr Oscar Wilde informs us not merely that “we shall know / Who paints the diapered fritillaries” whatever they may be – but that “the joyous sea / Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star / Shoot arrows at our pleasure.” This will leave the Toxophilite Society far behind. Also “we shall be / Part of the mighty universal whole, / And through all aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!” That will be nice!’
23 Daily News. W. E. Henley to Sydney Colvin [1881], quoted in E. V. Lucas, The Colvins and their Friends (1928), 130: ‘Oscar’s book has come out at last. The “Atheneum” wigged it horrid. A writer in the D[aily].N[ews]. whom I suspect to be Lang, was more kindly, but scoffed at it too. It seems, by the extracts I’ve seen, to be tolerably putrid.’ In another letter Henley says the Athenaeum was written by Joe Knight. Damian Atkinson, Letters of W. E. Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson (2008), 168.
24 ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’s Poems’, Morning Post, 8 August 1881, 6: ‘Incomparably the best of the poems is “The Burden of Itys”. It is full of melody, and contains some fresh and pleasant imagery’. ‘Current Literature’, Daily News, 23 July 1881: ‘Of the longer poems the “Burden of Itys” is the most charming and flawless’. ‘Recent Poetry and Verse’, Graphic, 23 July 1881: ‘Perhaps the best of the pieces is “The Burden of Itys”’. ‘Our London Correspondence’, Liverpool Mercury, 13 July 1881 hailed Wilde’s ‘positive genius for musical metre’.
25 World. From the internal evidence of the piece it is clear that the review was not by WCKW.
26 Dial (Chicago), August 1881, ii, 82–5; Providence Journal, July 1881; NYT, 14 August 1881, 10; Century (New York), November 1881, xxiii, 153, echoed the praise for ‘Ave Imperatrix’ and the dissatisfaction with Punch. The New York Tribune, 31 July 1881, 6, while admitting that ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde is not an idiot’ and finding some merit in the verses, was rather less generous.
27 Harris, 42.
28 Mason, 282–3; the cover design on the ‘second’ and subsequent ‘editions’ was reproduced at a slightly larger scale (Mason, 287). ‘Our London Letter’, Northern Echo (Darlington), 4 Oct 1881; the new ‘title page’ – for the third edition – was printed on 26 September 1881 (Mason, 283).
29 New York Tribune, 20 August 1881, 6: ‘A third edition of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s poems has already been called for in London, and Roberts Brothers are preparing a second edition for this country.’ The second US edition is dated 1882, though there may have been more than one ‘impression’ of the first edition – see Mason, 324.
30 Harris, 49.
31 Harris, 44.
32 J. R. Rodd to unknown [1881] (Clark).
33 JMW to Louisine Waldron Elder, 21 September 1881 (GUL).
34 Harris, 42.
35 William King Richardson to Dudley Lincoln, Balliol College, 6 March 1881 (Houghton).
36 Francis Gribble, The Romance of the Oxford Colleges (1910), 164–70. World, 8 June 1881, 12, reported the incident: ‘And so these naughty Magdalen youths pumped on their only appreciator of the fine arts and belles lettres amid shouts of “No more aesthetes in Magdalen!”’. The culprits were gated. William King Richardson to Dudley Lincoln, 29 May 1881 (Houghton) confirms OW’s presence in Oxford on ‘Monday last’.
37 Henry Newbolt, My World As In My Time (1923), 96–7. Newbolt confesses that Elton’s speech was ‘no doubt better than my recollection’. Sandra F. Siegel, ‘Wilde’s Gift and Oxford’s “Coarse Impertinence”’, in T. Foley and S. Ryder, eds, Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1998) 7; Ellmann, 140; Schroeder, 55. The copy of Poems inscribed ‘To the Library of the Oxford Union
, my first volume of poems, Oscar Wilde’ is in the Eccles Collection at the BL. Curiously it is dated ‘Oct 27 ’81.’ Was this, perhaps, the date on which the book was returned?
38 CL, 116.
39 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 214. Labouchère had been associated with Edmund Yates in establishing the World in 1874, before leaving two years later to set up the very similar Truth, which may account for his magazine’s initial reluctance to write about OW. A parody of OW’s ‘Ave Imperatrix’ did, however, appear in the magazine in 1880.
40 ‘Philosophical Oscar’, Chicago Times, 1 March 1882, 7, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 94.
41 CL, 154.
42 Canon Miles to OW, 21 August 1881 (Clark).
43 ‘Oscar Wilde: An Interview with the Apostle of Aestheticism’, San Francisco Examiner, 27 March 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 103; Henry Cole, in his diary, 26 August 1881, mentions meeting OW at Whistler’s studio: ‘He informed me that in literature a dull thing is dull on account of the writer’s fault and not on account of the subject treated by him’ (GUL).
44 Canon Miles to OW (fragment) [1881] (Clark).
45 Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (1966 edition), 457; there is a hint of Frank Miles’s questionable reputation in Rodd’s comment (to an unknown friend): ‘A little lady with dark eyes, called Daisy turned up at [Whistler’s] studio today… Frank, she told us, was an immense favourite – he had such a taking way. – only one and the same old way I suppose.’ R. Rodd to [Unknown], 15 August 1882 (TCD).
46 Sherard, Real, 110–12. The incident is also described, more briefly, in Sherard, Life, 139. In neither instance is Frank Miles mentioned as the artist friend, nor is the fact that his victim was a ‘young girl’. These pieces of information are supplied in a letter from Sherard to A. J. A. Symons, 18 August 1935 (Clark): ‘The artist whom Oscar helped to escape from the police at Keats House, Tite Street, Chelsea, was Frank Miles who was wanted for some minor offence towards a young girl. The story is quite authentic. Oscar avoided any recriminations from the invading myrmidons on the accepted plea that he had fancied that a rag was projected from fellow lodgers.’ Another friend of Wilde’s recalled a separate incident, when Frank Miles was being blackmailed by a woman who had induced him to ‘commit an act of extreme folly’; Wilde again saved the day, insisting on an interview with the woman, tricking her into giving him the one incriminating document, and then throwing it into the fire. He then saw off the ‘bully’ who had accompanied the woman and had been ‘waiting below’. Anon., The Great Reign (1922), 94–9, in Mikhail, 275. Whether this incident also involved an underage girl is hard to determine. Sherard certainly told Hesketh Pearson, ‘Miles had a predilection for Exhibition natural enough in a struggling artist but reprehensible, paraît-il, where only small girls in single spies are invited to contemplation.’ Pearson, 55–6. Despite such instances it is sometimes claimed that Frank Miles was homosexual: Croft-Cooke, 40; Hyde, Oscar, 23; McKenna, 14. There seems, however, no evidence to support this claim.
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