47 Ward, Recollections of a Savage, 108; Harris, 457.
48 Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 23. It is possible that this ‘gentleman’ was Lord Ronald Gower. Although Gower’s clandestine sexual relationships with young men had long been a matter of rumour, Wilde may have chosen to disbelieve them at first. In 1878 a scurrilous newspaper, The Man of the World, had implicated Gower in ‘a loathsome scandal’ involving ‘immorality of the most revolting character’. But, on threatening to sue the paper, Gower had secured a full retraction without the case coming to court; see PMG, 1 January 1879. If Wilde initially took this victory at face value, he may have later changed his view. Certainly his friendship with Gower, close in the late 1870s, seems to have all but ended after Wilde moved to London. Perhaps he had come to recognize him as an ‘undesirable’ associate.
49 Sherard, SUF, 86–7; Sherard, Life, 144, describes the rooms as ‘small’.
50 Archibald Forbes, ‘London Jottings’, syndicated to South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide), 9 July 1884: ‘I remember some three yeas ago assisting at a conference in which were discussed schemes for Oscar’s future.’
51 Daily Globe (Minnesota), 30 October 1881, 5.
52 Forbes, ‘London Jottings’.
53 ‘What the World Says’, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 4 August 1881.
54 ‘London Letter’, Leicester Chronicle, 12 November 1881, 5.
55 The possibility of a lecture tour was first mentioned in the press in June 1881, in ‘Our London Letter’, Northern Echo (Darlington), 27 June 1881; it was described as being promoted by Boucicault. PMG, 4 January 1882 (quoting an interview with Boucicault in the New York Herald) says that OW had originally told Boucicault that ‘whatever effect he could make would only be appreciated by a drawing-room audience’. For Bernhardt’s possible involvement, suggested by Louis Fréchette, ‘Oscar Wilde’, La Patrie (Montreal), 20 April 1895, see Schroeder, 56.
56 OW told Blanche Roosevelt that ‘he thought of coming to America to see what we are like, and referred with apparent pleasure to the flattering manner in which some of his poems had been received by a portion of the American press’. Memphis Daily Appeal (Tennessee), 14 October 1881, 2, reprinted in the New York Tribune.
57 Public Ledger (Tennessee), 9 September 1881, 4.
58 D’Oyly Carte interview, from the New York Tribune, quoted in Freeman’s Journal, 25 January 1882.
59 Richard D’Oyly Carte to T. B. Pugh, 8 November 1881 (Morgan); the letter is in the hand of Carte’s American agent, W. F. Morse. Pugh was a leading promoter in Philadelphia.
60 The unnamed American’s conversation with Helen Lenoir, quoted in Nathan Haskell Dole ‘Biographical Introduction’ to Poetical Works of Oscar Wilde (1913); Morse refers to the advice having been given by ‘a lady well known in English and American newspaper circles as a writer upon the current society topics of the day’. W. F. Morse, ‘American Lectures’, in The Works of Oscar Wilde (1907). Some have suggested the ‘lady’ may have been Mrs Frank Leslie, but this seems doubtful – see Lewis & Smith, 24. Blanche Roosevelt is another possibility.
61 Morse, 73. Hyde, Oscar, 60, and Ellmann, 145, assume the cable was sent from Carte’s New York office, but Morse’s terse account does not state this, and it seems more likely that the cable was sent by the ‘lady’ journalist, the ‘responsible agent’ being W. F. Morse. The cable was addressed to OW at his mother’s address, 1 Ovington Square.
62 ‘Reports that Mr. Wilde has been engaged for the United States are premature. More than one offer has, we learn, been made him to give some “aesthetic” lectures in New York this winter, and negotiations are now in progress as to terms.’ Graphic (London), 26 November 1881.
63 Richard D’Oyly Carte to T. B. Pugh, 8 November 1881 (Morgan).
64 Richard D’Oyly Carte to Helen Lenoir (copy), 17 December 1881, quoted in Regina B. Oost, Gilbert and Sullivan: Class and the Savoy Tradition (2009), 57–8.
65 Richard D’Oyly Carte to Helen Lenoir (copy), 17 December 1881, quoted in Oost, Gilbert and Sullivan: Class and the Savoy Tradition, 57–8. Oost suggests that this relates to OW attending a performance in London, but the context implies that Carte is referring to OW attending the show in New York.
66 Friedman, 70. Aside from fancy-dress appearances and Masonic meetings there is no evidence to suggest that Wilde had ever sported such a costume before this date, though elements of the outfit had been lampooned regularly in Du Maurier’s various ‘Aesthetic’ cartoons since 1877.
67 CL, 118; Hart-Davis and Holland (CL, 123) state that the arrangement was for one-third of net receipts, but ‘W. F. Morse’s Statement of Accounts, 1882’ (Arents Collection, New York Public Library) makes clear the division was 50/50.
68 J. Lewis Hind, Naphtali (1926), 235; Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 243; Hind says JMW’s comment was published in the World, but that was not the case. It appears to have been a private communication.
69 CL, 118.
70 Mrs Bernard Beere, after her husband’s early death, ‘turned her attention to the stage, finding a histrionic master in Hermann Vezin, and an intellectual guide in Willie Wilde (Oscar’s elder brother). Under the direction of these two men she became a woman of superior intellectual attainments, but not at first of any great histrionic facility.’ ‘Social Gossip from Home’, Argus (Melbourne), 24 March 1888. For ‘Dot’ Boucicault’s involvement, see ‘The Theatres’, Daily News, 21 November 1881. His participation seems to have led to the erroneous report that his father Dion Boucicault was involved – and was even the producer of the piece. ‘From our London Correspondents’, Newcastle Courant, 2 December 1881. The error has been often repeated since: Ellmann, 146. Dion Boucicault’s non-involvement is confirmed by the fact that he was busy with work commitments in Dublin in November 1881, and in New York in December: see George Rowell, ‘The Truth about Vera’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, vol. 21 (1993).
71 Elizabeth Robins, Both Sides of the Curtain (1940), 18; OW told Robins that the cost of mounting a single matinee performance in a London theatre would be £100.
72 The first hint was in the World, 9 November 1881, 10: in a paragraph on OW’s forthcoming American lecture tour, ‘I hear that Mr. Wilde is also making arrangements for bringing out an original play before he leaves London’. This was followed by the Daily News, 21 November 1881; World, 23 November 1881; Freeman’s Journal, 28 November 1881, etc.
73 ‘Private Correspondence’, Birmingham Daily Post, 5 December 1881.
74 ‘London Gossip’, York Herald, 15 December 1881, 8.
75 CL, 97.
76 NYT, 26 December 1881.
77 Rowell, ‘The Truth about Vera’, 99. The lack of funds may be alluded to in an oblique comment on the cancellation from the Birmingham Daily Post, 5 December 1881: ‘As regards the theatrical arrangements, the essential preliminary to which, in the eyes of those who have plays to dispose of, [had not] been even seriously approached.’
78 CL, 97; in 1883 the copy of OW’s play sent to Arthur Wallack, the New York theatre producer, was discovered in a drawer. When asked why he had not produced Wilde’s drama, Wallack’s assistant, Mr Moss, remarked, ‘I guess it needed cutting, like his hair.’ Evening News (Sydney), 21 April 1883.
79 Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 212–14.
80 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 163–5; World, 23 November 1881, 15; Burra Record (South Australia), 20 June 1882.
81 Dundee Courier & Argus (Dundee), 17 December 1881.
82 ‘Philosophical Oscar,’ Chicago Times, 1 March 1882, 7, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 93–4. OW is (mis)quoted as praising Langtry’s ‘delightfully joyousness of manner’.
83 Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 220.
84 World, ‘Christmas Number’, 21 December 1881, 19. ‘Ego Upto Snuffibus Poeta’ (by Edmund Yates), illustrated by Alfred Bryant. The verse relating to Swinburne includes references to Wilde, Hardinge and Mallock.
85 Truth, 22 De
cember 1881, 813.
86 World, 4 January 1882, 14.
87 Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 25.
Part IV: The Remarkable Rocket
Chapter 1: The Best Place
1 Oscar Wilde’s Visit to America (1882), eight-page prospectus (Toronto University Library).
2 ‘Ten Minutes With A Poet’, NYT, 3 January 1882; Sun (New York), 3 January 1882; World (New York), Lewis & Smith, 31.
3 The anecdote was reported as being passed on by a fellow passenger in the World (New York), the New York Herald and the NYT. The Sun (New York), 3 January 1883, put the lines into OW’s own mouth: ‘By the by, do you know, I was very disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean. It was very tame.’ But the accounts – very similar though not identical – from the other three papers are to be preferred. For the spread of the anecdote across America and the UK see Morse, 76; Daily News, 4 January 1882; PMG, 4 January 1882; Freeman’s Journal, 5 January 1882; London Daily Herald, 9 January 1882; for satirical verses see ‘Disappointed’, in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 8 January 1882, 2; Lewis & Smith, 33; Ellmann, 151, mentions ‘The Disappointed Deep’ in PMG – though it is not to be found in the publication; Leeds Mercury, 5 January 1882.
4 New York Evening Post, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 15–16.
5 It is not known for certain to which hotel OW was first taken. The two most likely possibilities are the Grand Hotel or the Brunswick. See OWIA, and Lewis & Smith, 35.
6 OW, ‘Impressions of America’, 22.
7 CL, 127; typescript of Dan O’Connell, ‘Bohemian Experiences of Oscar Wilde and Sir Samuel Barker’, originally published in The Chronicle (San Francisco) (Clark).
8 Quoted in Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms, The Marquis de Leuville: A Victorian Fraud? (2012).
9 Boston Globe, 29 January 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 48.
10 Morse, 76; Boston Globe, 29 January 1882, 5; NYT, 8 January 1882, 7; ‘Wilde’s Experience,’ Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882.
11 Mason, 124–6.
12 ‘Art’s Apostle’ (from the NY correspondent of the Boston Herald); Evening Star (Washington, DC), 21 January 1882. John Cooper has pointed out that of the twenty-seven numbered images of OW (reproduced in The Wilde Album, 65–91), the first twenty-three belong to one sitting; the final four to a second sitting (OW’s hair is appreciably longer). The Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882, refers to OW having ‘thirty sittings’ (i.e. thirty photographs) with Sarony, and this was perhaps the number stipulated in the contract – with some of the exposures not being printed up.
13 Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882; Lewis & Smith, 39, state that Morse ‘was so eager for Sarony to shoot his star that he waived the customary charge’. And this is repeated in most biographies. But the suggestion is contradicted by the Topeka Daily Capital and other papers, e.g. ‘Miscellaneous’ in Northern Argus (Clare, South Australia), 30 January 1885. It may be that Morse waived an advance payment, having settled with Sarony for a percentage of the sales.
14 Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882.
15 ‘The English Renaissance’, Miscellanies, 121; New York Tribune, 6 January 1882, 5.
16 New York Tribune, 6 January 1882, 5.
17 Era, 21 January, 1882.
18 ‘Vanity Fair’, The Argonaut (San Francisco), 10, no. 1, 7 January 1882.
19 Lewis & Smith, 57.
20 CL, 124.
21 CL, 124.
22 Morse account; NYT, New York Tribune, 10 January, 1882, 2; CL, 126; versions of the speech from NYT, Miscellanies, Seaside Edition. ‘Oscar the Aesthete’ (US newspaper cutting), 29 January 1882 (Clark).
23 Morse, 78–9.
24 ‘Living Up to Beauty’, New York Herald, 10 January 1882.
25 New York Herald, New York World, NYT, in Friedman, 77. ‘Wilde’s Experience’, Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882 lists Mr Connery of the Herald, Whitelaw Reid, Tribune, George Jones, NYT, William H. Hurlburt, World, Mr Fiske, Star.
26 ‘The Drama in America’, Era, 21 January 1882; Richard D’Oyly Carte to Arthur Sullivan, [January 1882] (Clark); D’Oyly Carte interview, from the New York Tribune, 12 January 1882, reprinted in Freeman’s Journal, 25 Jan 1882.
27 Quoted in Lewis & Smith, 55.
28 Friedman, 77–8; Argonaut. Hurlbert also organized a ‘charming’ dinner for OW (on the evening of 10 January); see New York Tribune, 10 January 1882, 2; Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882.
29 Argonaut.
30 CL, 126.
31 CL, 127.
32 Argonaut.
33 CL, 127.
34 Friedman, 76; ‘Our London Correspondence’, Liverpool Mercury, 24 January 1882.
35 ‘The Poet’s Day’, Punch, 4 February 1882.
36 Phoebe Pember to ‘Clavius’, 16 January 1882, New York (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
37 Jervis McEntee, ‘Diaries’, 14 January 1882 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution); diary of James Herbert Morse, quoted in Friedman, 79.
38 J. E. Kelly, ‘Memoirs’ (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
39 Edmund Gosse to E. C. Stedman, quoted in Thwaite, Edmund Gosse, 211.
40 Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (1910), 2:31.
41 Quoted in Bette Roth Young, ed., Emma Lazarus in Her World (1995), 189.
42 CL, 127.
43 Manchester Times, 27 May 1882.
44 Kelly, ‘Memoirs’. Kelly states that he went to meet OW ‘two or three days’ after his New York lecture, and made the drawing the following day. It is often suggested that the small child in the drawing was Kelly’s son. But Kelly had no son. His memoirs make clear that the boy was a friend of Wilde’s. Perhaps he was the ‘little Ganymede’ referred to in CL, 124, maybe one of the several children of Robert B. Roosevelt and Mrs Fortescue. In 1907, the original etching plate having been lost, a new print – a wood engraving – was made from Kelly’s original drawing. Shortly afterwards Kelly also modelled a relief of Wilde’s head from the same study, which was cast in bronze.
45 ‘Wilde’s Experience’, Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882; Mason, 324–5.
46 Gary Scharnhorst, ‘Kate Field Meets Oscar Wilde’, Wildean, 28 (2006), gives a full account of the lunch.
47 Mary Warner Blanchard, ‘Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age’, 46; a letter from Posie Emmet to ‘Billy’, 17 January [1882] (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), mentions Oscar Wilde’s visit to the studio of Dora Wheeler (daughter of Candace Wheeler); Bismark Tribune (North Dakota), 23 December 1881, 4.
48 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Chicago Tribune, 1 March 1882, 7, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 91.
49 Argonaut.
50 Argonaut.
51 ‘Is this Aesthetic Taffy’, New York Herald, 13 January 1882.
52 Edgar Saltus, Oscar Wilde; An Idler’s Impression (1917), in Mikhail, 427.
53 CL, 128.
Chapter 2: Go Ahead
1 Margaret Stetz, ‘Everything is going brilliantly’ (lecture, University College London, 2016).
2 Pearson, 62.
3 CL, 128.
4 Philadelphia Press, in Lewis & Smith, 73.
5 Lewis & Smith, 73.
6 Stoddart to W. Whitman, 11 January 1882 (Library of Congress); Lewis & Smith, 71.
7 Horace Traubel, Jeanne Chapman and Robert Macisaac, eds, With Walt Whitman In Camden (1992), 7:366: ‘Years back [Stoddart] came over with Oscar Wilde, when Wilde was here in America and the noise over him was at its height. They came in great style – with a flunkey and all that. And what struck me then, instantly, in Stoddart was his eminent tact. He said to me, “If you are willing – will excuse me – I will go off for an hour or so – come back again – leaving you together.” etc. I told him, “We would be glad to have you stay – but do not feel to come back in an hour. Don’t come for two or three” – and he did not – I think did not come till nightfall.�
� Kansas City Journal, 12 November 1899, 12, at OWIA.
8 ‘With Mr. Oscar Wilde’, Cincinnati Gazette, 21 February 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 69.
9 Sherard, Life, 214.
10 Lewis & Smith, 75.
11 Philadelphia Press, quoted in Lewis & Smith, 75–7; Morse, 118. ‘Wilde’s Buncombe’, National Republican (Washington, DC), 24 January 1882, 1.
12 Hofer & Scharnhorst, 29.
13 Lewis & Smith 75; Walt Whitman to Harry Stafford, 25 January 1882, at OWIA.
14 Boston Herald, 29 January 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst 43.
15 Traubel, Chapman and Macisaac, eds, With Walt Whitman In Camden, 4:79: ‘When Wilde was here, after our talk, he expressed some surprise; he said, “You are not exactly as I pictured you.” I asked him: “Worse or better?” He said, “Better – and different.” He told Donaldson afterwards what he referred to. Tom asked him. He said: “His poise that was what surprised me.”’
16 Lewis & Smith, 75, 77.
17 Morse, 136.
18 Alan Grey and Joane Whitmore, eds, Florence (privately printed, 2008) 1:162–3, quotes fragments of a letter from OW, received 17 January 1882, ‘Dear Mrs Florence Duncan, I thank you for your very courteous letter & as I should not like to leave Philadelphia without seeing its most…’; ‘A Chat with Oscar Wilde’, Quiz, 25 January 1882, 4; [Unknown] to OW, 10 February 1882 (Clark), ‘[Mrs Duncan] is very bright, asking me if I had told you of her criticism of your writings. “Oh, no, the Quiz is seen by him in London,” said I. She looked aghast, and said – “how could he overlook it and be so good as to come to see me!” I replied, “Because he is a Gentleman.” Was a good reply?’
Oscar Page 103
