10 CL, 372+n; W. Pater to OW, 15 November [1877?] (Clark).
11 Ricketts, 31.
12 ‘Michael Field’, Journal (BL), 21 July 1890.
13 Ricketts, 33.
14 Carlos Blacker to the Duke of Newcastle, 5 December 1888, in Maguire, 24.
15 CL, 407–8.
16 Harris, 69; CL, 398; submitted in April, the story was finally accepted on 20 May 1889. H. Schroeder, Oscar Wilde: THE PORTRAIT OF MR W.H. – Its Composition, Publication and Reception [1984], 12.
17 Wright and Kinsella, ‘Oscar Wilde, A Parnellite Home Ruler and Gladstonian Liberal’; Bridget Hourican, ‘A Veritable Tragedy of Family Likeness’, History Ireland, issue 5, vol. 14 (2006).
18 Moyle, 148, 151.
19 F. C. Althaus to OW, 19 March 1889 (Clark); CL, 397.
20 Quoted in McKenna, 149.
21 Clyde Fitch to OW (Clark).
22 McKenna, 154; McKenna suggests that Clyde Fitch’s letter to OW – at the Clark – referring to himself as a ‘brown eyed Faun [lying] on his grass green bed’ – inspired the poem. But it seems more probable that the poem was the basis for the references in the letter. An earlier letter in the sequence (beginning ‘Perfect, Perfect, Perfect – It is the most delicate, the most exquisite, the most complete idyll I have ever read’) – was perhaps an acknowledgement of the poem.
23 Moyle, 174.
24 The lunch at ‘Dorothy’s Restaurant’ was on Friday, 21 June 1889. Gertrude M. Williams, The Passionate Pilgrim: A Life of Annie Besant (1931), 200; Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (1992), 283; Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (2014).
25 Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, THE PORTRAIT OF MR W.H., 14–21; Clyde Fitch to OW (Clark).
26 Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, THE PORTRAIT OF MR W.H., 14; CL, 409.
27 Harris, 69.
28 Ransome, 100, OW ‘became an habitual devotee’ of homosexual sex in 1889. Raffalovich/Michaelson, 108–9, says that he was warned against knowing OW.
29 Marguerite Steen, A Pride of Terrys: A Family Saga (1962), 206.
30 Raffalovich/ Michaelson, 110; Ellmann, 369; O’Sullivan, 104. The mot, quoted in Croft-Cooke, 10, attributed to ‘one raconteur’, that OW arriving at Raffalovich’s flat, with five other men, said to the butler, ‘a table for six’ seems improbable.
31 CL, 407; OW had previously considered the idea of gathering the story together with ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ and the ‘Decay of Lying’ in a single volume. CL, 405.
32 CL, 406, 456; PMG, 6 February 1891.
33 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (1924), 78–9; CL, 413, 416; ‘Current Notes’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 44 (1889), 743, in PDG, OET III, xvii.
34 CL, 411; ‘Current Notes’, PMG, 5 October 1889 announced that a ‘Mr Williams’ would be taking over as editor, in an effort to make the magazine more ‘practical’; but a month later (PMG, 7 November 1889) reported that ‘it died a natural death with the October number’.
35 CL, 413, 414, 416.
36 Ricketts, 29–30. OW also added: ‘It seems he [the reader] and his wife have sometimes asked poor Thomas Hardy to alter his stories!’ Although in the 1880s Hardy’s main publisher was Smith, Elder, he did publish some of the stories that appeared in Wessex Tales (1888) in Blackwood’s Magazine.
37 J. G. P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts: a biography (1990), 24–5.
38 Ricketts, 28–35.
39 CL, 412.
40 A warrant was finally issued against Lord Arthur Somerset on 12 November 1889. He never returned to England. H. M. Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal (1976); Theo Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (1994).
41 Herbert Vivian, ‘The Reminiscences of a Short Life’, Sun, 17 November 1889, 4, in Mikhail, 154–8.
42 CL, 426, 427, 415.
43 CL, 418.
44 CL, 420.
45 ‘Michael Field’ Journal, in Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 45.
46 C. J. Holmes, Self and Partners (1936) 168.
47 C. Ricketts to G. Bottomley, 20 July 1918, in Delaney, Charles Ricketts, 56–7.
48 CL, 423n.
Chapter 2: A Bad Case
1 CL, 416.
2 PMG, 23 September 1890; the article refers to ‘a Canadian artist who was staying with some friends of hers and mine and South Kensington’. For the identification with Frances Richards see The Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History, 86 (2006); the Ross family lived in South Kensington.
3 CL, 416.
4 Nicholas Frankel, ed., The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray (2011), 150.
5 CL, 524; Frankel, ed. The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, 156; Isobel Murray, ed., Oscar Wilde (1989), 582, suggests a character from Pater’s Gaston de Latour as a possible source for the name ‘Raoul’.
6 CL, 425.
7 Harris, 70–1.
8 CL, 424–5; PDG, OET III, emphasizes the care OW had taken with the manuscript.
9 PDG, OET III, xliii.
10 Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, My Fill of Days (1937), 183–4; PDG, OET III, xxxv.
11 Bernard Berenson, Sunset & Twilight (1964), 10; CL, 443.
12 CL, 585.
13 J. M. Stoddart to OW, 22 April 1890, in Frankel, ed., The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, 44.
14 Frankel, ed., The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, 43–8, 232–4. Frankel’s introduction and notes contain much new information from the J. B. Lippincott Co. records at the Pennsylvania Historical Society (Stoddart received the typescript in Philadelphia on 7 April 1890).
15 CL, 425; Maurice Macmillan to OW, 16 June 1890 (Austin); George Lock to OW, 7 July 1890 (Clark). In June 1890 Ward, Lock & Co. published ‘in volume form’ A Dead Man’s Diary by Coulson Kernahan, which had also been serialized in Lippincott’s Magazine.
16 CL, 729.
17 Stokes and Turner, in the ‘Dubia’ section of OET VII, list five possible OW contributions to PMG in 1890, the last on 3 April.
18 ‘Literary Intelligence’, Liverpool Mercury, 25 June 1890.
19 ‘Literature’, Derby Mercury, 25 June 1890; ‘Magazines and Reviews’, Leeds Mercury, 24 June 1890.
20 ‘England and the Nations’, NYT, 29 June 1890, quoted in PDG, OET III, l.
21 JFW to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 119.
22 R. Ross to OW [July, 1890], in Ross, ed., Robbie Ross – Friend of Friends, 20–1.
23 ‘Magazines’, Graphic, 12 July 1890; Speaker, 5 July 1890.
24 ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray”’, PMG, 26 June 1890; À Rebours, although not named, is quoted in the review.
25 Scots Observer, 5 July 1890.
26 Daily Chronicle, 30 June 1890; ‘A Study in Puppydom,’ St James’s Gazette, 24 June 1890; Scots Observer, 5 July 1890.
27 Gifford Lewis, The Selected Letters of Somerville and Ross (1989), 222; Elizabeth Lee, Ouida: A Memoir (1914), 157; J. A. Symonds to H. F. Brown, 22 July 1890, Brown, ed., Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds, 240; Preston, ed., Letters from Graham Robertson, xvi.
28 Holland, 78, 219–20, 312; Walter Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde’, Bookman, November 1891, in Beckson, 84.
29 ‘England and the Nations’, NYT, 29 June 1890, quoted in PDG, OET III, l.
30 CL, 428–9.
31 CL, 435–6.
32 CL, 429–31.
33 CL, 438–9.
34 Ward Locke and Co. to OW, 10 July 1890, quoted in McKenna, 185–6.
35 Sidney Low, Samuel Henry Jeyes (1915), 42.
36 David Bispham, A Quaker Singer’s Recollections (1920), 150.
37 Bispham, A Quaker Singer’s Recollections, 150; Harris, 72.
38 ‘Michael Field’, Journal, 21 July 1890 (BL: available online via ‘The Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium’, tundra.csd.sc.edu).
39 Carlos Blacker to the Duke of Newcastle, [28 July 1890], in Maguire, 26.
40 Stuart Merrill, ‘Oscar Wilde’ ms (Clark), translated by H. M. Hyde. Stuart Merrill, though American-born, had been brought up in Paris, where
his father had a diplomatic posting. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé was one of his schoolmasters. After a brief interlude in America, he was – in 1890 – returning to live in France. It was the bilingual Merrill who had produced the ‘pink and blue’ French translation of Wilde’s ‘Birthday of the Princess’ story.
41 CL, 454, 451; ‘The Theatres’, Daily News, 25 August 1890.
42 Pearson, 220; OW praised GA’s ‘brilliant performance of Laertes’ in his review of Irving’s Hamlet for the Dramatic Review (9 May, 1885); G. Alexander, quoted in Evening World (New York), 30 September 1892; J. Kaplan, ‘A Puppet’s Power’, Theatre Notebook, 46 (1991), 62. Frank M. Boyd’s A Pelican’s Tale (1919), 298, refers to OW first offering GA ‘a play in blank verse’; CL, 421, although in CL, 421 OW’s letter to GA is provisionally dated ‘[?Late January 1890]’ because it also contains a reference to Alexander’s production of ‘Dr. Bill’ by Hamilton Aidé, which opened at the Avenue Theatre on 1 February 1890. But Aidé’s play proved a huge success and ran through most of the year. Letters from Alexander to Clement Scott written in January 1892, referred to in Guy & Small, 94n, place the initial arrangement between Alexander and Wilde to ‘eighteen months’ earlier – i.e. July 1890 – and this date seems to be confirmed by Alexander’s comment in the Evening World that it was reading PDG that encouraged him to think OW could write a play. The sum received by OW in July 1890 was £50, but G. Alexander gave the total agreed advance as £100 in a letter to R. Ross (Ross, ed., Robbie Ross – Friend of Friends, 152). The notion that this sum was divided into two separate payments is my conjecture, but based on a similar arrangement that OW proposed to Norman Forbes-Robertson, CL, 454.
43 Alexander Teixeira de Mattos to OW, 19 July 1890 (Mark Samuels Lasner collection, Delaware).
44 CL, 452.
45 T. Sturge Moore, ed., Self-Portrait – taken from the Letters & Journals of Charles Ricketts, R. A. (1939), 16.
46 Harris, 73. OW’s first meeting with Gray has traditionally been placed rather earlier – and before the writing of PDG. But this seems unlikely. It is not mentioned in any contemporary record. The one source for this early date is the typed copy of a 1910 manuscript by Frank Liebich (1860–1922) at the Clark, which describes a dinner with OW, John Barlas, John Davidson and John Gray in a private room of a Soho restaurant in ‘the early summer of 1889’ – and suggests that, even at that date, Gray and Wilde were intimate friends. John Sloan’s 1995 biography of John Davidson, however, makes it clear that Davidson was not in London during the early summer of 1889 – and was only very briefly, and unhappily, in town later that year. He did not return, and settle in London, until 1890. And it was during 1891 that he came to know OW and John Gray well. Philip Cohen’s 2012 biography of John Barlas also indicates that Barlas’s friendship with Wilde did not develop until the beginning of 1891. It seems much more likely that the convivial dinner described by Liebich occurred in the ‘early summer’ of that year.
47 CL, 455–6.
48 Louis Latourette, quoted in Ellmann, 540; although the passage, referring to a meeting with an unnamed ‘young Englishman’ in Rome in 1900, does not refer explicitly to John Gray, the connection seems highly probable. OW certainly encountered John Gray in Rome in April 1900. And he certainly did come to regard him as the type of ‘Dorian Gray’.
49 J. H. McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest (1991), 55, 49; Harris, 73.
50 Lionel Johnson to Campbell Dodgson, 5 February 1891; Ernest Dowson to Arthur Moore, [2 February 1891], in H. Flower and D. Mass, eds, The Letters of Ernest Dowson (1967), 182; the letter is postmarked 9 January 1891.
Chapter 3: Suggestive Things
1 R. H. Sherard to J. Barlas, 29 January 1891: ‘Glad you have made it all [square] with Oscar Wilde. Don’t neglect him as he may be able to help you to a good publisher & anyway he is worth cultivating if only as a friend.’ In Philip K. Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas: A Critical Biography (2012), 105.
2 Archibald Grove to OW, [December 1891] (Washington, Library of Congress), the letter enclosed ‘proofs of a symposium which will appear in the January number’. The article on ‘Socialism and Literature’ was written by Henry S. Salt.
3 Robert Ross to Mrs Colefax, 20 June 1912, reproduced in Intentions, February 2011, 22.
4 George Bernard Shaw recalled: ‘I delivered an address on Socialism, at which Oscar turned up and spoke. Robert Ross surprised me greatly by telling me, long after Oscar’s death, that it was this address of mine that moved Oscar to try his hand at a similar feat by writing “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”’ (Harris, 331). It is hard to fix the details of this story, although the various encounters between the two men, noted in Shaw’s diary (see Stanley Weintraub, ‘The Hibernian School’ in J. A. Bertolini, Shaw and Other Playwrights [1993]), provide a suggestive context. On 18 July 1890 Shaw had delivered a lecture to the Fabian Society, at the St James’s restaurant, on ‘Socialism in Contemporary Literature’ under the title ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’, but it is not known if OW attended.
5 For Barlas’s contribution to ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ see Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 106–16; he quotes a letter from Sherard to Barlas [March 1891], ‘Wilde speaks highly of you and your service.’
6 CL, 743; In ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ Renan himself is cited, along with Darwin, Keats and Flaubert as among the few figures in the nineteenth century to have been able to realize their own perfection.
7 Denys Sutton, ed., Letters of Roger Fry (1972), 601; J. Barlas to J. Gray, [February 1891], in Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 105; see also OW to J. S. Little, CL, 475.
8 J. Barlas to J. Gray, 29 January 1891, in Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 105.
9 Harris, 100; Schroeder, 146–7.
10 OET V, 11; CL, 467–8; the play opened on Monday 29 January 1891.
11 CL, 468; ‘The Drama in America’, Era, 21 February 1891; ‘Lawrence Barrett in a New Play’, New York Tribune, 27 January 1891, in OET V, 14; NYT, 27 January 1891, in Beckson, 87.
12 PMG, 6 February 1891, quoting the ‘London correspondent’ of the Glasgow Herald, says that OW had received an ‘indefinite’ reply to an inquiry about when Barrett planned to put on the play, ‘but two or three days ago, there came to Mr. Wilde, a cablegram from New York – “Guido Ferranti” produced; a great success”’. CL, 464; Guy & Small, 105; 467–8.
13 OET V, 15.
14 Rodney Shewan, ‘A Wife’s Tragedy’, Theatre Research International, 7 (1982), 94, suggests that this early abortive effort referred to by OW may be the ms of ‘The Wife’s Tragedy’.
15 CL, 463, 486; arrangements for the tour were complicated when Lawrence Barrett, long in failing health, died on 20 March. Minna Gale, however, determined to keep the show on the road. There is a signed receipt dated 20 June 1891 (on Lyric Club letterhead): ‘Received from Minna K. Gale of New York City the sum of £200 – two hundred pounds sterling – for the Sole Right for the United States of America and Canada of my play the Duchess of Padua as per agreement – Oscar Wilde.’ (Clark).
16 PDG, OET III, li–lvi. Guy & Small, 234–7. Besides the six new chapters – 3, 5, 15, 16, 17 and 18 – OW also divided chapter 13 in two, creating chapters 19 and 20 in the book version. JFW to OW [June 1890], in Tipper, Oscar, 130.
17 PDG, Chapter 6.
18 Coulson Kernahan, ‘Oscar Wilde: Some Recollections’, ts 12–13, (Clark); Coulson Kernahan, ‘Oscar Wilde As I Knew Him’, ts 52, (Clark).
19 Ernest Dowson to Arthur Moore, [2 February 1891], in Flower and Mass, eds, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, 182, re. meeting chez Horne on 29 January; Lucien Pissarro to Camille Pissarro, 10 February 1891, in Anne Thorold ed., The Letters of Lucien to Camille Pissarro 1883–1905 (1993), 179; J. Barlas to J. Gray, 29 January 1891, in Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 105: ‘I am glad that you [OW and JG] are both anarchists’.
20 Frank Liebich, ‘Oscar Wilde’, ts (Clark); CL, 686; Harris, 73.
21 CL, 482.
22 CL905.
23 Harr
is, 73; McCormack, John Gray, 27–9; Ernest Dowson to Arthur Moore, [2 February 1891], in Flower and Mass, eds, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, 182; Lucien Pissarro to Camille Pissarro, 10 February 1891, in Thorold, ed., The Letters of Lucien to Camille Pissarro, 179.
24 OW to Arthur Symons, [pm 1 October 1890]: ‘Your friend has my full authority to translate my essay on Criticism – I think that on “The Decay of Lying” has been already done, and I am making arrangements for a translation of Dorian Gray’ (Christie’s, 19 May 2000). Although not specified, it is to be supposed that the translations were to be in French. No such translations, however, appeared.
25 CL, 471.
26 Horst Schroeder, ‘Oscar Wilde and Stéphane Mallarmé’, Wildean, 41 (2012), 75–81; also CL, 471; Sherard, SUF, 114–16.
27 D. J. Niederauer and F. Broche, eds, Henri de Régnier, Les Cahiers inédits 1887–1936 (2002), 244, 464; John Gray to Félix Fénéon, 14 April 1891, in M. Imbert, ed., Félix Fénéon & John Gray: Correspondance (2010), 40.
28 CL, 472; Maguire, 24; OW to Henri de Régnier, 2 March 1891 (Paris); Niederauer and Broche, eds, Henri de Régnier, 244.
29 OET VI, 88; Robert Sherard, ‘Aesthete and Realist’, Morning Journal, 22 March 1891, in Ellmann, 304; see also Horace G. Hutchinson, ed., Private Diaries of Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West (1922), 63.
30 Coulson Kernahan, In Good Company (1917), in Mikhail, 310–11.
31 CL, 295; Guy & Small, 57–61; Mason, 341–5.
32 Athenaeum, 27 June 1891; Walter Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde’, Bookman, November 1891, I, 59–60.
33 Schroeder, 111.
34 Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde’, 59–60.
Chapter 4: The Best Society
1 LAD, Autobiography (1929), 59.
2 LAD to F. Harris, 20 March 1925, Texas; LAD to A. J. A. Symons, 14 March and 16 March, 1939 (Clark); the inscribed PDG is at the Clark.
3 W. L. Courtenay, The Passing Hour (1925), 118, says that only Cust or ‘perhaps Edmund Yates, at his best, came somewhere near Oscar Wilde’s random flashes of wit’.
Oscar Page 109
