1854: [Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; var. O’fflahertie]; b. 16 Oct., at 21 [vars. 15, 23] Westland Row, Dublin, son of Dr. (later Sir) William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Elgee, his maternal grandmother being an O’Flynn; bapt. by Catholic priest at Glencree for his mother; raised at 1 Merrion Square [East]; ed. Royal School, Portora, Enniskillen Co. Fermanagh, 1864-71, with his elder brother William; occas. plays with children of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; suffers at death in Longford of his little sister, Isola (a lock of whose hair he always carried), 1867, and for whom he wrote “Requiescat”; holidays at Moytura, family house in Mayo; wins Portora School Scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin [TCD], reading Classics, 1871-74; roomed with Willie at Botany Bay, 1872-73; Foundation Scholar, 1873; challenges college bully to fisticuffs and won; tutored in classics by Robert Tyrrell (chair of Latin) and J. P. Mahaffy (chair of ancient history); took Berkeley Gold medal for Greek at TCD and Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford (1974-1878), disdaining third-year exams at TCD; visited Geneva and Paris with Lady Wilde; assists Mahaffy with proofs of Social Life in Greece from Homer ot Menander (1874), acknowledged in the preface; enters Magdalen on his birthday, 1874 (‘My accent was one of the things I lost at Oxford’); made friends with David Hunter Blair, later a convert to Catholicism, Reginald Harding, William Ward, and others; became acquainted with Walter Pater and John Ruskin; visits Florence, Venice, Padua, Verona, and Milan with Mahaffy, Summer 1875; falls in love Florence Balcombe (‘just seventeen and the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money’ – letter to Ward), who subsequently becomes engaged to Bram Stoker in 1878; publishes “Chorus of Cloud-Maidens” in Dublin University Magazine, 1875; meets Frank Miles in London, and Lillie Langry in the former’s studio; travels with Miles to his home in Nottingham and afterwards to the Wildes’ fishing lodge in Connemara (where Miles made murals of the Wilde boys as fishing cherubs), August 1875; death of Sir William Wilde, 19 April, 1876; assists Mahaffy with Rambles and Studies in Greece; travels with Mahaffy to Genoa and Ravenna and onwards to Corfu, Olympia, Argos, Aegina, Athens, and Mycenae, setting aside a meeting planned with Blair and Ward in Rome, Spring 1876; detours to Rome on return journey and gains audience with Pope Pius IX, arranged by David Hunter Blair (‘I would go over as a luxury’); sent down for the remainder of the term at Magdalen for returning late; stays in London and reviews the Grosvenor Gallery opening exhibition, 1876; returns to Dublin; sudden death of his half-br. Henry Wilson, from whom he receives a small legacy conditional on his remaining Anglican for five years; Class Moderations (Oxon.), 1876; wins Newdigate Prize for “Ravenna” (poem), 10 July, 1878; takes Double First (Litterae Humaniores), 19 July 1878; appears to have received mercury treatment (used for syphilis), March 1878 [acc. Ellmann]; narrowly misses fellowship, 1879; engages in flirtation with Violet Hunt in Dublin, 1879; sets up in London as ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, 1879; takes rooms at Salisbury St. (off the Strand), with Miles, displaying a port. of Lillie Langtry by Edward Poynter on an easel therein; strews Madonna lilies before Sarah Bernhardt on her arrival at Dover with Comédie Française; writes Vera, or the Nihilists, autumn 1880;

1881: Vera scheduled for Adelphi production in December but withdrawn on account of assassination of Tsar Alexander II, March 1881 (Princess Alexandra being sister of the Tsarina), and that of President Garland in America; proposes to Charlotte Montefiori, 1881; began to be caricatured in Punch as Jellaby Postlethwaite, the ‘quite too utterly’ poet, and appears thus more than fifty times in issues of 1881; meets Constance Mary Lloyd (b. 1858), through Dublin friends in London, 1881; issues Poems (July 1881), at his own expense; sends copy to Oxford Union, which is refused after division on morality of collection; forced to leave accommodation shared with Miles at the instance of the latter’s clerical father; moves into his mother’s house in London; satirised in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience as the outrageous aesthete Reginald Bunthorpe, contrasted with Archibald Grosvenor as the ‘fleshly’ and ‘spiritual’ types of aesthete respectively, April 1881; American tour proposed by Carte of D’Oyly Carte following success of Patience in New York (Sept. 1881); departs for America on a tour organised by Col. Morse, 24 Dec. 1881; programme incls. “The English Renaissance in Art” (9 Jan.), lectures revised to suit his audience as “The Decorative Arts”, and “The House Beautiful”; visits Walt Whitman in company with J. M. Stoddart, 18 Jan. 1882; represents himself as ‘the son of one of Ireland’s noblest daughters’ in St. Paul, Minnesota, St. Patrick’s Day, 1882; greeted as ‘Speranza’s Boy’ in San Francisco, April, 1882 and eulogised ‘Speranza’ again in his lecture on “The Irish Poets of ’48”; called ‘epicene’ by Bodley in New York Times; gives total of 140 lectures; arranges for production of Vera in New York; returns home with $6,000 in lecture fees and commission to write blank-verse The Duchess of Padua for American actress Mary Anderson; issues fourth and fifth revised edns. of Poems (1882); seeks appointment as a Schools Inspector; Vera produced unsuccessfully in New York, 1883, with Marie Prescott as Vera Sabouroff; The Duchess of Padua rejected by Mary Anderson (‘We shan’t be able to dine with the Duchess tonight, Robert’) but published in 1883; commences friendship with his first biographer Robert Sherard; moved to Paris, Autumn 1882-March 1883; living at Hotel Voltaire, Rive Gauche; influenced by Paul Verlaine, whom he met at Café Vachette, as well as Maurice Rollinat, and Edmund de Goncourt (espec. “La Faustin”), who characterises him in his Journal as a creature ‘au sexe douteux’; wrote poem about ‘passionate purity of brown-skinned boys’, 1883; meets Victor Hugo, who nonetheless sleeps at one of his soirées; embarks on new lecture touring, “Personal Impressions of America”, adding to his repertoire, organised again by Col. Morse; proposes to Constance, Dublin Nov. 1883;

1885: m. Constance, 29 May, 1885, she bringing marriage allowance of £250; honeymoons in Paris and Dieppe, and reads Joris-Karl-Huysman’s A Rebours; Labouchière Criminal Law Amendment Act passed 1885 (a so-called ‘blackmailer’s charter’ punishing ‘any act of gross indecency’ between males with two years penal servitude); Cyril b. 1885; moves to 16 Tite St., Chelsea, 1886, otherwise ‘The House Beautiful’, designed by Edward William Godwin and decorated in a style the antithesis of Victorian opulence; lecturing on “The Value of Art in Modern Life”, and “Dress”; Vyvyan b. 1886; contributes articles and essays to The Dramatic Review in 1885-86, The Pall Mall Gazette in 1885-90, and The Court and Society Review in 1887, all amounting to some 100 multiple reviews in 1887-88; meets Robert Ross (then 17), who stays at Tite St. as a paying guest; Wilde probably begins a sexual relationship with him, 1887; tells Frank Harris that the ‘flowerlike grace’ of his wife has given way to something ‘heavy, shapeless, deformed’, 1887; invited by Thomas Wemyss Reid, gen. manager of Cassell, to edit Ladies’ World, launched in Nov. 1886, and which Reid reluctantly agreed to rename The Woman’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society, Spring 1887; publishes The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888), ‘written not for children but for childlike people from eighteen to eight’; palm read by Count Louis Hamon, who spoke of impending disaster; presents a copy to Florence Stoker [sold for $8,500 at Christie’s, NY, 1984], and later with a copy of Salomé, ‘my strange venture in a tongue that is not my own’, 1893; Constance initiated into Golden Dawn (‘Qui patitur vincit/Who suffers conquers’), 1888; refuses prose articles by Edith Somerville for Women’s World, 1888; reviews ‘Mr Froude’s Blue Book’ [i.e., Two Chiefs of Dunboy] in Pall Mall Gazette (13 April 1889); probable affair with John Gray, who later became a priest; publishes ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1889), essay proposing that the homsexual love of a youth was the subject of the Shakespeare’s sonnets; resigns editorship of The Woman’s World, Oct. 1889; attends Parnell Commission; contributes ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ to Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine at Stoddart’s request, serialised from July 1890; called ‘unmanly, sickening, vicious’ by the Athenaeum reviewer and compared in spirit with the Cleveland St. scandal by the Scots Observer;

1891: introduced by Lionel Johnson to Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’; var. ‘Bosey’; b. 1870), third son of Marquis of Queensberry, during summer of 1891; in Paris met André Gide, 1891; publishes “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in Fortnightly Review, XLIX (1 Feb. 1891), apparently occasioned by attendance at Fabian lecture of George Bernard Shaw; Dorian Gray issued in book-form (1891); the Wildes begin to experience social ostracism, Constance remarking, ‘Since Oscar wrote Dorian Gray, no one will speak to us’; issues Intentions (1891), a collection of essays and dialogues including ‘The Decay of Lying’, first published in The Nineteenth Century, 1889 (with the epigram, ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’), ‘The Critic as Artist’, and ‘The Truth of Masks’; commissioned to write new play by George Alexander, 1890; The Duchess of Padua performed as Guido Ferranti, New York 1891; issues Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891); commences writing Lady Windermere’s Fan under the working title of A Good Woman, Summer 1891; commences Salomé [based on Matthew 14], Nov. 1891, and secures Sarah Bernhardt for the title-role; refused license by the Examiner E. F. Smyth-Pigott, and not produced till 11 Feb. 1896 in Paris, and 1905 in London ((Bijou Theatre); Lady Windermere’s Fan (Nov. 1892), and first produced by actor-manager George Alexander, at St. James Theatre; accepts nomination to membership of Irish Literary Society (London); writing A Woman of No Importance, Norfolk, Aug. August-Sept. 1892; produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, with Julia Neilson as Lady Chiltern (Haymarket 1893); visited at his house in Tite St. by the Marquis of Queensberry, the irate father of ‘Bosie’, as retaled to Frank Harris on the basis of the trials transcript, 1894; An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest both premiered 1895; A Florentine Tragedy, a blank-verse tragedy written Dec. 1893 and performed in London 1906, English version published in first collected works, 1908; also La Sainte Courtisane, A Woman Covered with Jewels, story of Myrrhina, based on that of Jezebel; visits Florence, Monte Carlo, and Algiers with Douglas, 1894-95; wrote “Constance”, appearing as Mr. and Mrs. Daventry (1900) over the name of Frank Harris to whom he sold the plot for money; Marquess of Queensberry, led to suspect a homosexual relationship between Wilde and Bosie, turns up at Tite St. with a prize-fighter, June 1894; death by suicide of of Queensberry’s son Drumlanrig, secretly Lord Rosebery’s lover;

1895: Wilde takes libel action against Marquess of Queensberry arising from the latter’s visiting card left at his club the Albemarle, 18 Feb. 1895, inscribed with message and address, ‘To Oscar Wilde posing somdomite’ [sic]; failure of his civil suit against Queensberry, 3-5 April, 1895, conducted by Sir Edward Clarke, QC, MP, with Edward Carson defending Queensberry by ruthlessly cross-examining Wilde on his aesthetic opinions and his behaviour with young men (‘I have just ruined the most brilliant man in London’); Wilde withdraws on third day of questioning; Queensberry instructs his solicitors to send the file to the Director of Public Prosecutions; unable to find hotel accommodation, Wilde stays with his friend Ada (‘The Sphinx’) Leverson and her husband; authorities briefly deferred arrest under Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885); Wilde remains in London and is arrested at Cadogan Hotel, Sloane St., 5 April; charged with gross indecency, May 1895; contents of Tite St. sold by sherriff’s men on the day before the first Crown action against him, incl. 2,000 books for £130; tried in criminal court, 26 April-1 May 1895; freed on bail after jury disagreement arising from his spirited defence of male friendship (‘I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man’); accedes to his mother’s request that he stay in England; wrote to Bosie that he had ‘decided it was nobler and more beautiful to stay [than assume] a false name, a disguise, a hunted life - all that is not for me’; bankruptcy hearing, 1895; second criminal trial, 20-25 May, 1895, with the Solicitor-General Sir Frank Lockwood leading for the Crown, possibly under political instructions in view of forthcoming elections and (more conjecturally) a threat of disclosure concerning Lord Rosebery’s affair with Queensberry’s eldest son; Constance sends sons to Switzerland, but remains herself until end of trial; Wilde found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced by Mr. Justice Wills to two year’s hard labour on 25 May (‘and that you, Mr. Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is clearly impossible to doubt’); name effaced on Scholars’ Board at Portora (finally reinstated in 1930); suffered extremely under pre-Prison Reform conditions, picking oakum and treading the mill; received kindness from Warder Martin at Reading Gaol (‘a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age’); imprisoned at first in Pentonville, then moved to Wandsworth after six months, and finally to Reading Prison, Nov. 1895, being spat upon at Clapham Junction; held in cell C.3.3; declared bankrupt while in prison; suffered from diarrheoia, insomnia, and recurrence of earlier abscess in ear; Constance travels from Genoa to inform him of the death of Lady Wilde, only to learn that he already knew, having seen her spirit in his cell, Feb. 1896; Salomé performed in Paris, 1896 (in English 1905); writes self-exculpatory letter to Lord Alfred; instructs Robert Ross to copy it and convey original to Bosie; Ross preserves the original while Douglas angrily destroys the copy; envisaged by Wilde as “Epistola, in Carcare et Vinculis”, accusing Douglas of a ‘terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character’; published in abridged form by Ross as De Profundis (1905), overheard screams of demented soldier being whipped with 20 lashes on instructions of visiting JP days before his release; witnessed three children being prepared for incarceration for poaching rabbits, and wrote to Daily Chronicle to raise money for payment of fines leading to their release; Wilde released from prison, 19 May 1897; moves immediately to France, settling at first at Berneval-sur-Mer nr. Dieppe (‘I wrote when I did not know life. Now that I know life I have no more to write’); adopted pseudonym ‘Sebastian Melmoth’; wrote and published as C.3.3 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, concerning the hanging of Trooper Thomas Woodridge for murder of his wife; embroiled in rivalry between former lovers, Bosie and Robert Ross; joins Douglas in France and travels with him to Italy, further alienating Constance; moves to Paris alone; death of Constance resulting from surgical operation in Italy, 1898; befriended by Harold Mellor, a young English gentleman, and travelled with him to La Napoule in Nice, where he met and embraced Sarah Bernhardt, then playing in La Tosca; visits Cannes; Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) published in London anonymously by Leonard Smithers, to whom Wilde had been reintroduced by Beardsley at Dieppe, firstly in edn. of 400 copies, though reaching six edns. in three months; writes a second letter to Daily Chronicle indicting British prison system for cruelty and stupidity stemming from ‘[entire] want of imagination’; publication of The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband (1899); travels to S. France but settles at Hotel d’Alsace, Paris, 1900; undergoes surgery for recurrent ear infection aggrevated by fall in prison;

1900: dies of pyogenic encephalitic meningitis, 1.50 p.m., 30 Nov., Hotel d’Alsace; baptised a Catholic on the night before his death, being attended by a Dublin Passionate priest whom Robert Ross had fetched at his request; bur. in pauper’s grave at Bagneux outside the walls of Paris, and reinterred in Cimetière Père Lachaise [Ave. Carette, Plot 89, between Jean Chaptal and Le Royer], with modernist monument in the form of an angel by Jacob Epstein, commissioned after the sale of his works by Ross on completion payments, 1909; the role of first biographer assumed captured by R. H. Sherard (Oscar Wilde, 1902) whose further naively defended him against revelations made by Gide and Harris; Robert Ross publishes De Profundis (1905, with 45 edns. to 1925); the standard biography is Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987), though erroneously attributing his death to syphilis - a theory promulgated by Arthur Ransome; Peter Hall revived The Importance of Being Earnest successfully at the National Theatre, 1982; a stained-glass window dedicated to Wilde in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, 14 Feb. 1995, the 100th anniversary of the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest; Wilde now seen as anticipating major trends of later cultural criticism including post-modernism and gay theory; trusts established to erect statues to Wilde in London and Dublin, resulting in Hambling and Osborne monuments, 1997; his papers are partly held in NYPL. PI JMC DNB NCBE ODQ DIB DIW DIH DIL OCTH OCEL SUTH FDA DUB OCIL

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Works

Published Works
Poetry, Poems (London: David Bogue 1881, 2nd. Edn. 1882) [infra], and Do. [‘Author’s Edition’] (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane 1892), with new title-page by Charles Ricketts; The / Ballad of Reading Gaol / By / C.3.3. (London, Royal Arcade: Leonard Smithers 1898).

Plays, Salomé ([Paris:] Librairie de l’art independant 1893), in English as Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane; Boston: Copeland & Day 1894), pictured by Aubrey Beardsley [genitals bowlderised in this edition, restored in 1906 edn.]; The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Ward & Lock 1891) [first serialised in Lippincott’s); Do. in German trans. by Johannes Gaulke as Das Bildnis von Dorian Gray (Leipzig: Max Spohr 1901); The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Smithers 1899); A Woman of No Importance (London: Smithers 1894); Lady Windermere’s Fan (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane 1893); The Sphinx (London: John Lane 1894); An Ideal Husband (London: Smithers 1899); An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) De Profundis (London: Methuen 1905); A Florentine Tragedy (Boston & London: J. V. Luce 1908). MODERN & SCHOLARLY EDITIONS: Sarah A. Dickson, ed., The Importance of Being Earnest […] in Four Acts as Originally Written by Oscar Wilde [New York Public Library Arents Collection 1956, No. 6] (NYPL 1956); Vyvyan Holland, ed. The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Butler & Tanner 1957); Vincent F. Hopper and Gerald B. Lahey, eds., The Importance of Being Earnest (NY: Barron’s Educ. Series 1959); Jackson Russell, ed., The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Benn 1980); Joseph Bristow, ed., ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and Related Writings (London: Routledge 1992), 271pp.; The Importance of Being Earnest [1st pub. 1899; World Classics] (OUP 1995); Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggen, eds., Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a reconstructive critical edition of the text of the first production [...] [&c.] [Princess Grace Library] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1995), 378pp., 158 ills., maps, notes, &c.; William Tydeman and Steven Price, eds., Salome (Cambridge UP 1996), 226pp.; Francis Miriam Reed, ed. and intro., Vera; or, The Nihilist ([Harvard]: Mellen Press, 1989) [final version as presented at its premiere Aug. 20th 1883 at Union Square Theatre in New York City]. Also [?Oxford Edns.], Peter Raby, ed., Lady Windermere’s Fan [1st pub. 1893]; Salomé [1st pub. 1894]; A Woman of No Importance [1st pub. 1894]; An Ideal Husband [1st pub. 1894].

Prose, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London: Nutt 1888); Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and other Stories (London: McIlvaine 1891); Intentions (London: Leipzig, Heinemann & Balestier 1891); House of Pomegranites (London: James R. Osgood, M’Ilvaine & Co. 1891), title-page design by Charles Ricketts and C. H. Shannon; The Soul of Man Under Socialism, first pub. in Pall Mall Gazette, 1891 (London [printed priv.] 1904); De Profundis (London: Methuen 1905); De Profundis (London: Methuen 1905), rep. in Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde, (London: Hart-Davis 1962). Isobel Murray, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (OUP 1974); Donald A. Lawler, ed., The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism [Norton Critical Edn.] (NY & London: Norton & Co. 1988) [facs. of Lippincott Monthly Mag. version]; Peter Faulkner, ed., The Picture of Dorian Gray ([1891] [Everyman Edn.] (London: J. M. Dent 1993), 207pp.; Picture of Dorian Gray [1890] (London: Thrift Edns. 1994). Plays, Also, Michael J. O’Neill, ‘Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Unpublished Lecture Notes of Oscar Wilde’, in University Review, Vol. I, No. 4 (Spring 1955), [c.p.50].

Poetry, Albert Camus, trans., Oscar Wilde: ballade de la geole de Reading (Paris: Falaize 1952). Brian Lalor, ill, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (London: Duckworth 1997); The Ballad of Reading Gaol [Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents, Poetry of the 1890s] [1898] (Spelsbury, Woodstock Books 1995), 31pp.; Poems, 1892 [Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents, Poetry of the 1890s] (Spelsbury, Woodstock Books 1995), 234pp.

Criticism, Richard Ellmann, ed., The Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (NY: Random House 1969; London: W. H. Allen 1970; new eds. 1987, &c.); Isobel Murray, ed., Wilde, Man Under Socialism and Prison Writings (Oxford: OUP 1990); John Wyse Jackson, ed., Aristotle at Afternoon Tea: The Rare Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate 1991); John Wyse Jackson, The Uncollected Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate 1995), 240pp.

Painting criticism, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, Dublin University Magazine, Vol. 90 (July 1877, p.125 [see notes, infra]; ‘The Rout of the RA’, in Court and Society Review, Vol. IV (27 April 1887) [ rep. in Ellmann, ed., The Artist as Critic, W. H. Allen 1970].

Letters, Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde, (London: Hart-Davis; NY: Brace, Harcourt & World 1962), xxv, 958pp, 35 ills.; also Hart-Davis, ed., Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: OUP 1979); Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis, eds., The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London Fourth Estate 2001), 1,270pp.

Anthologies & Collections, Richard Aldington, ed., The Portable Oscar Wilde (NY: Viking Press 1946), Do., rev. Stanley Weintraub (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977); Kingsley Amis, ed., Poems and Essays by Oscar Wilde (London: Collins 1956); Owen Dudley Edwards, Fireworks &c. (London: Barrie & Jenkins 1959), 282pp.; Graham Hough, Selections form the Works of Oscar Wilde (NY: Dell 1960);Richard Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde: Selected Writings (OUP 1961); Isobel Murray, ed., Plays, Prose Writings and Poems (London: Dent 1975); Merlin Holland, ed., Wilde Anthology, (Collins Gem [1997]), 32pp.; Robert Pearce, The Best of Wilde (Duckworth 1997), 182pp.; Alaistar Rolfe, ed., Wilde, Nothing ... Except My Genius (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1997), 81pp.; Stephen Calloway, ed., Wilde, Oscariana: The Wit and Maxims of Oscar Wilde (London: Orion 1997), 111pp.; Merlin Holland, ed., The Oscar Wilde Anthology (London: HarperCollins 2000), 288pp.

Collected editions: Alfred Neumann, trans. [Complete Works], Wiener Verlag Wilde Edn., 7 vols. ([Berlin:] Wiener Verlag 1908); Robert Ross, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works, 10 vols. (NY: Doubleday 1921); Robert Ross, ed., Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 15 vols. (London: Methuen 1908); Do., Ross, ed., The Complete Works, 10 vols. (NY: Doubleday 1921); rep. as The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 1908-1922 (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), sep. vols. incl. The Poems of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen 1908), and Reviews [Vols. 14 & 15] (Methuen 1908), &c.; Portable Oscar Wilde (Viking 1946)[?]; Vyvyan Holland, ed., The Complete Works (Glasgow: Collins 1948); G. F. Maine, ed., The Works of Oscar Wilde (London & Glasgow: Collins 1948) [var. 1968]; Isobel Murray [Univ. of Aberdeen], ed., The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde [World’s Classics] (OUP 1979), 278pp.; The Works of Oscar Wilde [Golden Heritage Series] (Dublin: Galley Press 1987) [imprint of WH Smith], 1114pp.; Isobel Murray, ed., The Writings of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: OUP 1989); Terry Eagleton, ed. & intro., Plays, Prose Writing and Poems of Oscar Wilde [Everyman] (London: J. M. Dent 1991), 480pp.; Merlin Holland, ed., Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: HarperCollins 1994), 1334pp.; H. Montgomery Hyde, ed. and intro., The Complete Plays (London: Methuen 1988), 606pp.; Ian Small, ed., Complete Short Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1994), 288pp. [anticipates full multi-vol. edition of works]; Bobby Fong & Karl Feckson, eds., The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: "Poems and Poems in Prose" (OUP 2001), 333pp.

Further Editions, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: A Study of Duty [with] The Portrait of W. H., and Other Stories (London: Methuen 1909) [1887; collected 1891; 1889; 1908 Edns.; on handmade paper and Japanese vellum 1908] this edn. incl. The Canterville Ghost’; ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’; ‘The Model Millionaire’].

Journal Articles, ‘Oscar at Oxford,’ in New York Review of Books, 31, (29 March 1984), pp.23-28; ‘Wilde in New York: Beauty Packed Them In ',New York Times Review of Books, 11 November 1987), pp.15-16; ‘Oscar Meets Walt,’ in New York Review of Books, (13 December 1987), pp.42-44; ‘The Uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce,’ in Ceri Crossley and Ian Small, eds., Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations: Imagining France [lecture at Bennington College in Ben Bullit Lectureship ser.] (London: Macmillan, 1988).

Prose Narrative, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime; The Canterville Ghost; The Sphinx Without a Secret; The Model Millionaire. A HOUSE OF POMEGRANITES: The Young King; The Birthday of the Infanta; The Fisherman and his Soul; The Star-Child; The Happy Prince; The Selfish Giant; The Devoted Friend; The Remarkable Rocket.

Essays & Letters, De Profundis, Four Letters from Reading prison; Two Letters to the Daily Chronicle. INTENTIONS: The Decay of Lying; Pen, Pencil and Poison; The Critic As Artist; The Truth of Masks. Also, The Soul of Man Under Socialism; The Rise of Historical Criticism; The Portrait of Mr. W. H.; Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young; Chron. Table [missing from this edns.]

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Bibliographical details
Poems, ELEUTHERIA: Hélas, Sonnet to Liberty, Ave Imperatrix, To Milton, Louis Napoleon, Sonnet on the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria; Quantum Mutata, Libertatis Sacra Fames, Theoretikos; [also] The Garden of Eros. ROSA MYSTICA: Requiescat, Sonnet on Approaching Italy, San Miniato, Ave Maria Gratia Plena, Italia, Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa, Rome Unvisited, Urbs Sacra Aeterna, Sonnet on Hearing the Dies Irae Sung in the Sistine Chapel, Easter Day, E Tenebris, Vita Nuova, Madonna Mia, The New Helen; [also] The Burden of Itys. WILD FLOWERS: Impression du Matin, Magdalen Walks, Athanasia, Serenade, Endymion, La Bella Donna Della Mia Mente, Chanson; [also] Charmides. FLOWERS OF GOLD: Impressions, The Grave of Keats, Theocritus, In the Gold Room, Ballade de Marguerite, The Dole of the King’s Daughter, Amor Intellectualis, Santa Decca, A Vision, Impression de Voyage, The Grave of Shelley, By the Arno. IMPRESSIONS DE THÉÂTRE: Fabien dei Franchi, Phèdre [ded. Sarah Bernhardt], Portia, Queen Henrietta Maria, Camma; [also] Panthea. THE FOURTH MOVEMENT: Impression, Le Réveillon, At Verona, Apologia, Quia Multum Amavi, Silentium Amoris, Her Voice, My Voice, Taedium Vitae; [also] The Harlot’s House, Humanitad, GLUKUIIIKROS ERWS, From Spring Days to Winter, Ailinon, ailinon eipe, no d'eu nikatw, Fantaises Décoratives, Canzonet, Symphony in Yellow, In the Forest, To My Wife, T. L. L., Désespoir, Pan, Ravenna, The Sphinx, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Poems in Prose, The Artist, The Doer of Good, The Disciple, The Master, The House of Judgement, The Teacher of Wisdom.

Robert Ross, ed., Works of Oscar Wilde, 15 vols. (London: Methuen 1908; rep. Dawson of Pall Mall 1969); bibl. details on the Dawson’s title-page verso [facing Methuen title-page]. The volume devoted to Dorian Gray includes a unique preface by Ross in the form of a note explaining that ‘the sole object of my intrusion [...] is to express my very best thanks to Mr Charles Carrington the publisher and owner of Dorian Gray for permitting it to appear in the uniform edition of Oscar Wilde’s authentic works - an edition which would have otherwise been incomplete.’ The title page [facing], shows the imprint: ‘Paris, Charles Carrington, 13 Montmartre 1908’. Bibl. lists Oscar Wilde, For the Love of the King: A Burmese Mask (London Dawsons 1969); De Profundis (Methuen 1925; 1945); Ballad of Reading Gaol (Methuen 1910); Dorian Gray (London July 1890); Do., 1st edn. with preface and 7 add. chaps (1891); same (Paris: Charles Carrington 13 Fauberg Montmartre 1908); also Albemarle Club [?Works, ed. Ellmann 1987, 411pp.]; Portable Oscar Wilde (Viking 1946).

Richard Ellmann, ed., Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (London: WH Allen 1970), includes ‘Tomb of Keats’; ‘Impressions of America; ‘Mr Whistler’s 10 O’Clock’; ‘Relation of Dress to Art’; ‘Dinners and Dishes’; ‘Half Hours with the Worst Authors’ [Saintsbury]; ‘To Read or Not to Read; ‘Portrait of Mr WH [1921]; Pater’s Last Volume; ‘Preface to Dorian Gray’; ‘Defence of Dorian Gray’ [newspaper letter of 1890]; ‘Soul of Man Under Socialism’ [Fortnightly Review, XLIX, Feb. 1891 292-319]; ‘Decay of the Art of Lying’, ‘Pen Pencil and Poison’; ‘The Critic as Artist’; ‘The Truth of Masks’ [orig. ‘Shakespeare and Stage Costume’, all from Intentions; [Oscar Wilde in the Witness Stand, 1895]; also reviews of Froude, Mahaffy, Swinburne, William Morris, Henley and Sharp. NOTE ALSO Richard Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (1987) [Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism averred by Ellmann at the close of the Preface.]

H. Montgomery Hyde, intro., The Complete Plays (London: Methuen 1988), 606pp. [Introduction, p.1-28]; incl. ‘a chronology’ of Wilde’s life, vii-xi. This edition includes ‘The Gribsby Scene’ [in which Algernon is served a writ for an unpaid hotel bill in the West End], copyright Estate of Vyvyan Holland, with explanatory note by H. M. Hyde (1981). All the plays included were first published by Methuen in 1908. NOTE, The Gribsby Scene found its way to Germany and was published separately there as Ernst Sein! in 1903. A copy was read by the drama critic James Agate who was impressed enough to say that ‘the fun in the scene that Wilde deleted is better than any living playwright can do’. he was unable to find the original, however. The full manuscript had been written in four quarto notebooks, of which the fourth was given to the British Museum by Ross in 1909. The remaining three turned up in a sale of property by the widow of Arthur Clifton, who had apparently borrowed them from Ross, a business associate, and were sold to Mr George Arents, who bequeathed them among the Arents Collection in the New York Public Library. The Gribsby scene was broadcast by BBC Home Service, 27 Oct. 1954, a reprinted in The Listener, 4 Nov. 1954. QUOT (Algernon), ‘Well, I really am not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs [Holloway] for having dined in the West End. It is perfectly ridiculous.’

Lectures, Kevin H. F. O’Brien, An Edition of Oscar Wilde’s American Lectures (Ph.D.; Notre Dame Univ. 1973); Michael J. O’Neill, ‘Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Unpublished Lecture Notes of a speech by Oscar Wilde at San Francisco’, in University Review, 1, 4 (1955), pp.29-33.

Various (Unsorted): Bobby Fong & Karl Feckson, eds., The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: “Poems and Poems in Prose” (OUP 2001), 333pp.; Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis, eds., The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (Fourth Estate), 1,270pp.; Oscar Wilde, De Profundis: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript, intro. by Merlin Holland (British Library 2001), 80pp. [all presum. 2001].

Theatrical Details
Chronology of first performances: Vera, or the Nihilists (written 1880; produced Union Square Th., 20 August 1883); The Duchess of Padua: A Tragedy of the XVI Century (written 1882-83, produced Broadway Th., NY, 26 Jan. 1891, and later in trans. by Max Meyerfeld, Berlin 1904; pub. as Die Herzogin von Padua, Berlin: S. Fischer 1904); Lady Windermere’s Fan (St. James Th., 20 Feb. 1892); A Woman of No Importance (19 April Haymaket 1893) [var. 13]; An Ideal Husband (Haymarket, 3 Jan. 1895) [infra]; The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (St James Th., 14 Feb. 1895) [infra]; Salomé, drame en une Acte (Paris, Theatre de l’Oeuvre, 11 Feb. 1896; London, New Stage Club, Bijou Th., 10 May 1905); A Florentine Tragedy (Literary Theatre Society, 10 June 1906). [See Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (1946).]

An Ideal Husband, Premiered at Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 3rd January 1895; Sole Lessee, Mr. Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Managers: Mr. Lewis Waller and Mr. H. H. Morell. Dram. Personae [actors]: THE EARL OF CAVERSHAM: Mr. Alfred Bishop;VISCOUNT GORING: Mr. Charles H. Hawtrey; SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: Mr. Lewis Waller; VICOMTE DE NANJAC: Mr. Cosmo Stuart; MR. MONTFORD: Mr. Harry Stanford; PHIPPS: Mr. C. H. Brookfield; MASON: Mr. H. Deane; JAMES: Mr. Charles Meyrick; HAROLD: Mr. Goodhart; LADY CHILTERN: Miss Julia Neilson; LADY MARKBY: Miss Fanny Brough; COUNTESS OF BASILDON: Miss Vane Featherston; MRS. MARCHMONT: Miss Helen Forsyth. MISS MABEL CHILTERN: Miss Maud Millet; MRS. CHEVELEY: Miss Florence West. Note also film version, An Ideal Husband, directed by Alexander Korda (1948), 96 mins.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Premiered at St. James’s Theatre, London, 14th February 1895; Lessee & Manager: Mr. George Alexander. Dram. Pers. [actors]: JOHN WORTHING, J.P.: Mr. George Alexander; ALGERNON MONCRIEFF: Mr. Allen Aynesworth; REV. CANON CHASUBLE, D.D.: Mr. H. H. Vincent; MERRIMAN: Mr. Frank Dyall; LANE: Mr. F. Kinsey Peile; LADY BRACKNELL: Miss Rose Leclercq; Hon. GWENDOLEN FAIRFAX: Miss Irene Vanbrugh; CECILY CARDEW: Miss Evelyn Millard; MISS PRISM: Mrs. George Canninge.

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Works

Memoir & Biography
Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson 1908); Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights and Certain Reflections (London: Chapman & Hall 1911); Countess de Bremont, Oscar Wilde and His Mother (1911); ., Martin Birnbaum, Oscar Wilde, Fragments and Memories (1920); Harry Furniss, Some Victorian Women, Good, Bad, and Indifferent (London: John Lane 1923) [on Constance]; Max Beerbohm, A Peep Into the Past ([priv.] 1923); Wilfred Scawen Blunt, My Diaries (1928); W. Graham Robertson, Time Was (London: Hamish Hamilton 1931); Grant Richards, Memoirs of a Misspent Youth, 1872-1896 (London: Heinemann 1932); Terry, Ellen Terry’s Memoirs (London: Victor Gollancz 1933); Boris Brasil [var. Brasol, Brazol], Oscar Wilde (1938) [commended in Alfred Douglas’s Summing-Up, supra]; Marquess of Queensberry, in collaboration with Percy Colson, Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas, foreword by H. Montgomery Hyde (London: Hutchinson [1949]), 181pp., front. port.; Margery Ross, Robert Ross: Friend of Friends (London: Jonathan Cape 1952); H. Montgomery Hyde, Carson: The Life of Sir Edward Carson, Lord Carson of Duncairn (London: Heinemann 1953) [incl. account of Wilde trial (pp.131-44); Rupert Croft Crooke, Bosie: The Story of Lord Alfred Douglas: His Friends and Enemies (London: W. H. Allen 1963); Arthur Symons, The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s (Pennsylvania UP 1977); E. H. Mikhail, ed., Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan 1979) [includes Yeats, Autobiographies, pp.79-85; Katharine Tynan, Twenty-five Years Reminiscences(London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1913), pp.148-51; André Gide, Oscar Wilde: In Memoriam [orig. Souvenirs]; and [comments on] De Profundis, the translation being by Henry D. Davray, also Mercure de France n.d. (Mercure de France n.d.); Brian Roberts, The Mad, Bad Line: The Family of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Hamish Hamilton 1981); Maureen Borland, Wilde’s Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross (Oxford: Lennard Publishing 1990); Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (London: HarperCollins 2000), 320pp.

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Criticism

Critical Studies: Chronological Listing :

Robert H[arborough] Sherard, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship (1902), and Do. [pop. edn.] (London: Greening & Co. 1908), 270pp., front. port., 5 pls. Robert H. Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie 1906), 470pp., front. port., 24 ills. [incl. ‘Iacta Alea est’ and a chap. contrib. by his jailer in Reading]. Stuart Mason, trans. and intro., Oscar Wilde: A Study, from the French of André Gide (Oxford: Holywell Press 1905) [ltd. Edn. 500], 110pp., with notes and bibl. R. H. Sherard, Oscar Wilde: A Biography (NY 1906) Stuart Mason [Christopher Millard], Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality - A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (London: J. Jacobs 1908). Franz Blei, André Gide, Ernest La Jeunesse [English trans. 1951], with Arthur Symons, Recollections of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge UP 1906). Leonard Cresswell Ingleby [Cyril Arthur Gull], Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie 1907). T. W. H. Crosland, The First Stone, on reading the unpublished parts of ‘De Profundis’ (priv. 1912), 30pp. [savage attack in verse]. Ingleby, Oscar Wilde: Some Reminiscences (London: T. Werner Laurie 1912). Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker 1912). W. W. Kenilworth, Oscar Wilde [a critical study] (1912). R. Thurston Hopkins, Oscar Wilde: A Study of the Man and His Work (London: Lynwood 1913). Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde and Myself (NY: Duffield & Co. 1914). Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, 2 vols. ([NY 1916; 2nd edn. 1918; rep. 1920; Garden City 1930; Michigan State UP 1959), with ‘Memories of Oscar Wilde by George Bernard Shaw’ in edns. after 1918), & Do. (London: Constable 1938) [with deletions and corrections imposed by Alfred Douglas and written by G. B. Shaw]. R. H. Sherard, The Real Oscar (1917). Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement (Dublin: Townley Searle 1920). Ernst Bendz, Oscar Wilde: A Retrospect ([NY:] Alfred Hodler 1921). Charles J. Finger, The Tragic Story of Oscar Wilde’s Life (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Co. 1923). Bendz, trans. [Alfred Douglas], Freundschaft mid Oscar Wilde (Leipzig 1929). Patrick Braybrooke, Oscar Wilde: A Study (London: Braithwaite & Miller 1920). Arthur Symons, A Study of Oscar Wilde (London: Charles J. Sawyer 1930; rep. 1938), & Do. [another edn.] (Robinson Publ. Co., 1992), 384pp. G. J. Renier, Oscar Wilde (London: Peter Davis 1933), 164pp., rep. as Do. (London: Thomas Nelson 1938), 164pp., bibl. Sherard, Oscar Wilde Twice Defended from André Gide […] and Frank Harris [&c.] (Chicago: Argus Book Shop 19324), 76pp. Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde [2nd ed.] (London: Constable 1938). Lord Alfred Douglas, A Summing-Up (London: Richards Press, first ed. 1940; reiss. 1950). Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (London: Methuen; NY: Harper 1946), 389pp., front. port., 15 ills. Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde [The Makers of Modern Literature] (Conn: New Directions 1947), 256pp., front. port. George A. Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde (London: T. V. Boardman 1949), 239pp., front. port. and 3 ills. St. John Ervine, Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal (London: Allen & Unwin 1951), & Do. [another edn.] (NY: Macmillan 1952; NY: William Morrow 1952). Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (London: Hart-Davis 1954), 272pp. James Laver, Oscar Wilde [Writers and their Work] (1954), port. & bibl. James Laver, Oscar Wilde [Writers and their Work Series] (London: Longman 1954). Giorgio Melchiori, The Tightrope Walkers: Studies of Mannerism in Modern English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1956). Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde, a Pictorial Biography (Viking 1960). Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (OUP 1962), 432pp. [cf. Letters, 1962, supra]. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen 1962). Hyde, Oscar Wilde, the Aftermath ([London: Methuen] 1963). Micheál MacLiammóir, The Importance of Being Oscar (1963). Walter W. Nelson, Oscar Wilde in Sweden and Other Essays (Dublin UP 1965). Terence de Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1967). Rupert Croft Crooke, Feasting with Panthers (Lodnon: W. H. Allen 1967). Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Art of Oscar Wilde (Princeton UP 1967). Richard Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays (NY: Prentice-Hall 1969; rep. 1986) [incl. Shaw [from Harris, op. cit.], Yeats, ‘My First Meeting with Oscar Wilde’ from Autobiographies; James Joyce, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé’; Gide’s ‘In Memoriam’; George Woodcock, ‘The Social Rebel’; Edward Roditi, ‘Fiction as Allegory: The Picture of Dorian Gray’; Yeats [from Autobiographies], Borges, Auden, and Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde (1912), dedicated to Robert Ross with thanks to ‘many of those who knew Wilde [and] have helped me’ [implying that he himself hadn’t known Wilde]. Philippe Jullian, Oscar Wilde (Einaudi 1972), Do., trans. Violet Wyndam (London: Paladin 1969; rep. London: Constable 1994), 420pp. Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970). Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; NY: Barnes & Noble 1970) [incld. Edgar Saltus, ‘Wilde’s Literary Ability’; Holbrook Jackson, ‘Wilde as Dandy and Artist’; John Cowper Powys ‘on Wilde as a Symbolic Figure’; et al.]. Rupert Croft-Brooke, The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde (NY: McKay 1972). Terence de Vere White, ‘Oscar Wilde’, The Anglo-Irish [Chap. XVI] (London: Gollancz 1972). Crooke, The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde (London: W. H. Allen 1972). Robin Spencer, The Aesthetic Movement: Theory and Practice (London: Studio Vista 1972). Kevin Sullivan, Oscar Wilde [Columbia Essays on Modern Writers] (NY: Columbia UP 1972). Martin Fido, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamlyn 1973), also Fido, Oscar Wilde: An Illustrated Biography (NY: Peter Bedrick 1985). Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain (Oxford: OUP 1974). Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (London OUP 1973) [essays on Shaw, Wilde, Yeats & Joyce]. Christopher S. Nassaar, Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde (New Haven: Yale UP 1974). H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde, A Biography (NY: Farrar Straus 1975; London: Methuen 1976) [410pp.]. Sheridan Morley, Oscar Wilde: An Illustrated Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1976), Do., rep. edn. (London: Pavilion 1997), 160pp. Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (London: Duckworth 1977). Donald H. Ericksen, Oscar Wilde (NY: Twayne 1977). Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (London: Macmillan 1977). B. Bashford, ‘Oscar Wilde, his Criticism and His Critics’, in English Literature in Transition, 20 (1977), pp.181-87. Bashford, ‘Oscar Wilde and Subjectivist Criticism’, in English Literature in Transition, 21 (1978), pp.218-34. Philip K. Cohen, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (London: AUP 1978). Vyvyan Wilde, Oscar Wilde and His World (Book Club 1978), ill. E. H. Mikhail, Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan 1978). John Stokes, Oscar Wilde [British Council Writers and their Works Series] (London: Longman 1978). E. H. Mikhail, ed. Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan 1979). Theodore Wratislaw, Oscar Wilde, A Memoir, foreword by John Betjeman [Eighteen Nineties Soc. 1979) [ltd. edn. 500 copies]. Mark Nicholls [Leslie Frewin], The Importance of Being Oscar: The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde Set against His Life and Times (NY: St. Martin’s Press 1980; Robson 1981), 238pp., & Do. [rep.], issued under author-name of Frewin, The Importance of Being Oscar: The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde [… &c.] (London: W. H. Allen 1986). Robert Keith Miller, Oscar Wilde (New York: Ungar 1982). William Tydeman, Oscar Wilde: Comedies [Modern Judgements ser.] (London: Macmillan 1982). Katherine Worth, Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan 1983). Jean M. Ellis D’Alessandro, Hues of Mutability: The Waning Vision in Oscar Wilde’s Narrative (Florence Univ. 1983). Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton 1983). Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde [Macmillan Modern Masters] (London: Macmillan 1983; reiss. 1998). Harold Bloom, Oscar Wilde (NY: Chelsea 1985). Ellmann, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Four Dubliners (Washington DC: Library of Congress 1986). Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton 1987; Penguin Edn. 1988) [the standard biography]. Martin Stoddard, Art, Messianism, and Crime: Sade, Wilde, Hitler, Manson and Others (NY: St. Martin’s Press 1986). W. Von Eckardt and J. E. Chamberlain, ed., Oscar Wilde’s London (London: O’Mara Books 1988). Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Market Place, Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Scolar Press 1987), 255pp. Owen Dudley Edwards, The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde (London: Barrie & Jenkins 1989). Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge 1990). Nobert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of A Conformist Rebel, trans. David Henry Wilson [European Studies in English Literature] (Cambridge UP 1989), x, 439pp. Neil Sammells, ‘Oscar Wilde, Quite Another Thing’, in Paul Hyland and Sammells, eds., Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (Macmillan 1991), pp.116-25. Regenia Gagnier, ed. Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde (NY: Twayne, 1991). Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud and Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991). Seán McCann, ed., The Wit of Oscar Wilde (Dublin: O’Brien Press 1991). Norman Page, An Oscar Wilde Chronology (London: Macmillan 1991). Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde and Irishness ([q.pub.] 1993). Melissa Knox, Oscar Wilde, A Long and Lovely Suicide (Yale UP 1994; pb. 1996) [psychoanalytical biography; panned by Merlin Holland in TLS, 13 Jan. 1995]. Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research (Greensboro N. Carolina, ELT Press. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1993), 275pp. Alan Sinfield [Univ. of Sussex], The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell 1994). C. George Sandulescu, ed., Rediscovering Oscar Wilde [Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco; Conference of 28-31 May 1993] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1994), xvi+464pp. [infra]. Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde, Interpreting Oscar (Abacus 1994), Declan Kiberd, ‘Wilde the English Question’, in TLS, (16.12.1994), pp.13-15. Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House 1994; reiss. 1995), 249pp. Juliet Gardiner, Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters and Wit (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. London: Collins & Brown 1995). Seamus Heaney, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’, in The Redress of Poetry [Oxford Poetry Lectures] (London: Faber & Faber 1995), pp.83-102. Declan Kiberd, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Irishman’, in Inventing Ireland (London: Cape 1995), pp.33-50. ‘Oscar Wilde Special’, Irish Studies Review, 11 (Summer 1995) [see infra], Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egoism (London: Macmillan 1997). Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1995), 478pp. John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations (Cambridge UP 1996), 216pp. Michael Patrick Gillespie, Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity (Florida UP 1996), 208pp. Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde [English Monographs] (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996), 236pp. Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Art in his Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997), [198]220pp., pb. edn. (1998). William Tyneman and Steven Price, Wilde: Salome (Cambridge UP 1997), 228pp. [complete study]. Michael J. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late-Victorian Society (Yale UP 1997), 224pp. Peter Raby, ed., Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge UP 1997), 329pp. [ ‘Context’: essays by Merlin Holland, Regina Gagnier. Stephen Colloway, Karl Beck and Bobby Fong. ‘Themes & Life’: essays by John Stokes, Lawrence Danson; Jerusha McCormack; Joseph Donohoe; Peter Raby; Russell Jackson; Harry Powell; Joseph Bristow; Richard A. Cave (‘Wilde’s Plays: Some Lines of Influence’); Joel Kaplan; Declan Kiberd]. Julian Mitchell, Wilde (London: Orion Media 1997), 299pp. [script of film]. Jonathan Fryer, André and Oscar and the Gay Art of Living (London: Constable 1997), 320pp. [on Gide and Wilde]. Philip Hoare, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War (London: Duckworth 1997), 250pp. Julie Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Virginia UP; London: Pluto Press 1997). Stephen Calloway & David Colvin, Oscar Wilde: An Exquisite Life (London: Orion Media 1997, 1999), 112pp. David Alderson, ‘Momentary Pleasures: Wilde and English Virtue’, in Éibhear Walshe, ed., Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (Cork UP 1997), pp.43-59 Jerusha McCormack, ed., Wilde the Irishman (Yale UP 1998), 205pp. [contribs. incl. Declan Kiberd, Derek Mahon, Frank McGuinness, Alan Stanford, and Fintan O’Toole; incl. Heaney’s address at ded. of Westminster Abbey Wilde window]. Varty, Anne, A Preface to Oscar Wilde (London: Addison-Wesley Longman 1998), 320pp. Joseph Spence, ‘“The Great Angelic Sin”: The Faust legend in Irish Literature, 1820-1900’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.47-58, espec. pp.54. Mary W. Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (Yale UP 1998), 320pp. 221 illus. Robert Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen (London: Methuen 1998), 192pp. Sandra F. Siegel, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Gift and Oxford’s “Coarse Impertinence”’, in Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder, eds., Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press 1998), pp.69-78. Vicki Mahaffey, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment (NY: OUP 1998), xix, 276pp., ill. Máire Ní Fhlathúin, ‘The Irish Oscar Wilde: Appropriations of the Artist’, Irish Studies Review, 7, 3 (Dec. 1999), pp.337-46. Jerusha Hull McCormack, The Man Who was Dorian Gray (NY: St Martin’s Press; Basingstoke: Palgrave 2000), 353pp. Neil Sammells, Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde [Studies in 18th & 19th-c. Lit.] (Harlow: Longman 2000), vi, 143pp. Colm Tóibín, ‘Love in a Dark Time’, review of Holland and Hart-Davis eds., The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, in London Review of Books (19 April 2001), pp.11-17. Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (London: Bloomsbury [2001]), 388pp. Joseph Bristow, ed., Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (Toronto UP 2002), 312pp. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ed., The Wilde Legacy (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2003), 172pp. [contribs. incl. Robert Dunbar, Marina Carr, Thomas Kilroy, Michael Colgan and Patrick Mason.] John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (Oxford: OUP 2003), 240pp. Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Century 2003), 288pp. [an ‘intimate’ biog.] Hans-Christian Oeser, Oscar Wilde ABC (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag 2004), 176pp.

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General Commentary
Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Duckworth 1949); Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (NY: New Directions 1966); Bernard Bergonzi, The Turn of the Century (London: Macmillan 1973); Karl Beckson, ed., Aestheetics and Decadents of the 1890s (NY: Random House 1966; enl. edn., Chicago: Academy Chicago Publ. 1981); John Dixon Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination 1848-1900 (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska UP 1968); David DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Texas UP 1969); Elizabeth Aslin, The Aesthetic Movement (London: Elek 1969); 248pp.; Ian Fletcher, Romantic Mythologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1967); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: OUP 1972); Fletcher and John Stokes, The Decadent Consciousness (NY: Garland 1979); Malcolm Bradbury and Fletcher, eds., Decadence and the 1890s (London: Edward Arnold 1979); Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP 1983); R. K. R. Thorton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold 1983); Terry Eagleton, St. Oscar [a play] (Derry: Field Day 1989), with author’s pref., [‘the Irish Roland Barthes’]; also remarks in Declan Kiberd, ‘Anglo-Irish Attitudes’, in Ireland’s Field Day, intro. Roger McHugh (London: Hutchinson 1985), pp.83-105, and Kiberd, remarks in ‘Irish Literature and History’, appendix to Roy Foster, Oxford Illustrated Book of Irish History (OUP 1989); Michael Steinman, Yeats’s Heroic Figures: Wilde, Parnell, Swift, Casement (1983); Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (NY: Norton 1992); also Jane Marcus, ‘Salomé, The Jewish Princess was a New Woman’, Bulletin of New York Public Library, Vol. 78 (1974), pp.95-113.

Individual Critics
H. Montgomery Hyde (Works on Wilde): ed., The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: Hodge 1948); Cases that Changed the Law (London: Heinemann 1951); That Other Love (London: Heinemann 1970); Oscar Wilde: The Aftermath (London: Methuen 1963); A History of Pornography (London: Heinemann 1964); ‘Oscar Wilde’, in Four Oaks Library, ed. Gabriel Austin (Somerville, NJ: [priv.] 1967); ed., The Annotated Oscar Wilde (London: Orbis 1982); ‘The Riddle of De Profundis: Who Owns the Manuscript?’, in Antigonish Review, 54 (1983), pp.107-27; ‘Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas’, in Essays by Divers Hands, 43 [n.s.] (1984), 139-40; also Mary Hyde, Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas: A Correspondence (London: John Murray 1982).

Richard Ellmann, The Critic as Artist as Wilde’, in Encounter, 29, 1 (1967), pp.28-47; rep. in Critical Writings (1970); ‘Overtures to Salomé,’ in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 17 (1968), pp.17-28, rep. in Ellmann, ed., Critical Essays (1969), and in Ellmann, Golden Codgers (1973); with John J. Espey, Oscar Wilde: Two Approaches (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 1977); ‘Henry James among the Aesthetes’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, 69 (1983), pp.209-28; rep. in along the riverrun: Selected Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton 1988).

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Special Topics
Joyce Bentley, The Importance of Being Constance (London: Robert Hale 1983) [on Constance Wilde, née Constance Mary Lloyd], Anne Clerk Amor, Mrs Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance (London: Sidgewick & Jackson 1983), 249pp., front. port., 18 ills.; Rohase Piercy, The Coward Does it with a Kiss (London: Gay Men’s Press 1990), 127pp. [recreating Wilde’s marriage from Constance’s viewpoint]; Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Harvard UP 1998), 403pp. [Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans; Pater; Wilde, et al.]; Oscar Wilde: Trial and Punishment 1895-1897 (London: HM Public Records Office 1997) [package publication].

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Bibliography
Stuart Mason [pseud. of Christopher Millard], A Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie 1914); John Charles Finzi, Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle: A Catalog of Manuscripts and Letters in the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library (California UP 1957); Mason, ed., Bibliography of Oscar Wilde [new edn.] (London: Bertram Rota 1967); E. H. Mikhail, Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (London: Macmillan 1978); Thomas A. Mikolyzk, Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography [Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature, No. 38] (Conn: Greenwood Press 1993), 496pp.; Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, new ed., intro. Timothy d’Arch Smith (London: Bertram ROTA 1967); 605pp. [Periodical Publications incl. Irish Monthly [80-89]; Kottabos [91-99]; also, Works issued in Book Form, orig. eds. and authorised reprints; Collected Edns.; authorised for America; authorised for Continent; pirated.]; E. H. Mikhail, Annotated Bibliography of Wilde Criticism (Macmillan 1978), 249pp.; Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research (Greensboro N. Carolina, ELT Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1993), 275pp. [The Myth of Wilde; Biography Reconsidered; Prologue to the Letters; uncollected letters; undated letters; typed copies … &c.; Manuscripts; Literary Histories; Major Critical Studies; General Critical Studies; Editions; Bibliographies; General Bibliography].

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Works about Wilde
Plays, Leslie & Sewell Stokes, Oscar Wilde: A Play (London: Secker & Warburg 1937); Terry Eagleton, St. Oscar (Derry: Field Day 1989); Thomas Kilroy, The Secret Fall of Constance (Dublin; Gallery Press 1997); David Hare, The Judas Kiss (Almeida Th., London 1997), with Liam Neeson as Wilde; Moisés Kauffman, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1998); also Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Life (?1997). FICTION, Sewell Stokes, Beyond His Means: A Novel Based on the Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Peter Davis 1955).

Cinema, Wilde (1997), dir. Brian Gilbert and screenplay by Julian Mitchell (1997), with Stephen Fry as Wilde and Vanessa Redgrave as Speranza; The Trials of Oscar Wilde (c.1967), with Albert Finney as Wilde; RTÉ 4-part drama series dir by James Douglas (May 1995); also Ken Russell, Salome’s Last Dance (1988), and a musical based on Dorian Gray (London 1997). [Search for earlier films].

Journals
Irish Studies Review [‘Oscar Wilde Special’], 11 (Summer 1995), incls. Richard Haslam, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Imagination of the Celt’, p.2; Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Hibernicism’, p.7; Philip McEvansoneya, ‘Oscar Wilde and Decadence in Art’, p.14; J/. B. Lyons, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Final Illness’, p.24; Michael Judd, ‘Stained Glass Images of Oscar Wilde’, p.28; Robert Blackburn, ‘“The Utterable and the Dream”’, Aspects of Wilde’s Reception in Central Europe 1900-1922’, p.30; Neil Sammells, ‘Pulp Fictions, Oscar Wilde and Quentin Tarantino’, p.39; with Alan Sinfield, ‘Wilde and the Queer Moment’, p.47, an article; and a review article of Sinfield, The Wilde Century, Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (Cassell 1994), reviewed by Scott Wilson, p.49 [and indignantly answered by Sinfield, Irish Studies Review, No. 12, Autumn 1995, pp.37-38]; also Declan Kiberd reviews C. George Sandelescu, ed., Rediscovering Oscar Wilde (Colin Smythe 1994), p.53; reviews of Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde, Interpreting Oscar (Abacus 1994), and Juliet Gardiner, Oscar Wilde, A Life in Letters and Wit (Gill & Macmillan 1995), ed., David Rose, director of Wilde Summer School in Bray, Co. Wicklow.

Websites
The OScholars is a 30pp. Wilde Studies monthly journal edited by D. C. Rose at Goldsmiths College, London; email at oscholarship@ireland.com.

Douglas O. Linder, "The Trials of Oscar Wilde: An Account", gives a detailed description of the forensic evidence including personalities involved, details of blackmail, and a photocopy of the ‘card’ that Queensberry left at Wilde's hotel [link]. The paper is part of a project on Famous Trials in the Missouri-Kansas University School of Law website.

Bibliographical details
C. George Sandulescu, ed., Rediscovering Oscar Wilde [Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco; Conference of 28-31 May 1993] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1994), xvi+464pp. [contains Denis Donoghue, ‘The Oxford of Pater, Hopkins, and Wilde’; Jerusha McCormack, on Wilde’s Dandyism; Ronald Schuchard, on Wilde’s Catholicism; Deirdre Toomey, on oral qualities; Davis Coakley on the Dublin background; Maria Pilar Pulido, on Speranza; Neil Sammells, on Wilde’s encounter with England and Englishness [‘Rediscovering the Irish Wilde’, pp.362-70]; Lawrence Danson, on Wilde’s credo; also papers by Theoharis Constantine, Isobel Murray, Pria Brînzeu, Marie-Noëlle Zeender, Jean M Ellis D’Alessandro, Sylvia Ostermann, and Michael Patrick Gillespie].

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Notes

John Sutherland, Oxford Companion to Victorian Fiction, give bio-dates, 1854[sic]-1900; separate entry for The Picture of Dorian Grey, serialised in abbr. form in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 1890. The mawkish "Ballad of Reading Gaol" appeared in 1898; Wilde’s disgrace and persecution had an enduring effect on English literary culture whose tentative flirtations with decadence, aestheticism and post-Romanticism were promptly discontinued. BL 4 [fiction].

John Stokes, ‘Oscar Wilde’, in Ian Ousby, ed., Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge UP 1988): 'In Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)] the life-style of the dandy Lord Darlington becomes a practical option, ‘if you pretend to be good, the world doesn’t take you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it does.’ Mrs Erlynne learns that being good is allowing the world to think you bad, and Lady Windermere, the puritan - and her daughter - learns that deception is sometimes necessary and beneficial, emerging more tolerant than she began. In A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingsworth is the dandy; Hester Worseley, another puritanical young woman; Mrs Arbuthnot a genuine fallen woman; her son Gerald, at the centre of the play, is to act as secretary to Lord Illingsworth, who is also attempting to seduce Hester, and turns out to be his (Gerald’s) father. In An Ideal Husband, the dandy is Lord Goring, who tries to help politician Robert Chiltern, being blackmailed over his association with a shady financier Baron Arnheim.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry 1991), Vol 2 selects The Happy Prince; Mr Froude’s Blue Book (on Ireland) [Viz., Two Chiefs of Dunboye, reviewed]; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Intentions, The Decay of Lying [from Intentions; and cf. Mahaffy, Decay of the Art of Preaching]; The Importance of Being Earnest [376-91]; ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ [731-37]; The Poems of Oscar Wilde, ‘Requiescat’ [elegy to his sister Isola], ‘Les Silhouettes’, ‘La Fuite de La Lune’, ‘The Harlot’s House’ [738-39]; BIOG 514 [and note misquotation of Lord Queensberry’s note]; REFS & REMS, 8, 295, 372-76; Yeats met Wilde and others at the London home of W. E. Henley [Heaney, ed.], 787; [biog. Yeats, 830] [W. J. McCormack, Gothic connections, 837, 838, Stoker’s wife Florence Balcombe had been courted by Wilde, 1842; published version of Vera includes a crude anticipation of Lady Gregory’s Kiltartanese, 845; in addition to family’s devotion to things Irish, Lady Wilde had contributed to the store of Irish gothic writing with German translations [unspec., WJM], 846, [err. 848], [err. 859], 963n, [Frederick Ryan 999n], [Corkery, 1008]. WORKS & COMM as supra.

Lord Alfred Douglas, ed., Plain English, Nos. 8-30, 30 Aug. 1920-29 Jan 1921 [bound as 25 issues, some missing; rare periodical, edited and partly written by Douglas and showing him at his most crazily xenophobic; throughout are virulent attacks on the Jews, the Irish, Robert Ross, &c.; Douglas edited it for 16 moths, till mid 1921. Eric Stevens 1992 [Cat. 168] £145. Also Plain Speech, vol. 1 nos. 1-12., Oct. 1921-Jan 1922; identical in style and format to the previous, £55. Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie, The Story of Lord Alfred Douglas, his friends and enemies (London: W. H. Allen 1963), 414pp [1st], £12; Brian Roberts, Lord Alfred Douglas, The Mad Bad Line, the family of Lord Alfred Douglas (Hamish Hamilton 1981), 319, 8 plates [1st], £10.

Jacqueline Wesley (Cat. 22; Oct. 1993) lists Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker 1912), 213pp., front. Port [oil by Harper Pennington]; subject of a libel action brought by Lord Alfred Douglas, because Ransome had described De Profundis as written to ‘a man to whom Wilde felt that he owed some at least of the public circumstances of his disgrace’; verdict given in favour of Ransome but passages complained of omitted from later editions; John Moray Stuart-Young, Osrac: The Self-Sufficient, and Other Poems, with a Memoir of the Late Oscar Wilde (London: Hermes Press 1905), 119pp. front. port., 5pls. and 2 facs. [contains 2 alleged facs. letters of Wilde to the author which forgeries as is the inscription on the portrait to "Johnnie" [Mason 681]; Sherard, Oscar Wilde Twice Defended from André Gide’s Wicked Lies and Frank Harris’s Cruel Libels to which is added A Reply to George Bernard Shaw / A Refutation of Dr. G. J. Renier’s Statements / A Letter to the Author from Lord Alfred Douglas, an Interview with Bernard Shaw by Hugh Kingsmill (Chicago: Argus Book Shop 19324), 76pp.

Eric Stevens (Cat. 1992) lists H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love, an historical and contemporary survey of homosexuality in Britain (London: Heinemann 1970) [1st ed.], 323pp. [contains much about Wilde and Alfred Douglas, Eric Stevens 1992 £10; ALSO Wilde, Children in Prison & Other Cruelties of Prison Life (Murdoch & Co. 1898) [Long letter written by Wilde to the editor of the Daily Chronicle in defence of warder Martin who had befriended him during his last months in Reading and who had been dismissed as a result of his humane actions] [1st ed.], 16pp [rare], £135; ALSO Four Letters by Oscar Wilde [not included in the English ed. of De Profundis] (priv. 1906; 500 copies) [1st ed.], 34pp., £95; Lady Windermere’s Fan (Leipzig Tauchnitz ca.1933), 238pp., £3; Rupert Hart-Davis, The Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Hart-Davis 1962) [1st ed.] xxv+958pp, 35 ills, £35; Hart-Davis, ed., More Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Murray 1986; rep. of 1985), 215pp., £6; E. H. W. Meyerstein, Letter to RN Green-Armitage, 1940, 3pp. 4to, £25; François Porche, L’Amour Qui N’Ose Pas Dire Son Nom, Oscar Wilde (Paris: Bernard Grasset 1927) [9th ed.-] 242pp., £12; Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (OUP 1990) [1st ed.] 204pp., £15.

Oxford University Press (Cat. 1996) lists Isobel Murray, ed., Oscar Wilde, [Works], incl. The Picture of Dorian Gray; Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest; The Decay of Lying; and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, with notes; 660pp.; also, Murray, ed., The Picture of Dorian Gray [World’s Classics] (OUP q.d.); Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (OUP [1962]), 432pp.; Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., More Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray 1985), 224pp.; Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand, eds., Oscar Wilde’s Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (OUP q.d.), 176pp., ill.; Murray, ed., The Soul of Man and Prison Writings [World’s Classics] (OUP q.d.), 248pp.

Belfast Central Library holds Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (OUP 1979); Wilde, Oscar, Aforismi, scelti e tradotti de Alex R Falzon (Milan: Epoca 1986), 155pp.; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by C.3.3. (London: Leonard Smithers 1898), 31pp.; The Canterville Ghost (London: John W Luce 1906), 124pp.; A critic of Pall Mall, being extracts from reviews and miscellanies (London: Methuen 1919), 218pp.; De Profundis, 31st ed. (London: Methuen 1915), 156pp; 42 ed. (1927), 151pp. Among numerous other works not copied here are, The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde, selected and ed. and intro. Owen Dudley Edwards (London: Barrie & Jenkins 1959), 282pp.; Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and related writings (London: Routledge 1992), 271pp.; Importance, etc., drawings by Sheila Jackson (London: Grey Walls Press 1948), 86pp., col. ills.

James Joyce held in his Trieste library copies of An Ideal Husband (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1908); Intentions (Leipzig: English Library 1907); Lady Windermere’s Fan (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1909), signed S. Joyce; The Picture of Dorian Gray (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1908); Salomé(Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1909); Selected Poems (London: Methuen 1911); The Soul of Man Under Socialism (London: priv. 1904); A Woman of No Importance (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1909); and R. H. Sherard, Oscar Wilde (London: Greening 1908). [See Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of James Joyce, Faber, Appendix, p.133.]

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Summary: Dorian cruelly jilts Sybil Vane who then commits suicide. Gray decides to overcome his momentary guilt by viewing Sybil’s suicide as an artistic event, ‘It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.’ He is encouraged in this erasure by his Mephistopheles, Lord Henry Wotton, ‘The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.’ Wilde’s book can be read as a protest against such deadly constructions of experience. Dorian’s wit runs to: ‘Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed’. Dorian Gray, based on motif of the painting that drains the subject, developed by Poe in ‘The Oval Portrait’, and featuring Lord Henry Wotton (prob. based on the Elizabethan diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, ‘comforter of all youths’ in Izaak Walton’s phrase, who served as a diplomat between the court fo the Duke of Florence and James VI of Scotland, after James I of England); also includes thematic reference to the myth of Ossian, grandson of Fingal, who visits Tir na nOg; note that in Ancient Legends, Lady Wilde wrote a teale of ‘Oscar the Lion’ who cuts off the head of a treacherous Celtic chief, carry it back bleeding to the fort, where the blood releases the captive Fenian knights; Dorian’s mother ‘was a Devereux’ (i.e., of the stock of the ill-fated Earl of Essex). Dorian Gray was first serialised in Lippincott’s [July 1890]; Dorian Gray defended by Wilde in letters to St. James Gazette (25 June 1890), writing, ‘the sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate’; and further, ‘good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so commonplace, type, are artistically uninteresting. Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination’ (26 June 1890); issued in book-form (1891), with additional epigraphs (‘all art is quite useless’; ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’). Note also a letter to the Scots Observer (‘You may ask me, sire, why I should care to have the ethical beauty of my story recognises. I answer, simply, because it exists , because the thing is there.’ [All cited in Neil Sammells, Pulp Fictions’, in Irish Studies Review, Summer 1995, pp.40-41.)

An Ideal Husband (1895): Sir Robert Chilton, friend of Lord Arthur Goring (the son of Lord Caversham), is has sold government secrets in the Suez Canal affair for his own gain early in his political career; his secret is discovered and exposed by Mrs. Cheveley, who threatens blackmail at the cost of his career as well as his marriage to Lady Chiltern, a figure of strict rectitude who cannot tolerate character flaws, especially in her ’ideal’ husband. Both Chilterns turn to Lord Arthur while Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert’s sister, gauges him potential husband material for herself. In the event, the blackmailer proves to have stolen a bracelet from Lord Arthur’s cousin Mary Berkshire, and Arthur sees her off, but not before she attempts to destroy Lady Chiltern with an ambiguous letter that the latter has addressed to Lord Arthur. At the conclusion of these transactions Lord Arthur shows ‘the philosopher that underlies the dandy’ and proves himself ‘the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought’, resolving all difficulties with wise words about human love, tolerance and the dangers of idealisation. ( Act. IV.) Finally, Lady Chiltern learns to accept her husband’s appetite for power and Lord Arthur proposes to Mabel Chiltern, undertaking - in Lord Caversham’s words - to become ’an ideal husband.’

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) - Summary I: Two young men, Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, JP, who is in love with Algernon’s cousin Gwendolen; Algernon does not realise that John was christened Ernest, though ‘Uncle Jack’ to his ward, Cecily; the men discover in conversation that they both pretend to be someone else when it suits them, Algernon has a useful invalid friend Bunbury, while John becomes his own wicked brother Ernest, under which name Gwendolen has accepted his marriage proposal; Cecily accepts Algernon who falsely tells her he is Ernest, a name she fancies; Lady Bracknell repudiates the proposal directed towards her charge Gwendolen; the ensuing confusions are resolved when it is discovered that Jack was indeed so named before being mislaid in the cloakroom of a London station by Miss Prism, a forgetful governess, and then adopted by Cecily’s father.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) - Summary II (Film version): comedy, black and white, 93 minutes, directed by Anthony Asquith (1952), starring Sir Michael Redgrave, Michael Denison, Dame Edith Evans, Dorothy Tutin, Margaret Rutherford, Joan Greenwood, Miles Malleson. Summary: Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff - two wealthy and eligible bachelors of the 1890s - are hopelessly in love. The former with Gwendoline, who is the latter’s cousin. The latter with Cecily, who is the former’s ward. Due to Jack’s ignoble habit of representing himself as his imaginary brother, Ernest, when in town, and Algernon’s adoption of Ernest’s name and wicked reputation to speed his courtship of Cecily, both girls believe themselves to be engaged to the non-existent Ernest. When Jack discovers this, he goes into deep mourning, announcing that his brother has been killed by a severe chill in Paris... but the girls see through this deception! Obliged to admit that neither is really called Ernest, the two men agree separately to be re-christened in that name to prove their devotion. They reckon, however, without the intervention of the formidable Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s mother and Algernon’s aunt, who opposes everything until Miss Prism, Cecily’s governess and a devoted family retainer, brings to light an old skeleton in the family cupboard and makes it clear that one of the men, is in fact ’earnest’. (Video exhibited to private audience at 18h30 on Friday 11th May 2001 in the Conference Room at the Princess Grace Irish Library.)

Plays summarised: the plots of Wilde’s plays are given in British Writers, Vol. V (1982); and see also Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee 1946

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898): The chief themes are the tragic universality of the murder’s crime human tragedy (‘each man kills the thing he loves’); the possibility of Christian redemption (‘the man was one of those / Whom Christ came down to save’); and the futility of the prison system in general and capital punishment in particular (‘every prison that men build / Is built with bricks of shame’). Lines from the ballad appeared on his monument in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, ‘his mourners will be outcast men, / And outcasts always mourn.’

Oscar in drag? (1): A photograph presumed to be of ‘Oscar Wilde im Kostüm als Salome’, taken from the Collection Guillot de Saiz, H. Roger Viollet, Paris, appearing in the bibliography of Ellmann’s essay on Wilde in Jürgen Schneider & Ralf Sotscheck, Ireland: Eine Bibliographie selbständiger deutschsprachiger (Verlag de Georg Büchner Buchhandlung 1989, pp.214-34, p. 219), is now know to be falsely identified with him. In ‘Wilde as Salomé?’, in Times Literary Supplement ( 22 July 1994), p.14 [backpage], Merlin Holland questions authenticity of the photograph of Wilde as Salomé, printed by Ellmann in Oscar Wilde [1987] remarking that John Stokes wrote to London Review of Books (Feb. 1992), provisionally identifying subject of picture as Leonara Sengera [sic], a signed photo of whom appeared in the same Paris collection (Roger-Viollet). Holland runs to earth in a periodical Buhne und Welt pictures of soprano Alice Guszalewicz playing in Strauss’s Salomé in Budapest in 1906 in identical clothing. He then establishes the source of confusion between Sengern and Guszalewicz: Leonore Sengern played Herodias to Pala Donges’s I, in Leipzig, five weeks before Guszalewicz (née Farkas) appeared in the opera, on July 2 1906. Notes the first appearance of ‘Wilde as Salomé in Le Monde (20 March 20 1987), two weeks before Ellmann’s death; Ellmann was notified by his editor Catharine Carver and was delighted. Further, Elaine Showalter reproduced the photo in Sexual Anarchy (1990) in support of her reading of Iokanaan as ‘veiled homosexual desire’ while Marjorie Garber used it in Vested Interests (1992) to illustrate Salomé’s story as a transvestite dance. Even the Roger-Viollet archive recaptioned it in accord with to Ellmann’s book (later re-emending to ‘Wilde?’).

Oscar in drag? (2) Elaine Showalter, ‘It’s Still Salome’, in Times Literary Supplement ( 2 Sept. 1994), pp.13-14, draws attention to a silent film version of Salomé [sic] (1922), with Russian actress Alla Nazimova; and other productions, arguing that ‘from Wilde to Wilder, Salomé has always been the site for debates about sexuality, transgression, and sexual difference’. Notes Hollywood version (1953) with Rita Hayworth and Charles Laughton; Ken Russell, Salomé’s Last Dance (1987), featuring Wilde’s play as a private theatrical in a homosexual brothel, raided by the police; Oscar as spectator-voyeur, and all roles doubled with brothel keeper as Herod, and Salomé as teenage seductress licking lollipops; Salomé dancing before Herod splits in two and revealed as a naked man.’ Steven Berkoff’s also produced slow-motion Salomé, noting that Wilde chose the theme to ‘reveal his most personal and deepest feelings about the wonders of erotic love and the sheer delights of the male body’; Robert Ackerman’s NY production, 1992, with Al Pacino as Herod, as contemporary dark comedy with man sexually enthralled by his own step-daughter; Scottish National Opera production (1989) stressed Orientalist and Jewish aspects; other works compared include Sunset Boulevard.

Oscar’s ambitions: A handwritten questionnaire filled by Wilde as a student in the form of in a two-page entry of an ‘Album for Confessions or Tastes, Habits and Convictions’, 1877, declared that his most distinctive characteristic was ‘inordinate self-esteem’; and listed self among four favorite poets; most disliked in others ‘vanity, self-esteem, conceit’; Wilde said his idea of misery would be ‘living a poor and respectable life in an obscure village’; Further, Q: ‘What are the sweetest words in the world? A: ‘Well done!’; Q: ‘What are the saddest words?’ A: ‘Failure.’ Q: ‘What is your dream?’ A: ‘Getting my hair cut.’ A: ‘What is your bête noir?’ A: ‘A thorough Irish Protestant.’ Q: ‘What is your idea of happiness?’ A: ‘Absolute power over men’s minds, even if accompanied by toothache.’ Q: ‘If not yourself, who would you rather be?’ A: ‘A cardinal of the Catholic church’; put on sale by descendant of Adderley Millar Howard, impresario and actor who collected the questionnaires; includes a photograph of the 23-year-old Wilde; auction at Christie’s (London), 6 June; estimated price, $4,800 (noticed in Irish Times; copied from WWW Associated Press Bulletin).

G. B. Shaw wrote a ‘Preface’ to Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde (1938 edn.), [?re-]written 25 years after the first edn., and defending Harris against Sherard, a writer who has attacked his biography as an ‘imposture’ although Shaw discovers the same thing that he objects to said in a biography of his own [viz. the claim that Wilde died of syphilis, which Sherard at first disputed, and then endorsed in his interview with the gullible American biographer Boris Brasol of 1935].

G. K. Chesterton distinguished between ‘the real epigram which [Oscar Wilde] wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the tamest part of our tame civilisation’, and speaks of ‘the charlatan’ aspect of his genius. (Essay, Daily News, 1909; collected in A Handful of Authors, 1953; cited in P. J. Kavanagh, "Bywords", Times Literary Supplement, 21 Sept. 2001, p.16.)

James Joyce: the phrase, ‘in a relation to life than which none can be more immediate’, employed by Stephen Dedalus Stephen Hero echoes another in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, viz., ‘he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it’ (Lord Goring, Act III). Note also Mrs Cheveley’s remarks on her business with Sir Robert Chiltern [to Lord Goring:], ’Oh, don’t use big words. They mean so little. It is a commercial transaction that is all’ (idem.), and cf. ‘Those big words that make us so unhappy’ in Joyce’s review of William Rooney’s poems.

Publisher’s notice on the jacket of Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde: A Summing-Up (London: Richards Press, 1940; reiss. 1950), cites Four Plays (7th printing); The Picture of Dorian Gray (4th); De Profundis [1st]; Salome [sic] (2nd); The Ballad of Reading Gaol (4th); Intentions (3rd); Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and other stories [1st]; A House of Pomegranites with The Happy Prince [1st] & Poems (in preparation). Note that Lord Douglas at his most self-righteous in a passage on the influence of J. H. Mahaffy on Wilde [see under Mahaffy, Rx.]

Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., Letters of Oscar Wilde (London 1962), notes that the edition De Profundis (1905), ed. by Robert Ross, is less than half the MS letter written by Wilde in January-March 1897 and handed to Ross on the day after leaving Reading Gaol. Ross made two typed copies, sent one to Douglas, the addressee (though the latter always denied having received it), and bequeathed the second to Vyvyan, who published it in full in 1949; Ross left the MS to the British Museum on condition that it was not read for fifty years; it is this version which serves as copy-type for the Letters. There are errors in the typescripts due to aural mistakes in dictation to typist, and similar causes.

Talent v. genius: Wilde told André Gide, ‘I have put only my talent into my works. Ihave put all my genius into my life.’ (Stuart Mason, trans. Oscar Wilde: A Study, Oxford: Holywell Press 1905.)

Robert Donovan, Prof. of English at UCD, refused licence to student production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1930 on the grounds that it seemed to have the students going ‘out under the banner of Oscar Wilde.’

Vera, or the Nihilist (written 1880), combines details from the lives of Vera Figner, author of memoirs, who spent 22 years in Schlusselberg Fortress for her activities as an anarchist, and Vera Zasulich, who shot and wounded Gen. Trepov, City Prefect of St Petersburg, and went on to advocate the assassination of the Tsar; Wilde intended Sarah Bernhardt [recte Mrs. Bernard Beere] to play the part; in 1882, Bernhardt was playing in Fedora by Sardou, with a similar theme. (Q. source; corrig. supplied by D. C. Rose, Goldsmiths Coll., London; 27.07.01.)

Wilde published early poems and reviews in Kottabos (1876), and The Irish Monthly, ed. Fr. Matthew Russell (do.). His reviews incl. Froude’s Two Chiefs of Dunboye, Graves’s ‘Fr. O’Flynn,’ and Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin. Oxford Dict. Quot. has 59 items.

Lionel Johnson wrote a poem in Latin thanking Wilde for the copy of Dorian Gray that he received from him: ‘Beneditus sis, Oscare! ... .’ [See further under Johnson.]

‘Art for Art’s Sake’, the phrase so often associated with Wilde, was actually coined by Swinburne and not by Pater as often alleged also.

Gilbert & Sullivan caricatured Wilde as Bunthorpe in Patience (1881), with the lines: ‘A most intense young man,/A soulful-eyed young man;/An ultra-poetical super-aesthetical,/Out-of-the-way young man’ - ironicallly preparing the way for his ten-month tour of the United States of America.

Sir Samuel Ferguson addressed a poem to Wilde as "Dear Wilde", in Poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson, intro. A. P. Graves (Dublin: Talbot/London: R. Fisher Unwin [1917]), q.p.

Sir Edward O’Sullivan recorded young Wilde’s remarks in the course of a discussion of an ecclesiastical scandal of the day: ‘Oscar was present, and full of the mysterious nature of the Court of Arches: he told us there was nothing he would like better in after life than to be the hero of such a cause celèbre and go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as Regina versus Wilde.’ (Quoted in Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album, 1997, p.26.)

W. P. Frith was mocked by Wilde for his photographic-style of painting in ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, a London exhibition review contributed to Dublin University Magazine, Vol. 90 (July 1877), p.125. Wilde also mentioned in the review the Irish painters F. W. Burton and Richard Doyle. See also Wilde, ‘The Rout of the RA’, in Court and Society Review, Vol. IV (27 April 1887), rep. in Ellmann, ed., The Artist as Critic (London: W. H. Allen 1970).

The 1st edition De Profundis (1905), ed. Robert Ross, is less than half the MS letter written in January-March 1897 by Wilde, and handed to Ross on the day after leaving Reading Gaol; Ross made two typed copies, sent one to Douglas, the addressee (though the latter always denied having received it), and bequeathed the second to Vyvyan, who published it in full in 1949; Ross left the MS to the British Museum on condition that it was not read for fifty years; it is this version which serves as copy-type for the Letters. There are errors in the typescripts due to aural mistakes in dictation to typist, and similar causes. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., Letters of Oscar Wilde (London 1962). contain the complete text.

Karl Beckson and Bobby Fong print Wilde’s last (and lost) pastoral found in the Harry S. Dickey Collection, MS 72, Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins Univ.; in TLS, 17.2.1995, with photo port. of Wilde by Napoleon Sarony, New York, 1882, taken from Camera Portraits, Photographs from the Nat. Port. Gallery, by Malcolm Rogers (Nat Port. Gall [q.d.]).

The other Oscar: in Acallamh na Senorach [Colloquy of the Ancients], Cailte’s says: ‘Fair Youth was the horn Oscar brought to the feast, / He, whom many girls smiled on, was also the joy of men’s eyes’ (Roe/Dooley trans.).

Collage Signature: Wilde signed his correspondence with Oxford friends as ‘Oscar F. O'F. Wilde’. Note that Peter Harness, a DPhil student at Oriel College, adapted The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Oxford Playhouse, November 13-16 2002.

A Children’s Musical version of “The Selfish Giant” has been adapted with lyrics by David Perkins, additional lyrics by Caroline Dooley; large variable cast; simple settings; libretto and piano vocal score; optional band parts on hire (flute, Trumpet, bass guitar, Glockenspeil, &c.); twoi succcessful seasons at Yvonne Arnaud Th., Guildford, by Youth Theatre Act 1 (1995, 2002).