Abstract
In April 1877, the 22-year-old Oscar Wilde was thoroughly enjoying a cultural tour of Greece and Rome as one of a party led by his old Trinity College professor Reverend Dr John Pentland Mahaffy. However, he was traveling without leave from his Oxford college, Magdalen, and on his return he was promptly suspended for this impertinence. The young Wilde, ever the opportunist, decided to make the most of this unexpected recess by sampling the delights of the London season. He made his London début with a splash, attending the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery on the first of May in a spectacular coat cleverly designed to resemble a cello. The Prince of Wales, William Gladstone, and John Ruskin were present at this event. Though he soon resumed his studies at Oxford, Wilde’s successful appearance at the Grosvenor opening and his bold review of the exhibition for the Dublin University Magazine mark the beginning of his career as a self-styled ‘Professor of Aesthetics’. Remarkably, Wilde’s parallel career as a character in fiction began almost simultaneously; within months of the Grosvenor opening, he had made memorable appearances in two novels. As it was Wilde’s distinctive aesthetic style that first captured the imagination of contemporary authors, it is appropriate to begin this study with a brief review of that aestheticism.
‘I say, my dear fellow, do you mind mentioning to me whether you are the greatest humbug and charlatan on earth, or a genuine intelligence, one that has sifted things for itself?’
Nick Dormer to Gabriel Nash, in Henry James, The Tragic Muse
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 236.
W. W. Ward, ‘Oscar Wilde: An Oxford Reminiscence’, in Son of Oscar Wilde, ed. Vyvyan Holland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 255.
Julia Constance Fletcher, Mirage (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), p. 153.
Henry James, Mirage (Book Review), 1877, University of Virginia Library, May 18, 2001.
Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 253.
Peter Vernier, ‘A “Mental Photograph” of Oscar Wilde’, The Wildean 13 (1998), pp. 47–8; Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, p. 253.
John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 59.
Walter Besant and James Rice, The Monks of Thelema (London: Chatto and Windus, 1892), p. 220.
Ibid., p. 31. S. Squire Sprigge records that Besant had a particular aversion to people with ‘vain pretension[s]’ to ‘powers of discrimination or criticism of higher and more delicate character than those granted to ordinary mortals’. Walter Besant, Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant (Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1971), p. xii.
E. H. Mikhail, ed., Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 57. Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 318.
As Jonathon Fryer has noted, this was common practice for opponents to a candidate’s membership as well as his supporters; it is possible that Besant was in the former category. Jonathan Fryer, ‘Oscar and the Savilians’, The Wildean 18 (2001), p. 44. Unanimous support for the proposed candidate was required and Wilde was never elected to the club.
Arthur H. Nethercot, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Devil’s Advocate’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 59.3 (1944), p. 843.
After initially refusing to see Where’s the Cat?, Wilde later changed his mind and attended a performance of the play with Ellen Terry. However, he was reportedly disappointed with the production’s low quality. Michael Sadleir, Things Past (London: Constable, 1944), p. 116.
Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America [1882] (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), p. 46.
Leonée Ormond, George Du Maurier (London: Routledge, 1969). Various other Punch writers and illustrators satirized Wilde with references to ‘Ossian Wilderness’, ‘Oscuro Wilde-Goose’, and ‘Mr. Wilde Hoskar’.
Shaw wrote five novels between 1879 and 1883. Richard Dietrich has described these as an ambitious blend of ‘avant-garde realism with comic fantasy, social satire of the Dickens or Thackeray sort, parody of the popular novel, and a modernized, antisentimental version of the chivalric romance of Scott’. Richard Farr Dietrich, Bernard Shaw’s Novels: Portraits of the Artist as Man and Superman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), p. xiii.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface’, Immaturity, vol. 1, The Works of Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, 1930), p. xlii.
Margaret Crosland, in ‘Ada Leverson’, in Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists: First Series, vol. 153, Dictionary of Literary Biography ed. George M. Johnson, (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), p. 133.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘My Memories of Oscar Wilde’, in Oscar Wilde, ed. Frank Harris (New York: Dorset, 1989), p. 330. Stanley Weintraub, ‘“The Hibernian School”: Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw’, Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 13 (1993).
Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1874–1897, vol. 1, 4 vols (London: Max Reinhardt, 1965), p. 210.
Karl Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia (New York: AMS, 1998), p. 337; Weintraub, ‘“The Hibernian School”’, p. 33.
See David J. Gordon, ‘Shavian Comedy and the Shadow of Wilde’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 124.
and Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar (New York: Dutton, 1994), p. 353.
Mary Hyde, ed., Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas: A Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1982), p. 124.
R. F. Dietrich, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Superman: A Study of Shaw’s Novels (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1969), p. 75.
Holroyd mistakenly refers to Hawkshaw as ‘Hawksmith’, reflecting the common reading of Smith as Shaw’s self-portrait. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love 1856–1898, vol. 1, 4 vols (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 75.
Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Theatrics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 8–9.
Shaw often repeated this remark and admitted the truth of it to Ellen Terry in a letter of September 25, 1896, saying it was ‘quite true; they don’t like me; but they are my friends, and some of them love me’. Karl Beckson, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Celebrated Remark on Bernard Shaw’, Notes and Queries 239.3 (1994), p. 361.
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde (New York: Dorset, 1989), p. 279.
See Sherard’s Oscar Wilde ‘Drunkard and Swindler’: A Reply to George Bernard Shaw, Dr G. J. Renier, Frank Harris etc. (Calvi, France: Vindex, 1933) and his Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde (New York: Greystone Press, 1937).
Shaw thought that De Profundis contained ‘pain … inconvenience, annoyance, but no real tragedy, all comedy’. Shaw cited in H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: The Aftermath (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 191.
Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar, pp. 368–74. Wilde’s influence has also been detected in Shaw’s plays You Never Can Tell (1897), Candida (1897), Major Barbara (1905), and Man and Superman (1905). See Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia, pp. 339–41; Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: George Bernard Shaw (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 10; Gordon, ‘Shavian Comedy and the Shadow of Wilde’; David Rose, ‘Shavings’, The Oscholars 3:6, June (2003), available: www.irishdiaspora.net, December 3, 2006, last accessed in July 17, 2007; Weintraub, ‘“The Hibernian School”, pp. 43–6; Nicola Nixon, ‘The Reading Gaol of Henry James’s In the Cage’, ELH 66.1 (1999).
Sadleir, Things Past, p. 116. Oxford don C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) reportedly refused to attend a social gathering where Broughton was also expected to be present. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter, ed An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers: Revised and Expanded Edition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 98.
Marilyn Wood, Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920): Profile of a Novelist (Stamford, UK: Paul Watkins, 1993), p. 54. Frustratingly, this is the first reference Wood makes to any prior invitation from Wilde to Broughton.
Margaret L. Woods, ‘Oxford in the “Seventies”’, Fortnightly 150 (1941), p. 281.
R. C. Terry ‘Rhoda Broughton’, in Victorian Novelists After 1885, vol. 18 ed. Ira B. Nadel (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), p. 17.
Ethel M. Arnold, ‘Rhoda Broughton as I Knew Her’, Fortnightly Review 114 (1920), p. 276; Sadleir, Things Past, pp. 84, 85, 89–91, 94, 101.
Rhoda Broughton, Second Thoughts, vol. 1, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1880), p. 18.
Anonymous, Ye Soul Agonies in Ye Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Privately printed, 1882), p. 3.
G. T. Atkinson, ‘Oscar Wilde at Oxford’, Cornhill Magazine 66 (1929), p. 564.
William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), p. 188.
Patricia Clarke, ‘Rosa Praed (Mrs. Campbell Praed)’, in Australian Literature 1788–1914, vol. 230, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Selina Samuels (Detroit: Gale Research, 2001), p. 302.
See G. A. Cevasco, ed., The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 482. Clarke, ‘Rosa Praed (Mrs. Campbell Praed)’, p. 308;
Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter, Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 319.
Patricia Clarke, Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999), p. 83. Clarke, ‘Rosa Praed (Mrs. Campbell Praed)’, p. 306.
Mrs Campbell Praed, Affinities: A Romance of To-Day (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1886), p. 217.
Colin Roderick, In Mortal Bondage: The Strange Life of Rosa Praed (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1948), p. 107.
Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 216.
Anne Clark Amor, Mrs Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1983), p. 40.
For Wilde’s previously recorded observations on Australia, see John Willis, Oscar Wilde and the Antipodes, 2nd edn. (Fairfield: Privately printed, 2002).
Gisela Argyle, ‘Mary Augusta Arnold Ward (Mrs Humphry Ward) (1851–1920)’, in Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Abigail Burnham Bloom and Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 2000), pp. 396–7.
William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1976), p. 133.
Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, 24th edn. (London: Smith, Elder, 1889), pp. 395–6.
Horst Schroeder, ‘A Quotation in Dorian Gray’, Notes and Queries 38.3 (1991), p. 328.
Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London: W. Collins Sons, 1918), pp. 119–20.
John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 93.
Haldane Macfall, Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1928), p. 63. Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 191;
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, I Was an English Poet: A Critical Biography of Sir William Watson (1858–1936) (London: Cecil Woolf, 1981), pp. 125–6.
Aldington cited in William A. Cohen, ‘Willie and Wilde: Reading The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (1989), p. 243.
Quentin Anderson sees Gabriel Nash as James’s celebration and criticism of his recently deceased father. Cargill, ‘Mr. James’s Aesthetic Mr. Nash’, p. 177. Lyall Powers, like Leon Edel before him, argues that Nash was an amalgamation of Herbert Pratt and James himself. Powers, ‘Mr. James’s Aesthetic Mr. Nash—Again’, pp. 344–5. Jonathan Freedman notes that ‘physically, [Nash is] an amalgam of Oscar Wilde and Henry James’. Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 183. Freedman’s observation is interesting in light of the fact that Nash’s name combines the names of two famous Elizabethan literary adversaries: Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe. Lyall Powers also argues that Nash derives in some part from a female character in one of James’s earlier stories ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ (1869). Powers, ‘Mr. James’s Aesthetic Mr. Nash—Again’, p. 347.
Kevin J. Hayes, ed., Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 227–8.
Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 209.
Henry James, The Tragic Muse, The Laurel Henry James (New York: Dell, 1961), p. 70.
Ian Fletcher and John Stokes have concluded, and the present writer agrees, that Osmond is a general aesthetic portrait, not specifically Wilde. Ian Fletcher and John Stokes, ‘Oscar Wilde’, in Recent Research on Anglo-Irish Writers: A Supplement to Anglo-Irish Literature: A Review of Research, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983), p. 45.
For James’s relation to the aesthetic movement, see Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990)
and Richard Ellmann, ‘James Amongst the Aesthetes’, in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley (London: Macmillan, 1999).
George Monteiro, ‘A Contemporary View of Henry James and Oscar Wilde’, American Literature 35 (1964), p. 530.
Henry James, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 135.
Sheldon M. Novick, ‘Introduction’, in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 10.
For further discussion of James’s sexuality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic’, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin, 1994).
Eric Haralson, ‘The Elusive Queerness of Henry James’s “Queer Comrade”: Reading Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 197.
Laurence Housman, Echo de Paris: A Study from Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), p. 9.
John Carlos Rowe, in The Other Henry James, New Americanists, ed. Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 93–4;
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar, 1986), p. 222.
Raffalovich has been described by Brocard Sewell as ‘congenitally homosexual by temperament’. Sewell cited in Linda C. Dowling, ‘Venus and Tannhäuser: Beardsley’s Satire of Decadence’, The Journal of Narrative Technique 8.1 (1978), p. 33.
André Raffalovich, ‘Oscar Wilde’, in Footnote to the Nineties: A Memoir of John Gray and André Raffalovich, ed. Brocard Sewell (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1927), p. 110.
Rupert Croft-Cooke, Feasting with Panthers: A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), pp. 215–18.
Ian Fletcher, ed., The Poems of John Gray (Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1988), p. 8.
Brocard Sewell, Footnote to the Nineties: A Memoir of John Gray and André Raffalovich (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1968), p. 29.
Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 244.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (London: John Murray, 1930), pp. 94–5.
Paul Barolsky, ‘The Case of the Domesticated Aesthete’, Virginia Quarterly Review 60 (1984), p. 444;
Owen Dudley Edwards, ed., A Study in Scarlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 171.
John A. Hodgson, ‘An Allusion to Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, English Language Notes 34.2 (1997), p. 42.
Samuel Rosenberg, Naked Is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes (London: Arlington, 1975), p. 2.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Sign of Four’, The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Treasury of World Masterpieces (London: Octopus, 1981), pp. 36, 632. Rosenberg has noted the echo here of Wilde’s epigram delivered during his American lecture tour in 1882: ‘The American Woman? She is a charming oasis in the bewildering desert of commonsense [Rosenberg’s italics]’. Rosenberg, Naked is the Best Disguise, p. 133.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Treasury of World Masterpieces (London: Octopus, 1981), p. 559.
Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 157–8.
H. R. F. Keating, Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), p. 112.
Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1983) p. 25; Doyle, ‘The Sign of Four’, pp. 88, 626.
Martin Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 106.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Greek Interpreter’, The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Treasury of World Masterpieces (London: Octopus, 1981), p. 302.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Noble Bachelor’, The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Treasury of World Masterpieces (London: Octopus, 1981), p. 150.
It is interesting that the American conception of Holmes, significantly influenced by actor William Gillette—who adapted Holmes for the stage—is distinctly Wilde-like. Pierre Nordon notes that Gillette emphasized the detective’s ‘dandyism and somewhat sinister charm … also his “disappointment with the Atlantic”’, borrowing from Wilde’s famous statement upon arriving in America in 1882. Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle, trans. Frances Partridge (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 204.
Copyright information
© 2007 Angela Kingston
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kingston, A. (2007). Aesthete 1877–1890. In: Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609358_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609358_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36964-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60935-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)