Abstract
As the year 1890 drew to a close, Wilde was poised to take the London literary scene by storm. The following five years were to see a meteoric rise in his celebrity. Publication of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ in Lippincott’s Magazine in June 1890 had already caused a stir, but its appearance in book form the following year was to have a prodigious effect, provoking a massive amount of media attention and controversy. Wilde’s short story ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ had already inspired some conjecture about his sexuality; the publication of Dorian Gray, with its covert homosexual subtext, incited further speculation and censure. One reviewer of the story disparagingly remarked in the Scots Observer of July 5, 1890 that
Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys [an allusion to the previous year’s Cleveland Street scandal], the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.1
‘all the men who wore [green carnations] looked the same. They had the same walk, or rather waggle, the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head. When they spoke to each other, they called each other by Christian names. Is it a badge of some club or society, and is Mr. Amarinth their high priest? They all spoke to him, and seemed to revolve around him like satellites around the sun.’
Lady Locke, in Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Guy Deghy and Keith Waterhouse, Café Royal: Ninety Years of Bohemia (London: Hutchinson, 1955), pp. 58–59.
John Lucas, ‘Marie Corelli’, in Novelists and Prose Writers, ed. James Vinson and D. L. Kirkpatrick, Great Writers of the English Language (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 283.
S. Boswin, The Writings of Marie Corelli (Bombay: Examiner Press, 1907), p. 34.
Margaret B. McDowell, ‘Marie Corelli’, in British Novelists, 1890–1929: Traditionalists, vol. 34, ed. Thomas F. Staley, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985), pp. 86, 88.
Brian Masters, Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), pp. 114–15.
Bertha Vyver, Memoirs of Marie Corelli (London: Alston Rivers, 1930), p. 119.
William Stuart Scott, Marie Corelli: The Story of a Friendship (London: Hutchinson, 1955), p. 81.
Anonymous (Marie Corelli), The Silver Domino or Side Whispers, Social and Literary, 22nd edn. (London: Lamley and Company, 1894), p. 166.
McDowell, ‘Marie Corelli’, p. 84; Joy Melville, Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde (London: John Murray, 1994), p. 158.
Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend (London: Jarrolds, 1953), p. 164.
Philip Hoare, ‘Wilde’s Last Stand’, The Wildean 11 (1997), pp. 1, 17;
Philip Hoare, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War (London: Duckworth, 1997), p. 90.
Ella Hepworth Dixon, As I Knew Them: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way (London: Hutchinson, 1930), p. 35.
Margaret Wynman (Ella Hepworth Dixon), My Flirtations, 1893, Victorian Women Writers Project, available www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/dixon/myflirt.html, April 4, 2000, last accessed on July 17, 2007.
Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘The Bi-Social Oscar Wilde and “Modern” Women’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.4 (2001), pp. 60–1, 535. On January 21, 1893, Punch observed that ‘anyone in the London world could easily label’ the originals of Wynman’s fictional portraits ‘were he not baffled by the art of the skilful writer, and by the equally skilful illustrator … [who have] combined to throw the reader off the right scent’. Donald Mead, ed., ‘Punch and the New Woman and My Flirtations’, Intentions, no. 33 (London: Privately printed, 2004), p. 21.
Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman, 1894, Novel, Victorian Women Writers Project, available www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/dixon/storymod.htm, April 4, 2000, last accessed on July 17, 2007.
Ibid. These resemblances lead me to believe that Ann Heilmann is mistaken in her identification of Beaufort as Wilde. Ann Heilmann, ‘Wilde’s New Women: The New Woman on Wilde’, in The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years, ed. Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis, and Julie A Hibbard (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002), p. 136.
Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘Ella Hepworth Dixon’, in Late Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists: Second Series, vol. 197, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. George M. Johnson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), pp. 100, 104.
Ella Hepworth Dixon, ‘The World’s Slow Stain’, Turn-ofthe-Century Women 1.2 (1984), p. 10.
This sympathy is perhaps most evident in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Rose of Life (London: Hutchinson, 1905).
The same can be said of Frank Danby’s (Julia Frankau’s) novel The Sphinx’s Lawyer (London: William Heinemann, 1906).
Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. xxiv. Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, pp. 1–19. The reason for Brookfield’s antipathy toward Wilde is something of a mystery; Wilde is not mentioned in Brookfield’s memoirs (Random Reminiscences, 1911). Vincent O’Sullivan believed that Brookfield resented Wilde’s insistence that the cast of An Ideal Husband met on Christmas Day. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 404. Max Beerbohm recalled that Brookfield felt ‘snubbed’ by Wilde in some way.
S. N. Behrman, Conversation with Max (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960), p. 68. Richard Ellmann thought ‘the fact that Brookfield may have been Thackeray’s illegitimate son made him particularly sensitive to immorality’. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 349. Karl Beckson speculates that ‘Wilde’s brilliant success apparently provoked [Brookfield] to jealousy’. Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia, p. 36. Herbert Beerbohm Tree reported that Wilde could be an ‘infernal nuisance’ during rehearsals of his plays, often interrupting with objections and suggestions. Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, p. 192. It is possible that Brookfield took exception to Wilde’s frequent gibes about the acting profession and his reference to actors as ‘puppets’; indeed that was the inspiration for the title of Brookfield’s burlesque. Michael Seeney provides an overview of interpretations of Brookfield’s dislike of Wilde in Michael Seeney, ‘Charles Brookfield’, The Wildean 21 (2002).
A. Hamilton Grant, ‘“The Ephemeral”: Some Memories of Oxford in the Nineties’, Cornhill Magazine 71.426 (1931), p. 647.
J. G. Riewald, Sir Max Beerbohm, Man and Writer: A Critical Analysis with a Brief Life and a Bibliography (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), p. 129.
Max Beerbohm, Letters to Reggie Turner (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), p. 35.
Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the Past and Other Prose Pieces (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 3–8.
Notes from Beerbohm’s private character book reveal his close observation of Wilde’s appearance and mannerisms, which Beerbohm translated into caricature: Luxury-gold-tipped matches-hair curled-Assyrian-wax statue-huge rings-fat white hands-not soigné-feather bed-pointed fingers-ample scarf-Louis Quinze cane-vast malmaison-cat-like tread-heavy shoulders-enormous dowager-or schoolboy-way of laughing with hand over mouth-stroking chin-looking up sideways-jollity overdone—But real vitality … Effeminate, but vitality of twenty men. Magnetism-authority-Deeper than repute or wit-Hypnotic. David Cecil, Max: A Biography (London: Constable, 1964), p. 71.
Max Beerbohm, ‘Charterhouse and Oxford: 1890–1895’, Max in Verse; Rhymes and Parodies by Max Beerbohm, ed. J. G. Riewald (London: Heinemann, 1964), p. 7.
Max Beerbohm, ‘1880’, The Works of Max Beerbohm (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1921), p. 46.
Beerbohm attended Wilde’s trials to lend his support. Richard Ellmann is incorrect in his statement that Beerbohm wrote ‘cruelly in April-May 1895 to Mrs Leverson [at the time of Wilde’s trials], “I look forward eagerly to the first act of Oscar’s new Tragedy. But surely the title Douglas must have been used before.”’ This was actually written to Leverson by Aubrey Beardsley, not Beerbohm. Aubrey Beardsley, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan, and W. G. Good (London: Cassell, 1970), p. 82. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 400; Schroeder, Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, p. 151.
Max Beerbohm, Letters of Max Beerbohm: 1892–1956 (London: John Murray, 1988), p. 118. Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia, p. 27.
L. Amery, F. W. Hirst, and H. A. A. Cruso, Aristophanes at Oxford (Hamilton: Kent, 1894).
Richard Le Gallienne, ‘The Décadent to His Soul’, English Poems (London: The Bodley Head, 1895).
Richard Le Gallienne, Prose Fancies (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894), pp. 35–6, 45.
Charles Higham, The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p. 103.
William S. Baring-Gould, ed., The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1968), p. 591.
Ronald Burt De Waal, The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Classified and Annotated List of Materials Relating to Their Lives and Adventures (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974), pp. 220–1.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Secker and Warburg, 1981), p. 916.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Empty House’, The Celebrated Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Treasury of World Masterpieces (London: Octopus, 1981), pp. 358, 361.
An interesting adjunct to ‘The Empty House’ is the 1999 short story ‘Flashman and the Tiger’ by George MacDonald Fraser, part of Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ series that imagines the adult adventures of Harry Flashman, the notorious bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) by Thomas Hughes. For ‘Flashman and the Tiger’, Fraser appropriates Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, Lestrade, and ‘Tiger’ Moran (the last is revealed to be an old enemy of Flashman’s) when Flashman unwittingly stumbles into the denouement of the ‘The Empty House’. Interestingly, in Fraser’s story, Wilde is briefly glimpsed by Flashman in the company of Moran at the theater. Flashman is scathing in his description of Wilde, whom he refers to as an insolent, mincing posturer, surrounded by ‘toadies’ with the appearance of ‘an overfed trout in a toupé’. George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Tiger and Other Extracts from the Flashman Papers (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 290–1.
Karl Beckson, ‘Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde: Some New A. Conan Doyle Letters’, English Language Notes 17 (1979), p. 41. Doyle attended séances as early as 1879 and became an investigator for the Society for Psychical Research in 1894. Beckson, ‘Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde’, pp. 39–40.
Norman Alford, The Rhymers’ Club (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 5.
J. Lewis May, John Lane and the Nineties (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1936), p. 98.
Carroll V. Peterson, in John Davidson, ‘“Art for man”’ Twayne’s English Authors Series, ed. Sylvia E. Bowman (New York: Twayne, 1972), pp. 143–4.
W. B. Yeats cited in Robert Duncan Macleod, John Davidson: A Study in Personality (Glasgow: Holmes, 1957), p. 15.
Albert C. Baugh, ed., A Literary History of England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 1545.
Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 1114n. According to the pianist Frank Liebich, he met Wilde at a private dinner party at a Soho restaurant in the company of John Davidson, John Barlas, and John Gray. Liebich cited in Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 121. Barlas wrote an article on Wilde and his work for the Novel Review. John Barlas, letter to Oscar Wilde, March 2, 1892 (Clark). Barlas’s son recalled that his father was ‘a great admirer of Wilde as a man of letters’. C. Douglas Barlas, letter to A. J. A. Symons, December 20, 1925 (Clark). Mark Samuels Lasner has advised the present writer that Davidson praised Wilde’s efforts on behalf of Barlas in a letter to W. S. McCormick.
John Davidson, Baptist Lake (London: Ward and Downey, 1894), p. 142.
Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland also parodies the style of two other authors considered in this study: George Bernard Shaw and Henry James. Linda Anne Julian, ‘G. S. Street’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 135, ed. William B. Thesing (Detroit: Gale Research, 1994), p. 349.
Richard Le Gallienne, Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log (London: John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1896), p. 22.
George Slythe Street, ‘The Editor’s Apology’ The Autobiography of a Boy, The Decadent Consciousness: A Hidden Archive of Late Victorian Literature, ed. Ian Fletcher and John Stokes (New York: Garland, 1977), pp. ix–x.
Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, vol. 17 The Life and Letters Series, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 68.
Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (London: Constable, 1943), p. 187.
Richard Bleiler, ‘Robert S. Hichens’, Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists: First Series, vol. 153, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. George M. Johnson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), p. 108.
Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 17.
St. John Adcock, The Glory that Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors (London: Sampson Low, 1928), p. 110.
Robert Hichens, Yesterday: The Autobiography of Robert Hichens (London: Cassell, 1947), pp. 65–6.
Robert Hichens, ‘Introduction’, The Green Carnation (London: Unicorn, 1949). This was the first English edition to be printed since the novel was withdrawn from circulation during the Wilde scandal in 1895.
Julie Speedie, Wonderful Sphinx (London: Virago, 1993), p. 49.
Charles Burkhart, Ada Leverson (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 22. Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940, pp. 14, 112.
Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 577; Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 383. For a fictional elaboration on this possibility, see Clement Wood, The Sensualist: A Novel of the Life and Times of Oscar Wilde (New York: Jonathan Swift, 1942), p. 269.
Wilde, Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 418. In her essay ‘Sexuality, the Public, and the Art World’, Regenia Gagnier refers to the first part of this quotation to argue that Wilde approved of The Green Carnation and was ‘advertising’ it in Earnest. However, Gagnier does not include the final reference to the book being ‘morbid and middle-class’, which would seem to indicate Wilde’s disapproval. Regenia Gagnier, ‘Sexuality, the Public, and the Art World’, in Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, ed. Regenia Gagnier (New York: G. K. Hall, 1991), p. 38.
Christopher D. Murray, ‘Robert Buchanan’, in Victorian Novelists After 1885, vol. 18, Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), p. 21.
Andrew Nash, Buchanan, Robert Williams, The Literary Encyclopedia, available www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=627, last accessed on July 17, 2007. May 1, 2002.
Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray, The Charlatan (London: Chatto and Windus, 1896), p. 15.
Archibald Stodart-Walker, Robert Buchanan: The Poet of Modern Revolt (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 305.
Jonathan Goodman, The Oscar Wilde File (W. H. Allen, 1988), p. 98.
Grant Richards, Memories of a Misspent Youth: 1872–1896 (London: William Heinemann, 1932), p. 300.
Osbert Sitwell, ‘Ada Leverson, Wilde and Max’, The National and English Review 135.811 (1950), pp. 286–7.
Ada Leverson, ‘Suggestion’, in Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1993), p. 43.
Copyright information
© 2007 Angela Kingston
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kingston, A. (2007). Decadent 1891–1895. In: Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609358_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609358_3
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)