Oscar Wilde

In Twenty Years in Paris (1905), Oscar Wilde’s first biographer, Robert Harborough Sherard, describes his visit to the Hôtel d'Alsace on the rue des Beaux-Arts, where Wilde had died in penury on November 30, 1900. In July 1904, Sherard discovered that the landlord, Jean Dupoirier, had left Wilde’s shabby bedroom much as it was when the disgraced author had passed away. As Sherard observes, he was hardly the only one wanting to peek inside the tawdry chamber, with “its soiled curtains of the colour of lees of wine”. Soon after Wilde’s death, Dupoirier made a small profit by turning the room into a site of pilgrimage. Not only could devotees inspect the “leathern case” containing the “Privaz syringe” that Dupoirier had used to inject Wilde with morphine. They could also view the “the two large trunks” in which were stored “the books which he had collected during his stay in the hotel”. “He was a great reader was Monsieur Melmoth”, Sherard recalls Dupoirier remarking of the debt-ridden guest who lived quietly under this imaginative alias. “One rarely saw him without a volume in his hand.”

Although students of Wilde’s life have long known that Sherard is not the most dependable source, there is no reason to doubt what he claims to have uncovered among “the three hundred odd volumes in the two trunks”. Besides the “many French novels” and “a Huysmans or two”, Sherard found numerous publications that dealt with prison life, along with writings by Tolstoy. It appears, however, that during his time at the Alsace, Wilde was not always reading the volumes he regularly ordered from Brentano’s. Most of “the books”, Sherard states, “showed little sign of usage”. Many of the pages, it seems, remained uncut.

In his intimately titled study Oscar’s Books, Thomas Wright provides plenty of information that complements Sherard’s perception that in his last days Wilde was more of a book- buyer than a book- reader. “[H]aving put aside his pen”, Wright says of the absinthe-sipping Wilde, “he no longer gobbled up books, but tasted them.” As Wilde’s final bill from Brentano’s reveals, he remained to the end an “intrepid literary adventurer”. Just before his death, he had ordered copies of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) and Beatrice Harraden’s Hilda Strafford and the Remittance Man (1897), as well as volumes by American writers such as Harold Frederic. Even if he was in principle averse to the unflinching realism that made Morrison’s fiction such a cause célèbre, Wilde wanted to keep abreast of contemporary literary fashion. It was a habit that he had developed even before he began reviewing new fiction and poetry for journals in the 1880s. Wilde’s reviews show that he was anything but a snob; he could take pleasure in a Christmas giftbook by Mary Louisa Molesworth, just as he could admire the greatness of W. B. Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin. Both writers, he noted, were “fascinating” and “clever” in the different ways they wielded the “pen”.

Wright’s enthusiastic account sets out to show that for Wilde “books were a lifelong romance”, that he “devoured and luxuriated in books”. Yet when Wright comes to providing the details of Wilde’s eclectic reading, it is not always clear what they reveal about his idol. A recurrent problem is simply trying to determine the extent to which Wilde engaged with the hundreds of volumes that he owned.

It is evident that Wilde treated his copy of Sententiæ Artis (1886) by the aesthete-despising journalist Harry Quilter with some contempt. This piece of hack art-criticism took a bruising when Wilde was drafting his vitriolic review of it for the Pall Mall Gazette, and Wright notes that Wilde’s copy, which is in private hands, has a badly cracked spine and bumped corners. Similarly, Wilde’s copy of W. H. Mallock’s satire on modern intellectual fads, The New Republic (1877), which is held at Magdalen College, Oxford, has, appropriately enough, a jam stain visible on page 30. As Wright notes, Wilde “gorged himself on books and food simultaneously”. But if such negligence nicely suggests Wilde’s lack of respect for books such as Mallock’s, what might it tell us about his wider tastes?

Sales catalogues can provide useful pointers to Wilde’s literary interests. Wright was among the first researchers to consult the Eccles Bequest, which has recently become accessible to scholars at the British Library. He opens Oscar’s Books with a brief account of Wilde’s bankruptcy sale, which took place at the writer’s home at 16 Tite Street, Chelsea. This humiliating event, which drew crowds of bargain-hunters, aimed to defray the costs, amounting to £600, incurred after Wilde’s hazardous libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry collapsed at the Old Bailey on April 5, 1895. The sale, which took place a month before Wilde was sentenced to two years in jail, comprised 114 lots of personal books, as well as many other lots of art and furnishings, including Thomas Carlyle’s writing table.

The annotated sale catalogue acquired by Lady Eccles shows that the contents of Wilde’s library went for next to nothing: Wright tells us that the meagre £130 they fetched was “roughly the same as Wilde’s weekly expenditure on food, drink, cabs and hotel rooms”. Moreover, he reminds us that a number of Wilde’s friends bought copies at the sale and kindly returned them to their owner after his release from prison. But discussion of Wilde’s library can only take us so far. Although Wright knows that at the sale twenty-three volumes of the works of Émile Zola went for ten shillings, he cannot say what Wilde made of them, although he reminds us that Wilde “pours scorn” on this French writer in his “anti-realistic manifesto”, “The Decay of Lying”. This set of Zola’s fiction, it would seem, has gone missing, like so much else that lay in Wilde’s finely crafted bookcases.

Wright is on firmer ground when he looks closely at works we know Wilde read, especially those he absorbed – often through cramming – during his undergraduate years, first at Trinity College, Dublin and then at Oxford. These included Social Life in Greece (1874) by J. P. Mahaffy – Wilde’s tutor at Trinity – a work that “offers the fullest and frankest discussion of homosexuality in all nineteenth-century scholarship”. Wright sees, too, that Mahaffy’s “audacious and epigrammatic style” left a lasting impact on his student, who took his degree in Literæ Humaniores in 1878. Wright points out that by 1873 Wilde had already discovered the first volume of John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets. Everyone who has edited Wilde’s writings knows that Symonds’s writings were just as important in Wilde’s aesthetic education as Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).

Wright’s researches in the Eccles Bequest have unearthed Wilde’s instructions to the builder of the Tite Street library, whose handiwork presumably complemented E. W. Godwin’s impressive interior decorations. Wright has also consulted Wilde’s bankruptcy papers at the Public Record Office, where he learned that the London bookseller David Nutt made some seventy transactions with Wilde between 1888 and 1895. Both David Nutt and Hatchards demanded payment at the time of Wilde’s bankruptcy: Hatchard’s bill was for £60 17s 11d. Evidently, Wilde’s book-buying was well funded; it was also wide-ranging. Nutt’s invoices show that Wilde bought copies of Justin Huntly McCarthy’s prose version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (1893), W. A. Clouston’s anthology Flowers from a Persian Garden (1890) and Edwin Arnold’s Indian Poetry (1886). Such volumes focus attention on the strain of Orientalism within fin-de-siècle literary culture, which was undoubtedly important to Wilde. From a bookshop specializing in foreign titles he bought the French version of Turgenev’s Virgin Soil; and his English translation of Turgenev’s “A Fire at Sea” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1886.

Oscar’s Books is largely confined to what we know about the contents, shape and size of Wilde’s library, but not every book that mattered to him remained on his bookshelves. For example, there is no mention of the works of Mary Eliza Haweis, about whom Deborah Cohen has written with such authority in Household Gods: The British and their possessions (2006). Haweis’s The Art of Beauty (1878) and The Art of Dress (1879) have some bearing on Wilde’s early pronouncements on the “house beautiful” and modern fashion. Wilde’s responsiveness to women’s culture in the 1880s is one of the more disappointing omissions in Wright’s study. The literary reviews that Wilde completed during his two years as Editor of Woman’s World (1887–9) show how seriously he took the work of up-and-coming female writers, such as Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and Amy Levy.

In the end, even if his sense of Oscar Wilde’s reading looks selective, it cannot be denied that scholars can learn much from Thomas Wright’s discoveries. Oscar’s Books is likely to inspire future researchers to attempt to “tell the story of an author’s life, and to illuminate it, exclusively through the books that he had read”.