by Oscar Wilde
46 Along with all the decorative devices and page ornaments, the book’s half-page illustrations and pictorial title page are by Ricketts, whom Wilde called “the subtle and fantastic decorator” to whom “the entire decorative design of the book is due” (CL 501). The four full-page illustrations, by contrast, are by Shannon, whom Wilde called “the drawer of dreams” and who is now especially noted for his lithographs. Shannon’s four illustrations were printed separately from the rest of the book in France, on special paper, using an untested, experimental printing process, with the result that they quickly faded and became hard to decipher. See Nicholas Frankel, “Invisible Illustration: Envisioning Beauty in Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates,” in his Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2009), 191–222. For the importance of book design to Wilde’s writings, see Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
47 CL 502.
48 The social pretensions of the short-lived weekly Court and Society Review, in which “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” first appeared, are implicit in its title as well as in the subtitle (“A Marriage Chronicle and Social Review”) adopted by the magazine for the first year of its existence. By contrast The World, in which “Lady Alroy” and “The Model Millionaire” first appeared, professed itself in its subtitle “A Journal for Men and Women.” That the magazine aimed to attract socially aspirant readers is perhaps more clearly indicated by the generic byline accompanying the original publication of these two stories, “Town and Country Tales.”
49 Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 121–122.
50 The swallow has previously courted a beautiful reed, the narrator tells us, but his fellow swallows find it “a ridiculous attachment” and he soon “began to tire of his lady-love.”
51 CL 354.
52 In 1909 Ross arranged for Wilde’s corpse to be reinterred permanently in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, where five years later Jacob Epstein’s famous funerary monument was unveiled over the grave. A special compartment was built into the monument, where Ross’s ashes now reside.
53 The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (48 & 49 Vict. c.69), Sec. 11.
54 See The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, intro. and with commentary by Merlin Holland (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 31, 50–51, 120–24.
55 CL 1044.
56 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 278.
57 “Helas,” in Poems (London: David Bogue, 1881), 3. Wilde quotes Jonathan’s words to Saul: “I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and lo! I must die” (1 Samuel 14:43). Jonathan’s words had previously been quoted by Wilde’s mentor Walter Pater in The Renaissance, which Wilde called his “golden book.”
58 CL 407.
59 Male actors masqueraded as, and perhaps even imagined themselves as inhabiting, the female gender. See p. 296 below.
60 Immediately after publishing “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” in Blackwood’s in 1889, Wilde asked his friend Ricketts to create a faked portrait of the titular Mr. W. H. for use in a future book publication of the story; in 1893, after Wilde had begun expanding the story by some 13,500 words (more than doubling its length), his publishers John Lane and Elkin Mathews announced that such an edition was “in preparation.” But Lane and Mathews, whose partnership dissolved in 1894, baulked at publishing Wilde’s book; and in 1895, shortly before his arrest for gross indecency, Wilde asked Ricketts to consider publishing it privately instead at his recently established Vale Press. Wilde returned to the subject again when Ricketts visited him in 1897, shortly before his release from Reading Prison. See Charles Ricketts, Everything for Art: Selected Writings, ed. Nicholas Frankel (High Wycombe, UK: Rivendale Press, 2013), 53–54, 61–62. As Ricketts writes in Oscar Wilde: Recollections, “It is curious how the problem of the Sonnets [i.e., “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”] haunted Oscar Wilde for years! My first meeting with him, my last before the Trial, and my interview in Reading Gaol each had reference to this subject; it has been a landmark in our friendship” (in Charles Ricketts, Everything for Art 221)
61 “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” in Criticism, ed. Guy, 122.
62 The masculinity of the tragic doomed lovers in “Mr. W. H.” stands in sharp contrast to the femininity of the doomed nightingale in “The Nightingale and The Rose.” The latter inherits her gender from Hans Andersen’s original, purportedly created by Andersen in homage to the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale, with whom he was hopelessly in love.
63 See too Joseph Bristow’s and Rebecca N. Mitchell’s comment that “the erotic attractiveness of the beautiful male is always mediated through an elusive (because entirely imaginary) figure that answers to the initials ‘W. H.’.… The patterns of homosexual attraction that suffuse many parts of the narrative remain intimately connected with the transmission of an imaginative longing to prove that ‘W, H.’ was a boy actor; it is in this longing, one that can at last tire of its ambitions to fabricate the truth, where the homoerotic desire of Wilde’s ‘Portrait’ resides” (Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015], 288).
64 Holland, The Real Trial, 93.
65 The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Frankel, 96.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
· · · THIS EDITION REPRINTS AN ECLECTIC MIX of Wilde’s short stories in the versions that Wilde first published and Victorian readers first encountered, often in popular magazines, rather than in versions revised—sometimes cursorily—years later for republication. In the case of the three stories that first appeared in Wilde’s 1888 collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales (“The Happy Prince,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Nightingale and the Rose”), this decision requires no explanation since Wilde never revised these three stories for republication. Similarly, “The Fisherman and His Soul,” which first appeared in his 1891 story collection A House of Pomegranates, was never revised for republication.
But the other five stories gathered here—four of which were republished in story collections as many as four years after they had first appeared in magazines, and the fifth of which (“The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”) Wilde revised but never republished—appear here in versions with which many modern readers will be unfamiliar. “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” “The Model Millionaire,” and “Lady Alroy” are printed here, then, in the form in which they first appeared in 1887 in the upscale Victorian magazines The World and The Court and Society Review, magazines with whose editors Wilde is known to have been on close and friendly terms.1 Similarly, “The Birthday of the Little Princess” appears here as printed in 1889 for international readers in the transatlantic magazine Paris Illustré, while “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is printed as it appeared in July 1889 in Blackwood’s Magazine, one of Victorian Britain’s preeminent monthlies, with distribution in North America, where it reached a large readership and was briefly slated for republication in the popular anthology Tales From Blackwood. Wilde later revised “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” extensively, clearly intending to republish it in the form of a book, and it is the later version that is often reprinted today. But this book never appeared in Wilde’s lifetime (it was finally published in 1921 after the manuscript came to light), and it is the punchier, less scholarly Blackwood’s version reprinted here that Wilde’s contemporaries would have known.
My decision to reprint the earliest published versions of these five stories requires some explanation, especially since it produces subtle shifts in emphasis. The decision is based partly on social and historical grounds: that these were the earliest versions encountered by Victorian readers is beyo
nd debate, but less obviously they were also the most widely read and impactful versions. This is clear from the extensive public commentary attending the publication of “Mr. W. H.” in Blackwood’s, which according to Frank Harris “set everyone talking and arguing.”2 But it is no less clear when we consider that the 1889 version of “The Birthday of the Little Princess” was published simultaneously in New York, London, and Paris, where it was translated into French by the poet Stuart Merrill, whereas The House of Pomegranates, the story collection in which the revised version appeared in 1891, sold poorly and was remaindered a few years after Wilde’s death.3 Similarly The World, in which “Lady Alroy” and “The Model Millionaire” first appeared, catered to “a wide spectrum of middle-class and upper-class readers” whereas Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, in which hastily revised versions appeared in 1891, was poorly reviewed, cheaply priced, and never reprinted in Wilde’s lifetime.4 Like The Court and Society Review, The World specialized in aristocratic and fashionable gossip: “portraits of the ladies of the aristocracy” featured prominently in the former, while the latter welcomed “contributions from people of rank” and had a reputation as a society paper notwithstanding its commitment to good fiction and intelligent, responsible, political coverage.5 We must remember that Wilde, the most socially aware of authors, wrote to engage and even flatter his readers. As the number of Wilde’s references to fashionable London locations in them implies, the stories he published in The World and The Court and Society Review were closely tailored for these magazines’ readerships, just as his sparkling social comedies were later tailored for the society audiences who attended the West End theaters where they were first performed. Like those social comedies, the stories that Wilde published in The World, The Court and Society Review, and Paris Illustré are preoccupied with wealth, power, and the foibles of the rich; and what the critic Regenia Gagnier writes of Wilde’s comedies—that Wilde was perfectly “aware of how trivial, vicious, and self-deluded was the Society [he] represented”—applies equally to these stories as well.6
There are more strictly authorial reasons, too, for emphasizing the serial versions. For roughly five years from the date of his 1884 marriage to Constance Lloyd, when all but the last of the stories in the present selection were composed and first published, Wilde was an accomplished and successful journalist. He contributed regularly to a range of periodicals, and from 1887–1889 he was the editor of the magazine Woman’s World, which he succeeded in transforming into a well-produced, serious, and well-regarded organ for advanced thought. He had as this time written none of the great imaginative works on which his reputation as a writer largely rests today, and journalism was his principal means of income. He “was always a man of the press,” the editors of Wilde’s collected journalism remind us, “and much of his prose and poetry appeared in journals of various kinds.”7 Five of the nine stories printed here originally appeared in magazines, and another two (“The Happy Prince” and “The Fisherman and His Soul”) were originally intended to feature in magazines (The English Illustrated Magazine and Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, respectively) even if a different fate awaited them. Although Wilde’s stories are now rightly regarded as an indispensable part of his literary oeuvre, their author himself probably regarded many of them as an extension of his journalism—which is not to suggest that they were mere money-making enterprises or that they lack great artistry, but rather that they are a mark of the respect and seriousness Wilde accorded to the medium of the popular magazine. The mid-1880s saw an explosion of such magazines aimed at an increasingly diverse, wide, and literate readership, many of them employing the latest printing technologies. “It is in your power to make your magazine an influence for culture,” Wilde remarked to one editor who had sent him two issues of an “exceedingly well-printed” magazine for comment.8 “It is impossible to live by literature,” Wilde stated when returning the manuscript of an aspiring fellow writer around this time. “By journalism a man may make an income,” he told his correspondent, advising him to prune his manuscript down and send it to either Time or Longman’s Magazine.9
Where five of the nine stories reprinted here are concerned, my decision to print the first published versions produces some significant shifts in emphasis and meaning. “Lady Alroy,” for instance, appears here under its original title rather than “The Sphinx Without a Secret,” the title Wilde gave it upon republication in 1891. The later title emphasizes superficiality and the falsity of appearances, whereas the original title emphasizes aristocratic rank and gender, appropriately enough for a story published in a society paper subtitled “A Journal for Men and Women.” The later title is a repetition, even an endorsement, of the narrator’s statement near the end of the story that Lady Alroy was “merely a Sphinx without a secret.” But if the later title is an endorsement, it is a deliberately misleading one, since the story gives us many reasons for questioning—as Lord Murcheson evidently does in the closing lines—whether the narrator is telling the truth.10 As Nils Clausen has written, “we must guard against being taken in by the narrator’s seemingly unequivocal pronouncement.” While the story’s narrator clearly wants the love-struck and possessive Murcheson to believe that Lady Alroy kept no secrets from him, he privately reflects to himself that hers was “the face of some one who had a secret, but whether that secret was good or evil I could not say.” As importantly, the story intimates that the narrator is himself a man who harbors an unspoken and secret attraction to Murcheson. In 1891, after the scandal over The Picture of Dorian Gray obliged Wilde to state publicly that “those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril,” he had good reason for wanting to deflect attention away from the possibility that his characters possessed sexually dangerous secrets. The original title re-awakens us to the possibility, even likelihood, that there is more to Lady Alroy than meets the eye.
A similar shift occurs in the case of “The Birthday of the Little Princess,” reprinted here under its original title rather than “The Birthday of the Infanta,” the title Wilde gave it on republication in 1891. Where the later title emphasizes the princess’s exoticism and regal hauteur, the original title emphasizes innocence and extreme youth. Wilde also changed “little Princess” to “Infanta” in the story’s opening line in 1891. These changes have important implications for interpretation, particularly where the princess’s reaction to the dwarf’s heartbroken death is concerned. To consider her as an Infanta is to consider her an autocratic monarch-in-waiting, a reflection or extension of the corrupt Spanish court she resides in. But to consider her as a “little princess” is to remember that she is first and foremost an innocent child. As an Infanta, it is all too easy for adult readers to cast judgment on her as aloof and heartless. It is considerably harder to cast judgment on her as a “little princess,” a child in a fairy tale, who like most other children dwells in a perpetual present.
Generally speaking, and with the crucial exception of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” Wilde did not revise his stories extensively or even especially carefully for book publication when they had previously appeared in magazines. But the later versions of “Lady Alroy” and “The Birthday of the Little Princess” contain a few significant variants, including those I’ve already mentioned, and these are noted in my annotations. My annotations also register significant variants in the later versions of “The Model Millionaire” and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” although here, with two conspicuous exceptions, the differences are more minor and both stories were republished by Wilde under their original titles. (The two exceptions are Wilde’s decision to alter “good looks” to “personal charm” in the later version of “The Model Millionaire,” and his removal of French phrases, expressive of Francophilia among the English aristocracy, from “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.”) Readers interested in a fuller reckoning of the textual differences between the different published versions of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” “The Model Millionaire,” and “The Birthday of the Litt
le Princess” (but not “Lady Alroy”) should consult The Short Fiction, edited by Ian Small.11 As Small notes, prepublication texts of Wilde’s short stories are virtually nonexistent. But partial manuscripts and page proofs survive for “The Fisherman and His Soul,” revealing that Wilde revised the story fairly extensively before publication, and some of Wilde’s most revealing prepublication revisions are noted in my annotations. An undated manuscript of “The Selfish Giant” in the hand of Wilde’s wife also survives. Again, readers interested in a full consideration of how these manuscripts and page proofs vary from the published versions should consult Small’s edition.
A special word of explanation is needed regarding my treatment of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” As already noted, Wilde’s subsequent revisions to the story were extensive. In preparing a book-length version, he more than doubled the story’s length. Among the most significant additions, he included more “evidence” drawn from the sonnets themselves in section 2 as well as lengthy digressions on the art of the actor and the Platonic ideal of friendship; he added two lengthy new sections discoursing on the provenance of the boy-actor, the “essentially male culture of the English Renaissance,” and the possible identity and importance of the so-called “dark lady” of the last twenty-eight sonnets; and finally, he expanded section 3 of the story (newly renumbered as section 5 in the longer version) to include a discussion of the elements of self-discovery and artistry in all criticism. Wilde’s scholarly additions to “Mr. W. H.” after its appearance in Blackwood’s raise important matters of history and gender, but they are too extensive for incorporation into my annotations to the Blackwood’s text. Moreover, the effect of many of them underscores Wilde’s own comment that the story perhaps better belongs in a “volume of essays and studies” and is “too literary” for inclusion in a book of stories. Consequently, Wilde’s most significant additions to “Mr. W. H.” can be found in the Appendix. For the full text of the book-length version, first published in 1921, readers are once again referred to Small’s The Short Fiction.