by Oscar Wilde
121 Inserted before the final two paragraphs of the story, after “retaining his senses to the last” (p. 227 above).
122 Wilde’s imagery here evokes impressionist paintings of beach scenes, such as Claude Monet’s 1870 painting “The Beach at Trouville.” His phrasing echoes p. 59 above (“He got up and looked out of the window.… In the square below some children were flitting about like white butterflies”) as well a sentence added in 1891 to the revised, book-length edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The brightly-coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous butterflies.”
123 Sonnet 99.
124 Wilde alludes here to Les Miserables (1862), by Victor Hugo (1802–1885), specifically to a passage in which the actions of the Bishop of Digne, when he accompanies a condemned man up the steps of the scaffold, are disparaged by his townsfolk as “all affectation.”
125 The pathetic fallacy is the false attribution of feelings and sensations to inanimate or “unsensing” things. The notion derives from John Ruskin, who writes in Modern Painters (1856), “All violent feelings … produce … a falseness in … impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘pathetic fallacy.’ ”
FURTHER READING
EDITIONS
The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man. Edited by Josephine M. Guy. Vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Journalism. Edited by John Stokes and Mark Turner. Vols. 6 and 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Uncensored, Annotated Edition. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
The Short Fiction. Edited by Ian Small. Vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
BIOGRAPHICAL
Ackroyd, Peter. The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. 1983. Reprint, London: Abacus, 1988.
Coakley, Davis. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town House, 1994.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Frankel, Nicholas. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
________. The Invention of Oscar Wilde. London: Reaktion Books, forthcoming.
Holland, Merlin. The Wilde Album. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.
Holland, Vyvyan. Son of Oscar Wilde. 1954. rev. ed. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999.
McKenna, Neil. The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections. Edited by E. H. Mikhail. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Sturgis, Matthew. Oscar: A Life. London: Head of Zeus, 2018.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
Beckson, Karl, ed. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
Fletcher, Ian, and John Stokes. “Oscar Wilde.” In Anglo-Irish Literature: A Review of Research, edited by Richard Finneran, 48–137. New York: MLA, 1976.
________. “Oscar Wilde.” In Recent Research on Anglo-Irish Writers, edited by Richard Finneran, 21–47. New York: MLA, 1983.
Mason, Stuart [Christopher Millard]. Bibliography of Oscar Wilde. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914.
Mikhail, E. H., ed. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Mikolyzk, Thomas A. Oscar Wilde: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Small, Ian. Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials & Methods of Research. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1993.
________. Oscar Wilde, Recent Research: A Supplement to “Oscar Wilde Revalued.” Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2000.
Small, Ian, and Josephine Guy. Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2006.
CONTEXTUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
Ablow, Rachel. “Reading and Re-Reading: Wilde, Newman, and the Fiction of Belief.” In The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, edited by Rachel Ablow, 157–178. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Bashford, Bruce. Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The Storyteller: Essays. Edited and with introduction by Samuel Titan. Translated by Tess Lewis. New York: New York Review of Books, 2019.
Bennet, Michael Y., ed. Philosophy and Oscar Wilde. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Bettleheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 1976. New York: Vintage, 2010
Bristow, Joseph, ed. Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008.
________, ed. Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
________. “ ‘A Complex Multiform Creature’: Wilde’s Sexual Identities.” In The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, edited by Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
________, ed. Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Bristow, Joseph, and Rebecca N. Mitchell. Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Chedgzoy, Kate. “ ‘Strange Worship’: Oscar Wilde and the Key to Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture, 135–176. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Danson, Lawrence. “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” In Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism, 102–126. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Davis, Michael F., and Petra Dierkes-Thrun, eds. Wilde’s Other Worlds. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Foss, Chris. “ ‘For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts’: The Affect of Pity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta.’ ” Journal of Narrative Theory 47, no. 3 (2017): 337–355.
Frankel, Nicholas. Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
________. Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s. High Wycombe, UK: Rivendale Press, 2009.
________. “Portraiture in Oscar Wilde’s Fiction.” Études Anglaises 69, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 2016): 49–61.
Friedman, Dustin. Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and The Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Halpern, Richard. “Theory to Die For: Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” In Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions 1880–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985.
Hillard, Molly Clark. Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014.
Killeen, Jarlath. The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. 2007. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2016.
________. The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore, and Ireland. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
________. “Wilde, the Fairy Tales, and the Oral Tradition.” In Oscar Wilde in Context, edited by Kerry Powell and Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Mackie, Gregory. Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.
Markey
, Anne. Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011.
McCormack, Jerusha, ed. Wilde the Irishman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Nunokawa, Jeff. Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Oya, Reiko. “ ‘Talk to him’: Wilde, his friends, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives, edited by Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson, 48–67. New York: Berghahn, 2020.
Pine, Richard. The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995.
Poole, Adrian. Shakespeare and the Victorians. London: Bloomsbury, 2014
Powell, Kerry and Peter Raby, eds. Oscar Wilde in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Roden, Frederick S., ed. Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Ruddick, Nicholas. “Teaching Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Aestheticism as Social and Cultural Critique in ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose.’ ” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Philip E. Smith II, 93–99. New York: MLA, 2008.
Schroeder, Horst. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: Its Composition, Publication, and Reception. Braunschweig, Germany: Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, Seminar für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984.
________. Annotations to Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Braunschweig, Germany: H. Schroeder, 1986.
Sillars, Stuart. Shakespeare and the Victorians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Small, Ian and Josephine M. Guy. Oscar Wilde’s Profession. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Smith, Phillip E., II, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: MLA, 2008.
Stokes, John. “Shopping in Byzantium: Oscar Wilde as Shakespeare Critic.” In Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 1: Theatre, Drama, and Performance, edited by Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, 178–191. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Sumpter, Caroline. The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Whitely, Giles. “Cosmopolitan Space: Political Topographies in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.’ ” Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914 7, no. 2 (2017): 124–142
Williams, Kristian. Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, foreword by Alan Moore. Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2020
Willoughby, Guy. Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993.
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. 1983. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2012.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
PAGE 5
A House of Pomegranates (London: James R. Osgood McIlvaine, 1891), title page.
Reproduction courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, PR5818.H6 1891.
PAGE 7
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London: David Nutt, 1888), front cover.
Reproduction courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.
PAGE 16
Charles Ricketts, illustration to “The Fisherman and His Soul,” from A House of Pomegranates (London: James R. Osgood McIlvaine, 1891), p. 87.
Reproduction courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, PR5818.H6 1891.
PAGE 24
Mr. Oscar Wilde, 1889. Photograph by W. & D. Downey, carbon print, as published in The Cabinet Portrait Gallery: Reproduced from Original Photographs by W. & D. Downey, Second Series (London: Cassell & Company, 1891), p. 96.
Reproduction courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.
PAGE 57
Belgrave Square, London. From Burton Holmes, Travelogues: with Illustrations from Photographs by the Author, Volume Two (New York: The McClure Company, 1910), p. 56.
PAGE 87
Thames Embankment, London (Detroit: Detroit Publishing Company, 1905).
Reproduction from the Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsc-08580.
PAGE 95
Café de la Paix, Paris. From H. Sutherland Edwards, Old and New Paris: Its History, its People, and its Places, 2 vols. (London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1893), vol. 1, p. 8.
PAGE 97
Park Lane, London. From Burton Holmes, Travelogues, with Illustrations from Photographs by the Author, Volume Two (New York: The McClure Company, 1910), p. 60.
PAGE 114
Walter Crane, frontispiece to The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London: David Nutt, 1888).
Reproduction courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.
PAGE 130
Walter Crane, illustration to “The Selfish Giant” from The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London: David Nutt, 1888), p. 44.
Reproduction courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press.
PAGE 134
Heinrich Vogeler, illustration to “Der Eigensüchtige Riese” (“The Selfish Giant”), from Die Erzählungen und Märchen, von Oscar Wilde (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1912), p. 126.
PAGE 138
Heinrich Vogeler, illustration to “Die Nachtigall Und Die Rose” (“The Nightingale and The Rose”), from Die Erzählungen und Märchen, von Oscar Wilde (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1912), p. 118.
PAGE 159
“Alastair”
PAGE 173
“It was a monster, the most grotesque monster he had ever beheld,” illustration by Ben Kutcher to “The Birthday of the Infanta,” from A House of Pomegranates, with an introduction by H. L. Mencken (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925), opposite p. 170.
PAGE 196
“It never occurred to me that Cyril Graham was playing a trick on me,” illustration by Arthur W. Crisp (uncredited) to “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” from Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., and Other Stories, Vol. 4 of The Writings of Oscar Wilde: Uniform Edition (London: New York: Keller-Farmer, 1907), p. 191.
PAGE 208
Dedication page (detail) to Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before Imprinted (London: G. Eld, for T. T., 1609).
Reproduction courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.
PAGE 230
Heinrich Vogeler, illustration to “Der Fischer Und Seine Seele” (“The Fisherman and His Soul”), from Die Erzählungen und Märchen, von Oscar Wilde (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1912), p. 46.
PAGE 276
Charles Ricketts, story opening with illustration to “The Fisherman and His Soul,” from A House of Pomegranates (London: James R. Osgood McIlvaine, 1891), p. 63.
Reproduction courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, PR5818.H6 1891.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am profoundly grateful to John Kulka, who over a decade ago commissioned me to produce the series of annotated editions of Wilde’s works for Harvard University Press, of which this is the fourth book in the series. I am grateful, too, to my editors, Andrew Kinney and Katrina Vassallo, for expertly steering the manuscript into production; to Scarlett Wilkes, who provided generous assistance with permissions and image research; to Sherry Gerstein at Westchester Publishing Services; and to the Press’s anonymous readers, whose comments improved the book markedly at a late stage.
I owe debts of gratitude as well to the staff of the British Library, especially the now-closed Newspaper Library at Colindale, where research for this book began; t
o the Interlibrary Loan office at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), for performing small miracles; to Mark Samuels Lasner, for kind permission to include image reproductions from his collections; and to administrators and staff in both the English Department and the College of Humanities and Sciences at VCU, especially Catherine Ingrassia, Chair of English, whose support for a research leave in the fall of 2019 allowed me to finish this book.
My intellectual debts will be clear from my notes and annotations, but Ian Small deserves special mention. As any Wilde scholar knows, his contribution to scholarship, for many decades now, has been immense. I owe much to his previous research on Wilde’s short fiction, as well as to that of Horst Schroeder on “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”
Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Susan, and our sons, Max, Theo, and Oliver, for allowing Oscar Wilde to become a part of our family. As the Fisherman says, “love is better than wisdom.” Without their love, my own contributions to this book would have been impossible.