The most significant resource for any researcher wishing to understand the finer details of Oscar Wilde’s remarkable career, the “Oscar Wilde and His Circle” archive at the University of California, Los Angeles houses the world’s largest collection of materials relating to the life and work of the gifted Irish writer. In Wilde Discoveries, editor Joseph Bristow brings together thirteen studies based on research done in this archive that span the course of Wilde’s work and shed light on previously neglected aspects of his lively and varied professional and personal life.
In the Introduction to the book, Bristow discusses the need for a more thorough account of Wilde’s life and work. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to Wilde Discoveries about the importance of archives in understanding Wilde’s background.
“Further archival research on Wilde’s early years has also helped us comprehend more fully his transition from immensely gifted Oxford scholar to self-appointed “Professor of Aesthetics” who gained instant notoriety in London’s trendiest circles. Late 1878 and early 1879 marked a crucial turning point for Wilde. By the time he sat his final examination in June 1878, he had won Oxford’s coveted Newdigate Prize for Poetry. Five months later, once he took the Divinity examinations that permitted him to receive his outstanding bachelor’s degree, he applied for, though failed to secure, a fellowship in Classics at Trinity College. Both developments suggest he still had strong commitment to a university career. Yet the period that follows remains one of the most opaque in Wilde’s life. By the time he moved to London in February 1879 he had presumably been working on the manuscript of a long essay prepared for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize at Oxford; the essay topic, “Historical Criticism among the Ancients,” had been announced the previous summer. That Wilde submitted a polished version of the document titled “Historical Criticism” seems unlikely. As Schroeder states, there is no record of Wilde’s candidacy for the prize “in the University archives, in Wilde’s letters, and in the memoirs of fellow students.”50 In any case, the judges decided not to award it. Whether Wilde had at this time failed to secure a fellowship at his college, Magdalen, also remains an open question. By September 1879, however, Wilde showed interest in making his mark as an authority on Classical culture. He published in the respected Athenæum a plainspoken review of R.C. Jebb’s articles on ancient history and literature in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Wilde takes the Glasgow professor to task for producing a “slight and sketchy” account of Ancient Greek literature.51 To emphasize his point, Wilde lauds Theocritus’ second idyll, also known as the Pharmakeutriai (‘The Sorceresses’), which expresses “fiery colour and splendid concentration of passion.”52 This idyll evokes the pagan femme fatales that had since the 1860s preoccupied the art and poetry of those Pre-Raphaelites such as the classically trained Swinburne, whose influence is palpable in Wilde’s early verses.53
Yet, even if he started using the Reading Room of the British Museum soon after making the move to London, Wilde’s life in the metropolis brought about changes that drew him further away from the scholarly researches in which he had excelled.54 The main draw to London was artist Frank Miles, whom Molly Whittington-Egan reveals to have been one of Wilde’s initial contacts at Oxford. In all probability, the two men met soon after Wilde, who received the highest marks in the entrance examination, matriculated at Magdalen College on 17 October 1874. The wealthy Miles, who remained Wilde’s closest male companion (and possibly lover) until 1881, was not an Oxford man, though he presumably had many acquaintances at the university. He was a fairly successful Society painter who exhibited his charming portraits of young women, including celebrities such as actress Lillie Langtry, on a regular basis at the Royal Academy until 1887. Langtry, who infamously became the Prince of Wales’s mistress in 1877, was one of the stylish connections that Wilde made through Miles. (Adoringly, Wilde penned a gushing hundred-line poem, “The New Helen,” which climaxes by honouring the “white glory” of Langtry’s “loveliness.”55) Ronald Sutherland-Gower, an affluent aristocrat and sculptor whom befriended Wilde in June 1876, was another.56 Gower recalled that he believed that Miles “with his pencil, and his friend Oscar Wilde with his pen” were to make Langtry into the “Jaconde and Laura of this century.”57 Yet Gower, who abandoned his career as a politician in 1874, did not only possess the artistic associates that broadened Wilde’s milieu; his hardly restrained homosexuality also had far-reaching effects on Wilde’s understanding of how “Greek love” might find palpable expression in modern society. Even though it proves difficult to guess the frequency with which Wilde enjoyed this aristocrat’s hospitality, we know that Wilde spoke at the unveiling of Gower’s statue of Shakespeare in the gardens of the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in October 1888. They were, it seems, in touch for at least twelve years. Critics generally accept that Wilde modelled aspects of Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray on the somewhat dilettantish Gower. Together, Gower and Miles went some way towards enabling Wilde’s self-realization as an outlandish aesthete whom the press readily caricatured, as well as the kind of man who had a much more open awareness of the possibility of sexual expression than that of his most liberated contemporaries” (Bristow, 12-14).
