“I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms,” Oscar Wilde wrote, foreseeing his posthumous triumph. He was born on this day in 1954.
Wilde was never an open radical in the manner of George Bernard Shaw, but the imperious essays he published between 1889 and 1891—“The Truth of Masks,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—dug tunnels under the moral foundations of Victorian England.
The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence.
Dorian Gray emerged from the same dinner that insured the immortality of Sherlock Holmes. Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle dined together in London in August, 1889, as guests of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the editor of. Doyle, like so many others, came away dazzled by Wilde. “He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say,” Doyle recalled.
In the Morgan manuscript, Wilde’s hand flows confidently, as if taking dictation, but the appearance of fluency may be deceptive: the autograph is probably a copy of an earlier draft that has disappeared. Although Wilde is celebrated as the greatest natural talker of modern times, he edited his prose meticulously. The opening paragraphs, describing Basil’s studio, are a masterpiece of precise evocation, and Wilde’s handwritten changes sharpen the imagery yet more.
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