THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

A Portfolio of Theatre and Book Reviews

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No 51 : MARCH 2010

We apologise for the gap in production since number 50.

Wilde theatre reviews appear here; Shaw reviews in Shavings; all other theatre reviews in .

Exhibition reviews and reviews of books relating to the visual arts now appear in our new section VISIONS which is reached by clicking its symbol

All authors whose books are reviewed here are invited to respond. This page is edited by D.C. Rose and Anna Vaninskaya.

In an article for THE OSCHOLARS which she titled ‘Wilde on Tap’, Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, our American Editor, set out an agenda for our theatre coverage that we will try to follow. This article can be found by clicking .

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
WILDE
Philip E. Smith on Thomas Wright on Oscar’s Books
Pascal Aquien on Philip E. Smith on teaching Wilde
Leonée Ormond on Puppetcraft’s The Selfish Giant
Julia Steck and Andrea Uebelhard on The Importance of being Earnest
Richard Pine on Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray
James Bryce on Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray
OTHER REVIEWS OF FIN DE SIÈCLE INTEREST
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller on Shaw
Ruth Livesey on Leela Gandhi on fin-de-siècle radicalism
Paul Fox on Decadent Poetry
REVIEWED ELSEWHERE

WILDE REVIEWS

Review by Philip E. Smith

Thomas Wright: Oscar’s Books. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008. £16.99. Published in the USA as Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2009. $27.

Thomas Wright is known as the editor of Wilde’s Table Talk (2000) and, with Donald Mead, of Wilde’s The Women of Homer (2008). His new and welcome excursion into literary biography ranges chronologically through Wilde’s life reporting his relationships with books--as student, as appreciative reader, buyer, receiver and giver of books, as reviewer, collector, bibliophile, and writer. Wright has worked on this immense subject for two decades, drawing extensively upon established biographical and textual scholarship as well as little-known sources and independent research.

In the ‘Afterword,’ Wright narrates his own infatuation with reading and writing on Wilde, including his time as an undergraduate at Magdalen College where he occupied for two years the rooms containing Wilde’s russet oak fireplace from the Tite Street library. Wright’s afterword describes the ambitious goals and scope of the study: ‘an attempt to tell the story of an author’s life, and to illuminate it, exclusively through the books that he had read’ (306). Estimating that Wilde owned a library of around 2000 books, Wright compiled a list, beginning with the record of the Tite Street Auction Catalogue from April 1895, which provides an inventory of Wilde’s library and possessions divided into auction lots. Most of the lots included titles but many of them, like ‘French novels, a parcel’ simply remain tantalizing puzzles to scholars. Wright added to his list book titles that appear in his letters, notebooks, and published writing, as well as in his book bills, unpublished lectures and reviews, extracts and information printed in auction catalogues, and in biographies and memoirs of Wilde. Wright’s ambition was to read all of the books Wilde had owned or read; he confesses that despite sampling all he could identify, he was not entirely up to the task. Wilde read works in English as well as classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and German; Wright, equipped with Italian and ‘a smattering of French’, needed to approach much of Wilde’s library through translation (307). ‘Nor was language the only obstacle. I found many of the books on the list hard going -- I became lost in the labyrinthine commentaries on Hegel, and the opaque pages of Herbert Spencer and Mallarmé induced in me a sort of vertigo’ (307). Wright traced as many of Wilde’s books as he could find, eventually locating about fifty of them ‘in public and private collections of Wildeana in America and England’; for all of them, he procured the same edition and transcribed into it ‘all of Wilde’s annotations and markings, to produce a duplicate of his copy’ (309).

As the first person systematically to study Wilde’s library in this way, Wright found significant evidence for the powerful and multifarious life of Wilde as reader; he documents his discoveries in extensive notes for every chapter and in appendices. This Wilde is devoted to reading, to sharing knowledge, to making and hearing language as sound and image, to using books as material, whether mining them for ideas or seeing them as aesthetic creations of paper and beautifully designed illustrations and bindings. He is revealed as a very different and more complicated, intelligent, and intellectually attractive creature than the ‘uncongenial’ commercial writer reductively conjured by Josephine Guy and Ian Small in Oscar Wilde’s Profession (12).

Wright’s biographical method is to combine salient information from the records of Wilde’s life and activities with more detailed incidents involving books, reading, and libraries. Wright divides his study into three sections: first, Wilde’s childhood and young manhood through the completion of studies at Oxford in 1878; second, Wilde’s life after university through his trial in 1895; third, Wilde’s imprisonment and exile through his death in 1900.

My summary account of the book will show the kinds of concerns and details Wright considers as he describes the permeating influence of books in Wilde’s life from his christening through his last days. He begins section one, ‘Built Out of Books,’ by noting that Wilde’s mother, whom he refers to by her pen-name, Speranza, drew two of Wilde’s names, ‘Oscar’ and ‘Fingal,’ from mythical Irish characters in James Macpherson’s Ossian poems. Wright notes that Wilde’s childhood included appreciation of his parents’ favorite Irish folk and fairy stories as well as Ossianic legends. Likewise, Wright claims, the family’s dinner table conversation with distinguished guests exposed Wilde to the stimulating and pleasurable experience of witty, intellectual dialogue. His mother’s insistent practice of reciting or chanting poetry aloud shaped Wilde’s appreciation of words memorized or voiced from the page. Wright shows how Speranza’s taste in poetry, as well as her own poems, became foundational for Wilde: as a young man he knew and quoted from his mother’s poems, the works of other Irish poets, and the works of English Romantic and Victorian poets as well as Americans like Longfellow and Whitman. One of the books marking this influence is the 1858 edition of Tennyson’s poems given to Speranza by Thomas Carlyle; as Wright notes, ‘she passed it on to her son [and] it may serve as a symbol of the poetic legacy she bestowed upon him’ (33). These poets among many others were powerfully formative figures for Wilde. For example, Wright mentions Wilde’s admiration for E. B. Browning as shown the inscribed gift copy of Aurora Leigh he presented, having marked many of his favorite passages, to his Oxford friend, William Ward; it is in the Eccles bequest at the British Library. Among the Romantics, Wilde particularly worshipped Keats as a poetic mentor as was reflected in his purchase at auction of some the poet’s letters; he also purchased and displayed in his home in Tite Street the manuscript of Keats’s ‘Sonnet in Blue’ (35).

Weaving his narrative from a combination of information and plausible speculation, Wright considers the probabilities of Wilde’s boyhood instruction in reading, the accumulation of a library, and his childhood book favorites, including Meinhold’s Sidonia the Sorceress and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Wilde’s ability at reading during his school years at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen was rewarded by prizes he won for excellence in his studies in literature and religion, respectively, G.L. Craik’s History of English Literature and Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion. The latter book he clearly disliked and included it in his 1886 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette as one of the ‘books not to read at all’ (317). During his time at Portora he acquired, autographed, and dated (2 September 1865) the first in Wright’s chronological list of those extant books identified as his: Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII. As Wright observes, his ability to read French at this age seems prodigious: ‘On page 171 the ten-year-old boy has written the words ‘Oscar 8 November 1865’, no doubt to mark his remarkable progress with the demanding French text’ (47).

Wright’s account of Wilde’s classical training at Portora draws upon curricular information, his success in examinations, and surviving copies of his books, ‘which contain copious and meticulous annotations concerning syntax and grammar’ (50). Wilde’s school texts were standard cheap editions but his peers recollected his stately large-print editions of the classics. Wright’s review of Wilde’s huge book bill for 1871 causes him to suggest, regarding this seeming contradiction, ‘On the balance of the evidence, it seems likely that the man who famously liked to have it both ways probably owned two sets of the classics at school -- one for study, the other for aesthetic pleasure and public display’ (51).

Wright’s copious research into Wilde’s classical texts from his education at Trinity College Dublin reveals his careful annotations and markings that elucidate and clarify linguistic or grammatical points in the texts, or suggest comparison to moments in other readings, or even an aesthetic or critical judgment, for example in his annotations to R.Y. Tyrrell’s edition of The Bacchae of Euripides. Wilde gave these volumes hard and appreciative use along with careful study: they are, Wright reports, in poor condition, bumped and damaged, spines loose, full of notes and doodles, some pages torn out. The power of Wilde’s intelligence and the thoroughness of his preparation using these texts were rewarded by the Berkeley Gold Medal in Classics that Wilde won in 1874.

Wright inspected other crucial books for Wilde at Trinity and Oxford, including the two volumes of John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets published in 1873 and 1876, which Wilde drew upon extensively for his notebooks and for his 1876 review-essay, ‘The Women of Homer.’ The intertextual relationship between Symonds’s and Wilde’s essays may now be seen in the admirable edition prepared by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead. At Oxford, one of the major texts set for study in the Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’ curriculum Wilde studied was Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. As Wright notes, Alexander Grant’s historicist introduction and notes were required reading but Wilde strongly preferred J. E. T. Rodgers’s edition of the Ethics and annotated it profusely with comments and notes showing his opposition to Grant’s interpretation: ‘Interleaved with the Greek text are around 200 pages on which Wilde has written copious notes in English and Greek. In them he creates a bridge between the past and present by comparing Aristotle to modern writers such as David Hume and Tennyson. . .’ (70). Wilde’s distaste for Grant’s views of Aristotle was already known: it can be seen in his 32-page holograph notebook at the Clark Library and in his inclusion of Grant in the list of books ‘not to read’ in the 1886 Pall Mall Gazette list (Wilde, Artist as Critic 27); however, Wright has found Wilde’s judgment conclusively phrased in the marginalia to Rodgers: ‘Grant is quite foolish’ (71).

Wright’s account of Wilde’s reading at Oxford compiles and reports information from many sources already known, for example, letters, assigned readings, notebooks, book bills, and library records but adds, significantly, his inspection of Wilde’s marked books like Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and especially the five-volume, second edition of Plato’s Dialogues translated and edited by Benjamin Jowett in 1875. Wright notes that ‘The Dialogues of Plato became one of Wilde’s golden books. He marked and annotated most of the dialogues, and many of Jowett’s introductions. In doing so he read far beyond the confines of his Greats course, for which only five of the dialogues were prescribed texts’(85–86). Wright describes several of Wilde’s annotations to the dialogues that have resonance for his life or writings: for example, he marked Socrates’ characterization of poets as liars in The Republic, Alcibiades’s praise of Socrates as a storyteller in the Symposium, Socrates’s confession of having been aroused by the beauty of Charmides in Charmides, and Protagoras’s criticism of Socrates for his pursuit of Alcibiades in Protagoras. Wright also spends a chapter on Wilde’s readings in philosophy at Oxford, confirming principally his knowledge of Kant and Hegel. Wilde’s book bills from Oxford show that he purchased William Wallace’s and T. H. Green’s introductory studies of Hegel while studying for Greats; Wallace’s ‘Prolegomena’ to Hegel’s Logic is a major source for Wilde’s readings recorded in the Commonplace Book.

In ‘The Library,’ the second section of the book, Wright focuses on the period 1879-95 and Wilde’s Tite Street residence containing the library that was sold and dispersed at auction. Using the letters, the remarks of friends and visitors but primarily the auction catalogue, he describes the decoration and arrangement of the room, including its notable furnishings, such as Carlyle’s desk, several paintings, and a bust of Hermes. Thinking about Wilde’s library in the context of nineteenth-century European attitudes, Wright observes that it ‘served him as a retreat from the rest of the house; it was also a symbol of his personal history as its contents bore witness to the various stages of his literary life and career. Likewise, Wilde clearly subscribed to the notion that a book collection is expressive of character--throughout his works he conveys a great deal about the temperament of his fictional creations by giving us a peek at their bookshelves’ (124).

Wright’s account of the library and the events of Wilde’s life contains useful information for scholars and critics. For example, he has consulted receipts from the book shops owned by Alfred Nutt and Franz Thrimm that record many purchases of books written in French and other European languages. There has never been any question that Wilde knew the writing of, for example, Flaubert, Renan, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Dante, but Wright has pieced together and inspected the evidence showing some of the titles he purchased and in which years. He divides Wilde’s acquisitions thematically, noting Wilde’s ownership of books on serious subjects such as ‘Oriental’ poetry, Japanese art, science, politics and economics, philosophy, Irish nationalism, the ‘condition of England,’ Celtic myth and legend, European and native American mythology. Wilde also owned and read books on other subjects, for example, fishing, violin-making, theatrical dancing, recipes for mixing cocktails, and orchid-growing. Wilde’s library contained an extensive number of titles in popular fiction and biography published in inexpensive editions as well as three-volume novels of the kind admired and written by Miss Prism.

Wilde’s general disregard for the niceties of book handling, however, as seen in his student editions, continued with his purchases for the Tite Street library: he used his books, bumping their corners, breaking spines, writing and doodling in them, and carelessly cutting the pages. Paradoxically, as Nicholas Frankel in Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (2000) has shown in much more detail than Wright does, Wilde also delighted in book design. Wright calls him a dandy of books: ‘Book dandies can be distinguished from conventional bibliophiles by their interest in the book as a harmonious aesthetic object. They regarded volumes as delicious symphonies of text, illustration and binding; their Holy Grail was a book in which these elements formed a perfect unity’ (148).

Wright profiles Wilde’s experiences as a reader, beginning with the sensuous pleasures of identification in character and scene, moving to the touch of paper and covers, to the scent of pages and binding, to the sound of words read aloud. There is also, literally, the sense of taste: Wright confirms, through inspection of surviving copies, R. H. Sherard’s observation in The Real Oscar Wilde that Wilde tore top corners from back pages of his books to put in his mouth and chew (Sherard 188). From another perspective, Wilde ‘tasted’ books, reading them quickly, dipping in and out and performing, his friends remember, feats of speed-reading and accurate recollection.

To explain the breadth of his interests as a reader, Wright briefly sketches the Wildean notion of soul as the repository of experience passed on through generations as the inheritance of acquired characteristics: ‘This idea throws an interesting light on the eclectic character of Wilde’s book collection. Its heterogeneity attests, perhaps, to Wilde’s desire to fully explore his ancient Darwinian soul and to express all the myriad sides of his protean personality’ (158).

Wright surveys Wilde’s practices as donor and inscriber of gift books; his tastes and friendships take on greater resonance through the knowledge of whom he favored with books and how he selected and marked the passages or poems he preferred. Wright has tracked down several examples, including inscriptions of biographical poignancy to Robert Ross, to Constance, and to Speranza. His gift books with inscriptions played a part in his seductions of men like the American dramatist Clyde Fitch, the 17-year-old Edward Shelley, and more famously, Lord Alfred Douglas, upon whom Wilde lavished copies of his own works and, as well, the works of writers like Andrew Marvell, John Fletcher, James Thomson, and the Ghazels from the Divan of Hafiz.

Wright catalogues Wilde’s reading in the works of homosexual writers, including the 19th-century Uranian poets and their mentors, from Whitman back through the Renaissance and classical writers who are mentioned as the writers mentioned in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ who celebrate the amorous and intellectual mentoring of boys by men. Wright argues that Wilde had read Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in the early 1890s and that he ‘must have been familiar with Symonds’s pamphlets’ on homosexuality as well as Edward Carpenter’s poem and prose justifying homosexual love (204). In this context, he discusses Wilde’s friendship with George Ives, Uranian poet and owner of an immense library of materials on homosexuality that Wilde used: ‘His membership of the Ives circle, along with his long-standing interest in Uranian verse, places him at the centre of a group of late Victorian homosexual readers’ (206).

Wright speculates that Wilde’s interests in homoerotic sexuality connected with interest in other erotic literature. It is well known that he read and relished French Decadent texts like Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal, Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, Huysmans’s À Rebours, and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus. Wright speculates that he probably purchased some of the erotic titles published by Leonard Smithers’s Erotica Biblion Society as well as erotica sold under the counter by Charles Hirsch at the Librairie Parisienne bookstore.

The third and final section of Oscar’s Books, ‘A Library of Lamentations,’ chronicles Wilde’s reading from his trials and imprisonment in 1895 until his death in 1900. The library from Wilde’s Tite Street home was auctioned off on April 24 to defray the £600 in court costs awarded to the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde’s life as reader and writer was thereafter to be constrained until the end of his life, first by the inhumane system of solitary confinement in Her Majesty’s Prisons and then by the conditions of penury in exile.

Much in Wright’s account of the imprisonment will be familiar to Wildeans who have read Ellmann’s biography and the Complete Letters, especially those containing Wilde’s requests for books to be sent to him in prison. Wright has compiled all the requested titles and reproduces the full lists as an appendix. Wilde’s prison copy of Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, one of the books procured for him in August 1895 by the Liberal MP, Richard Haldane, is in the Eccles Bequest in the British Library. Wright examined it and found ‘markings that are probably Wilde’s’ (249), including lines of appreciation next to passages on Bach, Goethe, the imagination, and metaphysics as well as a question mark next to one of Pater’s assertions about the supposedly exemplary domestic lives of Dutch painters. But, significantly, he found a trace of Wilde’s despair: ‘Page 111 contains what must be the most poignant example of all Wildean marginalia--a single exclamation mark next to the word ‘silence’’ (250).

Wilde’s requests for books revealed to Wright an imprisoned man finding solace in the past, in books familiar to him since he was a young man, old friends, perhaps, to his imagination. Wright traced references from De Profundis to some of these readings, noting that Wilde copied extracts from them into the notebook he was allowed to have in Reading Gaol. Wilde also looked to the future and his release into European exile, studying Italian, German, and Spanish in his cell. In his prison position as schoolmaster’s orderly, he had some effect on his fellow inmates, ordering books that would please them and requesting the purchase of titles by writers like Dickens, Stevenson, Walter Scott, and H.G. Wells.

Wilde’s friends obliged his requests for a library that would be his upon release from prison and these books followed him from France to Italy. Sadly, he abandoned them in 1898 at the Villa Giudice near Naples, where Wilde lived with Douglas until Constance forced them to separate. Wright sees this loss as a key monstrance: ‘Wilde was also closing the door on his future as a writer. Without the inspiration and the physical proximity of books, there was no way that an author such as he was would ever write again’ (288). Wright’s account includes Wilde’s last book bill (from Brentano’s in Paris) and stories of the return to him by friends of some of the books and manuscripts auctioned in 1895. He also received presentation copies from friends and so had accumulated a last library kept in his Paris rooms, sometimes being impounded when he could not pay his rent.

At his last residence, the Hôtel d’Alsace, Wilde had, Wright estimates, ‘three hundred or so volumes he had amassed over the previous two years and most of the books were strewn across the floor or piled up in the corners of the room’ (297). So, in addition to the unaesthetic wallpaper he may have seen and criticized in his famous deathbed remark, Wilde left the world surrounded by one last collection of books, including popular fiction and prison literature such as magazine articles, pamphlets, and novels. Certainly, Wilde continued until his death the habit of reading voraciously; perhaps the books in his last room represented the unrealized intention of writing something more.

Any scholar of Wilde interested in his intellectual formation, in the intertextual backgrounds of his writing, and in the ways in which books circulated in his life should find in Oscar’s Books many clues for further study. Without attempting to second-guess Wright’s decisions about what to include in Oscar’s Books or the constraints that might have been imposed by publishers, I will mention aspects of the study that could be developed further.

The book needs more attention to Wilde as book reviewer. Although Wright mentions that Wilde wrote over 250 reviews, includes a chapter on the episode of Wilde’s review of Harry Quilter’s Sententiae Artis, and mentions other titles, many significant books we know Wilde reviewed are omitted from Wright’s consideration: for example, the poetry of Constance Naden and many other women as well as the important review of the Giles translation of Chuang Tzu. Wright notes Wilde’s knowledge and use of Darwin and Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory but omits the other scientists and social scientists Wilde read and recorded in his notebooks, like T.H. Huxley, W. K. Clifford, and Edward Tylor. Likewise, while Wright writes at length about Wilde’s familiarity with classical writers, some of them like Polybius and Plutarch, as well as some of the European historians he references in ‘The Rise,’ are omitted from Oscar’s Books. Likewise, Wilde’s extensive knowledge of historical and contemporary European drama is only partially acknowledged in Wright’s account. Publishers these days don’t like to support bibliographies of works cited, particularly in books intended for a popular rather than scholarly audience. Alas, Wright’s useful ‘Bibliographical Note’ does not compensate for the absence of a full bibliography. Scholars interested in tracking Wright’s sources will find them only by reading all the notes because sources in the notes are not referenced in the indices. Finally, the ‘General Index’ and ‘Index of Authors’ are useful and revealing of the range of Wilde’s reading but they do not include everything Wilde read.

What needs to be published as a supplement to Oscar’s Books (and to which Wright’s book makes a most important foundational contribution) is a full list not only of the books he owned but inclusively of Wilde’s reading, each entry sourced to evidence for its inclusion in the list. Perhaps such a list might appear online on The OScholars, where it could be revised and expanded as new information surfaces -- and given the number of pieces of evidence Wright has seen from private collections, plus recent additions to the scholarly archives like the Eccles Bequest at the British Library and the purchase of the Philosophy Notebook by the Clark Library, there is an abundance of new material, some in private hands, some bits known and available to scholars and others not. There will also be further revelations about Wilde’s reading when the volume of Wilde’s journalism in the Oxford edition, edited by John Stokes, appears. There are still several unpublished notebooks that, when edited and glossed, will add materially to our knowledge.

Oscar’s Books does not take any position in academic conversations or disputes over interpretation of Wilde’s works. Writing outside the academy as an independent scholar, Wright brings new and important information of interest to academics and to ‘insiders’ like readers of The OScholars. As such, he addresses a general audience, which means that many things we already know and take for granted about Wilde and the narrative of his life need to be part of his exposition. Wright’s speculations about Wilde’s reading might sometimes seem enthusiastic or over the top to a professionalized scholarly sensibility: his biographical approach favors personally psychologized interpretations of Wilde’s tastes and he sometimes makes biographical arguments based on chains of probabilities. However, the value of his work is considerable: no scholar has ever conducted this kind of survey of Wilde’s reading. I have learned much from it and I recommend it as a crucial resource for anyone interested in Wilde’s intellectual formation and the intertextual nexus revealed in his imaginative and critical writing.

Works Cited

Frankel, Nicholas. Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books. Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.

Guy, Josephine M. and Ian Small. Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed and introduction by Richard Ellmann. New York: Vintage, 1970. 1969.

---. The Women of Homer. Eds. Thomas Wright and Donald Mead. London: The Oscar Wilde Society, 2008.

Wright, Thomas. Oscar’s Books. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008.

v Philip E. Smith teaches in the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh. He is the co-editor of Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks and editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Review by Pascal Aquien

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Philip E. Smith II. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Hb. $37.50; Pb. $19.75.

v This review first appeared in our sister journal, Rue des Beaux Arts no.20, May/June 2009. For THE OSCHOLARS own review by Andrew Eastham, click here.

Ce livre, qui fait partie de la collection Approaches to Teaching World Literature, est, comme les autres volumes de la série, divisé en deux parties. La première, brève mais efficace, intitulée « Materials », propose, en les commentant de façon très utile, des éditions de Wilde, des sites Internet et des études critiques, que ce soit sous forme imprimée ou en ligne. La seconde, simplement intitulée « Approaches », occupe l’essentiel de l’ouvrage. Elle est faite de vingt-cinq essais consacrés à l’ensemble de l’œuvre de l’écrivain, ainsi qu’à sa correspondance et à sa vie, à partir de multiples points de vue critiques. Les essais, qui sont évidemment brefs (6 ou 7 pages), sont complétés par la liste assez longue (une quinzaine de pages) des ouvrages cités. Celle-ci, précieuse, aurait pu toutefois être organisée en sous-parties au lieu de se présenter sous une forme simplement alphabétique. Enfin, si un index des auteurs complète l’ensemble, on peut regretter l’absence inexplicable d’un index des œuvres.

Le livre commence de façon très pédagogique par un essai de Bruce Bashford, qui explique sa méthode d’enseignement. Celle-ci consiste à inférer le sens – souvent fuyant et instable – à partir du contexte en mobilisant les ressources logiques des étudiants plus que leurs connaissances critiques à proprement parler. Le second essai, de Neil Sammells, met l’accent sur les origines irlandaises de Wilde, nécessaires à la compréhension de ses positions politiques, beaucoup plus profondes et contestataires qu’il n’y paraît, et le troisième, dû à Philip E. Smith II, rend compte d’un cours fondé sur les liens féconds et nécessaires unissant Wilde, son écriture et son développement intellectuel, aux écrivains de son temps, Pater et Ruskin bien sûr mais aussi, par exemple, Nietzsche et Ibsen.

Trois essais sont ensuite consacrés à The Picture of Dorian Gray, la question étant de savoir comment enseigner, de façon renouvelée, une œuvre si célèbre. Une première réponse est donnée par Shelton Waldrep qui propose à ses étudiants une approche post-coloniale du roman, et une deuxième par Nikolai Endres qui apprend à son auditoire à analyser les codes érotiques de l’œuvre (« as a ‘gay’ text »). Une troisième réponse est mise en avant par Jonathan Alexander. Celui-ci propose de comparer le roman de Wilde avec trois de ses versions cinématographiques, dont le célèbre film d’Albert Lewin (1945), afin d’analyser la représentation, très changeante, de l’homosexualité en fonction des idéologies, les deux autres versions retenues datant respectivement de 1970 et de 1983.

Les deux articles suivants, ceux de D. C. Rose (« The Shorter Fiction Approached and Questioned ») et de Nicholas Ruddick (« Teaching Wilde’s Fairy Tales ») proposent des expériences pédagogiques originales, la première se fondant sur ce que l’auteur appelle « a quizzical approach » des nouvelles, en particulier de « Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime », et la seconde, contextualisante, visant à montrer, à partir de deux contes, « The Happy Prince » et « The Nightingale and the Rose », que les idées esthétiques de Wilde s’interprètent comme une critique argumentée de l’utilitarisme et des valeurs sociales et culturelles de l’époque victorienne.

Six essais sont ensuite consacrés à l’enseignement des comédies. Sos Eltis explique comment elle se sert de versions cinématographiques de An Ideal Husband pour s’interroger sur les rôles sociaux des personnages (par exemple, le dandy ou les femmes) et sur l’utilisation des conventions théâtrales. Melissa Knox propose une approche biographique (« A Method for Using Biography in the Teaching of Oscar Wilde’s Comedies »), Francesca Coppa explique comment Lady Windermere’s Fan anticipe le théâtre moderne et post-moderne, et Kirsten Shepherd-Barr fonde son enseignement sur les liens de Wilde avec Ibsen et la « pièce bien faite ». Robert Preissle, dans sa présentation de An Ideal Husband, invite les étudiants à lire la comédie en lien avec le film d’Oliver Parker (1999), et Alan Ackerman, qui enseigne The Importance of Being Earnest, s’interroge sur la forme, à partir d’un point de vue nourri par la philosophie (Platon, Aristote, Hegel et Bergson).

La section suivante est consacrée à Salomé, qui fait l’objet de cinq articles. Eszter Szalczer, dont l’approche est historiciste, s’intéresse au drame symboliste français en tant que genre, Joan Navarre invite les étudiants à réfléchir sur les différences entre la pièce de Wilde et l’hypotexte biblique ainsi que sur le motif du regard. Beth Tashery Shannon, qui compare elle aussi la pièce à ses sources bibliques, oriente son enseignement du côté de Beardsley, de Huysmans, Mallarmé et Gustave Moreau. Petra Dierkes-Thrun enseigne Salomé comme la mise en scène d’une transgression sexuelle et Samuel Lyndon Gladden, qui s’intéresse lui aussi à cette question, explique comment il contextualise son approche : ses étudiants découvrent les opéras de Strauss (Salomé) et de Massenet (Hérodiade), des versions cinématographiques de la pièce, dont la fameuse Salomé d’Alla Nazimova (film muet de 1923) mais aussi des œuvres graphiques et picturales (Moreau, Klimt, von Stück, etc.).

L’avant-dernière section, assez brève (deux essais), est consacrée à l’enseignement des textes critiques de Wilde, Joe Law s’intéressant par exemple à la construction du moi et à la relation du langage à la pensée, telles quelles se manifestent dans Intentions. Jarlath Killeen propose, lui, des analyses contrastées de « The Portrait of Mr. W.H. » (par exemple historiciste et déconstructionniste) en laissant aux étudiants la responsabilité, argumentée et justifiée, de leur propre interprétation.

La dernière section est consacrée aux procès de Wilde et à ses derniers écrits. Des questions telles que l’identité sexuelle et la conscience gay sont évidemment au centre des enseignements ici évoqués. S. I. Salamensky invite les étudiants à s’interroger sur le rôle de l’artiste dans la société, sur le comportement sexuel et le système judiciaire, et Frederick Roden enseigne « The Soul of Man under Socialism » et De Profundis en lien l’un avec l’autre, en les considérant comme des textes d’essence religieuse (le socialisme chrétien dans le premier cas et l’individualisme christique dans le second). Pour sa part, Heath A. Diehl propose une approche comparative de De Profundis et de la pièce de Moisès Kaufman, Gross Indecency ; il s’intéresse également à la théorie queer et à l’histoire de la sexualité. Enfin, Joseph Bristow fait état de son enseignement de The Ballad of Reading Gaol dont il analyse les nombreux hypotextes, ou encore l’histoire de la publication et de la réception.

Cet ouvrage de belle facture, à la fois dense et d’une consultation plaisante, ouvre un champ de réflexion passionnant sur l’enseignement de Wilde. Il a également le mérite de multiplier les points de vue, non seulement critiques mais aussi pédagogiques. Il est en ce sens une mine d’idées pour les professeurs comme pour les étudiants. Une lecture à ne pas manquer.

v Pascal Aquien is Professeur à l’Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. For a Bibliography of his writings on Oscar Wilde, click here.

Review by Leonée Ormond

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde, adapted and performed by PuppetCraft, Jackson’s Lane Theatre, London.

The Jackson’s Lane Theatre, based in a converted red brick church in Highgate, North London, is a very popular local amenity. This was never more apparent than when PuppetCraft’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant was performed there as part of the Children’s Theatre programme. As you entered, youngsters were running around, waiting for the doors to open. The anticipation was eager and there was a full house.

When we sat down we saw a cloth of varied colours, primarily green, covering a table in the centre of the stage. This represented the garden of the Selfish Giant. There was a sound of birdsong and a group of small model trees and plants placed on the cloth. On the right was the outside wall of a castellated construction, the Giant’s castle.

Two performers, John Roberts and Joanna White, operated the puppets and played the music, interspersing the episodes with readings from Wilde’s story. At the opening and close, they walked round the stage with a tuba and cymbals. At other times the music came from a ukulele, piccolo and psaltery. The children who play so happily in the garden of the absent Giant were tiny marionettes, dancing and roller-skating on the ground, springing up into the air and giving off an air of freedom and gaiety. Some of their lines were there to make the young audience feel at home, not taken from the original story, ‘I like your shoes’, for example.

The arrival of the giant came as a great shock, and not only to the puppet children trespassing in the garden. Many times their size, he sported a huge ugly head, white eyebrows, a bulbous nose and a fringed beard. He was operated by John Roberts, whose head could often be clearly seen as he spoke the Giant’s lines. With the help of Joanna White, who now became an architect, stones were collected from the foot of the table, John Roberts’ hand appeared through the Giant’s sleeve, and a wall was constructed. The puppet children looked wistfully in through an iron gate, lamenting the loss of their only playground. There was some compensating humour as the bad tempered giant continually declared, in defiance of the architect’s warnings, that his wall would not fall down. The flowers disappeared through holes in the table, the leaves fell from the trees. Winter took over, with a ghoulish frost flying by and a sharp snowstorm falling from above. The children in the audience were clearly rapt up in the events on the stage. There was virtually no noise, and they all joined in a song which opened ‘There was an old giant’, to the tune of ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’.

The gruff Giant’s increasing perplexity about the absence of spring was very well expressed by John Roberts. When the trespassing children climbed through the wall, and the Giant saw that his garden was blooming again, small wreaths of blossoms fell onto the trees, and the flowers re-emerged from below. The Giant’s discovery of the small boy who cannot reach the branches of the tree came as a surprise to the audience, as this puppet was indeed tiny, and dressed in dull coloured clothes. The Christian message was not stressed, but, as the Giant gently lifted him into the tree, the sound of Elizabeth Poston’s carol, ‘Jesus Christ the Apple Tree’, made the point for the adult audience. The death of the Giant, a few years later, with the child’s statement that he will go to paradise, clearly awed the young audience. One child, seated behind me, said in an anxious voice, ‘He’s dead’.

‘The Selfish Giant’ is one of the more uplifting of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. A brief, tightly constructed, story, it proved an ideal vehicle for a short performance for children. Joanna White perfectly adjusted her delivery in addressing the audience and drawing them into the story and John Roberts performed his multiple tasks with quite remarkable skill. This was a stirring and moving occasion.

v Leonée Ormond is Professor Emerita of Victorian Studies at King's College, London.

Review by Julia Steck and Andrea Uebelhard

The Importance of being Earnest at the Stadttheater Biel Switzerland. Premiere 7th November 2009

Katharina Rupp, stage director of the Stadttheater Biel in Switzerland, brilliantly succeeded with her unique interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s ingenious play ‘The Importance of being Earnest’. The evening began with John Worthing playing ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ on an imaginary piano, and continued with the same Straussian ‘Optimism of the Fin de siècle’(Der Bund). Rupp managed to keep an entertaining balance between nonsense and intellectual bravura, as well as the constant chaotic and comical escapades. Combined with the musical framework, Rupp directed Wilde’s play in an extraordinary way that has never been seen in this manner before on a Swiss stage, and was ultimately rewarded with a ten-minute standing ovation.

Max Merker and Aaron Hitz are the two dandies John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, who see life as a joke, and dance their way through the play. Multiple characters are played by the opposite gender, and thus the act of cross-dressing adds to the phenomenal performance. Wilde would have greatly enjoyed seeing the two ‘girls’, personated by Matthias Britschgi and Matthias Schoch, who fall in love and are supposed to lead the two dandies into marital bliss (Der Bund).

The success is not only the result of colorful multi-faceted acting, but is also based on Rupp’s ability to keep a seeming effortlessness throughout the play, which combined with the individual performances creates a firework of unforgettable impressions.

v Julia Steck is an Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

Review by Richard Pine

The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Oliver Parker.

I have viewed it. More than this I do not wish to say

v Richard Pine is the author of The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995), and Director of the Durrell School of Corfu.

Review by James Bryce

Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray

Venue: Theatre Royal Glasgow

Time: Thursday Matinee. 2.30pm, October 1^st 2009

Reviewer's background: Never seen a Matthew Bourne show before, and, as it is years since I read Wilde's’Dorian Gray, only the memory of the portrait in the attic remains.

A deafening blast of Tchaikovsky reveals an innocently sleeping Dorian. His hand crashes down on a brightly flashing neon-sign bedside alarm (echoes of’Groundhog Day’) and Tchaikovsky is snuffed out. A gust of laughter from the audience. An edgy tick-tick-tick like a time-bomb introduces us to Terry Davies' score, a revolving wall set upstage centre wipes the bed scene away after the fashion of a silent film, and we are in the world of Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray.

It is the world of catwalk fashion, the world of the image, the world of externals. A troupe of wannabee models are herded and posed by the Mephistophelian Basil, the dance regimented, almost robotic, propelled by a repetitive, jazz tinged pulse.

Another ‘wipe,’ the music switches, and we meet the power behind the fashion world, the ‘Big Sister’ of the organisation, Lady H, played by Michaela Meazza as a cross between C S Lewis's Ice-Queen and a grim-faced model, always mindful of an invisible camera somewhere out in the audience. None of the wannabees.

Into this hip world, dressed in white-suited purity, comes Dorian the ingénue shyly serving drinks, and, you've guessed it, his potential is spotted immediately by the rapacious-eyed Basil, (echoes of Company, Chicago, and countless other musicals). The music pulls back into ambient relief (in both senses of the word), there is a beautifully sensuous duet between Dorian and Basil, and Dorian is chosen as the face of ‘Immortal’ (the cross-bar of the 't' enlarged to form a religious cross).

Through each subsequent scene, the ‘dissolution’ of Dorian becomes apparent - the attraction of being the Celebrity, the Face, the man of the moment, the man who thinks he is ‘it.’ However, there is an ambivalence about Dorian himself (an excellent Jared Hageman): he looks good, he indulges his growing (mainly sexual) pleasures with gusto, but there is throughout – and I think this has much to do with the personality of the dancer himself - the subtle air of a man who is out of his element. He is a man who has continually accepted society's evaluation of him and made it his own, and this seemed to me right. He is a man who quite literally ‘gets out of himself.’ At the end Act 1, this dissolute, public self separates, not as Wilde's painting, but comes out of the walls of the attic as the doppelganger.

Act 2. The boom of Tchaikovsky, the alarm clock and a bed not as solitary as it was at the beginning of Act1. The dissolution continues, the ‘private’ self vying with the ‘alter ego’ until the chilling denouement in which Dorian destroys those who robbed him of his essence and finally suffocates the doppelganger, an act which of course destroys him. But that's not the end- I may have given too much away already, but I won't give away the final picture. Suffice to say, it was a punch in the gut.

In toto, this production – on the whole – moved me, made me laugh, carried me. The aptness of the movement to the subject and plot: from robotic to street dance, to classical ballet (briefly), to a myriad other styles (forgive me, there are so many labels, genres these days, and sometimes they only confuse the issue). It is funny, moving, shocking, and beautiful by turns. Throughout, reverberations, references, echoes, implied or unsubtly plastered over the set broadened the whole experience; I have already mentioned the references (or strictly speaking, inferences) to ‘Groundhog day,’ the Broadway musical, the Beckham-like face of ‘Immortal,’ which changes from archetypical model shot to a gouged-eye Oedipus at the end. By the time it ended, and I exited the theatre, it reverberated in every building, every advertisement, every face - the relation between inner and outer.

However – and I'm sorry to have to bring a ‘however’ in – a confession; there were a couple of points in the second half of act 1 where I disengaged. Now I don't know the reason for this, maybe I shouldn't have stayed up so late the night before, maybe x, maybe y, maybe, maybe, maybe. However, I noted three occasions when I definitely ‘came out of it.’ The first was a tiny mimed moment in which Lady H seemed to be saying something, and I found myself annoyed: it felt lazy, a cheap shortcut. I wanted to know what she said. I wanted a subtitle. (I've already referred to the silent movie flavour of the production). My second dropout related to the use of the revolve which, before I fully allowed myself to go with it, I found a tad annoying (‘oh yes, here comes another scene change’) - now this may be something to do with having made the choice not to read the programme beforehand, but I will come to that later. The third dropout pertained to the music. On the whole I enjoyed the score, thought it very effective but the persistent alternation between insistent riff-based themes and quieter, ambient textures became, for me, a bit predictable. This never happened for all of Act 2 – I was wholly drawn into it by then, so maybe it was just me. If anyone else who has seen it experienced ‘dropout,’ I would be interested to hear from you (or indeed, if you didn't).

In fine, I recommend it. It is still with me. I want to see it again. If you want only nice, graceful ballet and the joy of movement for itself, it may not be your cup of tea – but then, if you know Bourne's work already, you won't be expecting that.

v James Bryce is an actor, musician and writer.

OTHER REVIEWS OF FIN DE SIÈCLE INTEREST

Review by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

James Alexander, Shaw’s Controversial Socialism (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008).

Prolific, indefatigable, redoubtable, and imposing, George Bernard Shaw lived from 1856 to 1950 and cast a wide shadow across the literature and politics of his long era. Once a luminary, in recent decades his star has dwindled as that of his rival compatriot, Oscar Wilde, has risen; we are, after all, the ‘Oscholars’ and not the ‘Sscholars.’ In the early 1890s, Wilde was far more successful a dramatist than Shaw, yet he generously ranked the two together as part of a ‘great Celtic School’ of writers working together to demolish the ideals of Victorian England. But Shaw outlived Wilde by a long shot, and did not have personal trials on the order of Wilde’s with which to contend. Shaw would be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1925; Wilde would die before the first Nobel Prize was granted in 1901.

James Alexander’s Shaw’s Controversial Socialism focuses not on Shaw’s literary achievements, but on his political legacy; specifically, his role within and impact upon British socialism, especially in the period from 1880-1905. For, aside from his prolific literary career, Shaw was deeply committed to day-to-day political work in the socialist cause, and he produced an extensive corpus of political writing, thoroughly documented and examined in Alexander’s impressive study. Rarely have Shaw’s political activities and writings been subject to such careful scrutiny and placed within such a detailed and richly drawn political context. Meticulously researched, Alexander’s study will be invaluable for anyone who wishes to understand Shaw’s relation to the major (and minor) political thinkers and movements of his day. When did Shaw first read Karl Marx? Exactly who else in London had read Marx at that time? And which friends and acquaintances would stop at Shaw’s desk in the British Library to chat as he worked his way through Deville’s French translation, Le Capital? All of these questions and more are answered in Alexander’s account, with a remarkable degree of detail and lucidity. The book is readable and engaging, though readers not familiar with the Liberal and socialist in-crowds of the 1890s will have to pay close attention so as not to confuse Burgess with Burrows and Burns, or Haldane with Hobhouse or Hobson. Close attention is rewarded with the emergence of a rich associative tapestry, with Herbert Spencer reading Man and Superman on his deathbed (71), Friedrich Engels jealous of English socialists’ potential access to Marx (116), and Eduard Bernstein declaring in 1896 that socialism would be stronger in England if Shaw were ‘swallowed by an earthquake’ (138).

Alexander describes the book as an attempt ‘to say something about George Bernard Shaw … from a historical rather than a literary point of view’ (xv), arguing that Shaw’s socialism ‘was forged in tension’ with Marxist and Liberal doctrines of economics and politics (216). His socialism was ‘controversial’ in the sense that it always inhabited an oppositional relation to Liberalism on the one hand and Marxism on the other. While Alexander claims that Shaw’s socialism was ‘almost deliberately offensive’ (7) – analogous to St. Paul’s Christianity – he also suggests that Shaw’s political voice in his innumerable socialist writings operated in two distinct registers: a Fabian register, which tended to be ‘conciliatory and conventional’ (152), and a more personal Shavian register, which tended to be antagonistic, antinomian, needling. So, for example, Shaw’s contribution to Fabian Essays in Socialism, a volume that he also edited, argued that socialism ‘owed nothing to Marx since it could be derived from orthodox political economy’ (50). This was an economic version of Fabian permeation: it presented socialism as ‘some sort of Whiggish fulfillment of Liberalism’ (64), in the service of undermining Liberal anti-socialism. On the other hand, and in another register, works such as The Quintessence of Ibsenism and ‘The Illusions of Socialism’ would make a Nietzschean ‘assault on all ideals, morals, while attempting to associate Socialism with the result of such a revaluation of values rather than as another ideal that would have been rendered obsolete by such a revaluation’ (80). Here, Shaw was not the Fabian rationalist, but rather ‘made Socialism into a Kierkegaardian religion, a matter of a leap of faith’ (83). It was this Shavian register that led Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, for example, to form ‘a particular dislike for Shaw,’ and to blame him after the first World War ‘for the ‘final world catastrophe’ that had come from ‘the unmitigated selfishness’ with which he had ‘indoctrinated his generation.’’ He called Shaw ‘an anarch of the Nietzschean type’ who destroyed ‘faith in common humanity’ (168). These two distinct registers of Shaw’s political work can both be understood, Alexander argues, as attempts to demarcate a ‘third way’ distinct from Liberal and Marxist principle.

To read Shaw’s Controversial Socialism is to experience a strange intimacy with Shaw as well as a wholesale defamiliarization. The book is so detailed that readers will follow Shaw from meeting to meeting, speech to speech, essay to essay; and yet, the Shaw who emerges from all this wandering is not the Shaw who exists in literary criticism today. He is more concerned – far more concerned – with blowing Cobdenism and free trade ‘to bits’ (157) than he is with Ireland, censorship, or the woman question. He is much more interested in Henry George, William Stanley Jevons, and Philip Wicksteed than in Florence Farr, Ellen Terry, or Mrs. Patrick Campbell. He is not the same Shaw who emerges from The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw or from Michael Holroyd’s biography. To read Alexander’s study is to wonder at how little Shaw’s interests and understanding may accord with the interests and understanding of literary critics today. He was a man who thought imperialism had nothing to do with race: ‘Supremacy of the Englishman no part of the theory of Imperialism,’ he wrote in his notes for a February 1900 lecture (162). Unlike Marx, he thought imperialism was more anti-capitalist than capitalist: it was a policy of state interventionism, and thus an affront to laissez-faire economics, and in this way was socialist.

Shaw was clearly even stranger than we thought, but some of Shaw’s strangeness here may, in part, be a reflection of Alexander’s interests rather than a comprehensive account of Shaw’s interests. Ireland comes up in the book, for example, hardly at all, and in a section where Alexander discusses John Bull’s Other Island, he presents the drama as a satire of Liberal politicians without even mentioning British imperialism in Ireland (175). Alexander is a political scientist, not a literary scholar, and in general his handling of Shaw’s literary work reflects this fact. A section on ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook,’ for example, inadequately theorizes Shaw’s authorial voice in this appendix to Man and Superman, considering the Handbook as written under a ‘pseudonym’ rather than as written by a character from the play. Alexander says this was ‘the only time Shaw wrote deliberately under a pseudonym’ (176), ignoring the many letters to the press that Shaw wrote under false names, and ignoring the epistolary appendix to Shaw’s early novel An Unsocial Socialist, which similarly presents itself as written by a fictional character. In general, Alexander’s insistence on a sharp division between Shaw’s ‘literary’ and ‘political’ writing – he offers a great deal of analysis of Shaw’s political work, but presents it as quite another thing from his literary career – will seem overly rigid to literary scholars. Nevertheless, Alexander’s study brings a deep knowledge of British politics and socialist history to bear on the study of Shaw’s lifework, and is indispensible for any scholar who seeks to understand the political climate of Shaw’s day. One might wish for more attention to Shaw’s literary politics, or to the vigorous socialist movement in Northern England – a political context that Alexander mostly ignores in favor of London and the continent – but such objections are minor in the face of what amounts to a major work of scholarship on Shaw, socialism, and the fin de siècle political sphere.

v Elizabeth Carolyn Miller joined the UC Davis English department in 2008. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender studies, film and visuality, and print culture and politics. Her book Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle was published in November 2008. She is currently working on a book-length project tentatively titled The Birth of Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late-Victorian Print Culture.

Review by Ruth Livesey

Leela Gandhi: Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

The fin de siècle seems to have been a very hospitable era. Quite apart from the number of at-homes, soirées, salons, clubs, societies, causeries, and leagues hosted in the houses of writers and activists in this period, there is also the marked intellectual inclusiveness of the age. Experimental poetry and vegetarianism, socialism and spiritualism, dress reform and eugenics appeared to be the most comfortable of bedfellows towards the end of the nineteenth century; a time in which, as Terry Eagleton observes, intellectuals were ‘blithely confident of some invisible omega point at which ... Emerson lies down with Engels’.[1] Leela Gandhi’s rich and persuasive Affective Communities is, however, the first study of this period to make this openness and inclusivity its central concern; and a deeply serious one at that. The book meditates on the philosophical and political significance of such networks of affiliation in a time of emergent anti-colonialism and speculates on the potency of a radical politics founded on a love for strangers. In his recent study of William Morris, Marcus Waithe makes a compelling argument that hospitality is a critical principle of openness to alterity that runs throughout Morris’s diverse works and his politics. But Waithe appears quite conscious, I think, of the body of recent critical theory on friendship, hospitality and ‘guesting’ which he does not engage with in that book. It is this, more conceptually-driven approach that Gandhi, a noted post-colonial scholar, makes to her material. The result is a profound and challenging meditation on what she terms in her conclusion the ‘immature politics’ of the fin de siècle: a politics that is inclusive precisely because it arises out of events, rather than strategies, and comes before the systematisation, the ins and outs of, in this instance, ‘mature’ scientific socialism.

The intellectual and political inclusiveness of fin-de-siècle radicalism has been illuminated recently by Sheila Rowbotham’s glorious biography of Edward Carpenter. As a socialist, a theorist (and practitioner) of homosexual love, a food and dress reformer, an anti-colonialist, spiritualist, poet and sage Carpenter is the epitome of the period’s pluralism. Gandhi’s Affective Communities, which at several points turns upon Carpenter, appeared over a year before Rowbotham’s book and it is interesting to speculate how the former work might have been inflected by Rowbotham’s unparalleled and subtle study of Carpenter had it been available. For Gandhi’s substantive chapters contain little case studies of how anti-colonial friendships threaded through, were nourished by and nourished, fin-de-siècle movements around homosexuality, vegetarianism, mysticism, aestheticism, and socialism. Carpenter cheerily speaks to all these concerns – or at least to a notion of art that refracts aestheticism – though Gandhi keeps her focus on his homosexuality and mysticism in the colonial context. A little more attention to these movements themselves and what drew them all together in this period would have been a welcome addition to Gandhi’s sense of the narrative of late nineteenth-century radical affiliations.

But what Gandhi’s work offers to those studying this period of literature and history is something rather different to the sort of meticulous scholarship that takes as its end point the disclosure of the friendship networks and intellectual history of late nineteenth-century radicalism. The affective communities that held together Carpenter, M.K. Gandhi, Henry Salt, Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, Oscar Wilde, and Manmohan Ghose are but the occasion here for sifting and extracting the emancipatory potential of friendship as a concept and a putative politics. They are what she – with a little obfuscation, perhaps – refers to as the ‘archive’ through which she traces her argument. Throughout the book, Gandhi keeps two philosophical touchstones in her sights: first, Derrida’s late work The Politics of Friendship (1994); second, the Kantian subject of radical individualism and autonomy as it is given form in the three Critiques and the counter-position of Hegelian communitarianism. These heavy-weights – of which more later - are accompanied by some staple narratives of nineteenth-century intellectual history – albeit in some striking new contexts. Gandhi explores the significance of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) and evolutionary thought in enforcing heteronormativity at the end of the nineteenth century as a counterpoint to Carpenter’s imagining of homosexuality as affiliation to otherness and outcasts. Bentham and J.S. Mill have a rather more unexpected outing in the context of late Victorian vegetarianism. Gandhi argues that there are two strands to the nineteenth-century animal welfare movement: the first, embodied in the (Royal) Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she allies with Utilitarian thought. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham includes a footnote displacing anthropocentrism in ethics and envisaging the day upon which ‘the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny’ (Bentham cit Gandhi p. 90). This shift in criteria to include all beings that can suffer within the embrace of legislation leads Gandhi to conclude that ‘the story of utilitarian-inspired animal rights also contains in microcosm the secret history of modern governmentality’ (91): a history, that is of course, as she notes, played out in the macrocosm of British Imperialism in India. Gandhi’s counter-example of the radical anti-vivisectionists and vegetarians of the later nineteenth century – Henry Salt, Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford – by contrast place a premium on feeling kinship with other animals. It was this aspect of the vegetarian movement, this radical sentimentality which rejected hierarchy in favour of an entangled anarchistic existence with others on the earth that offered a welcome and a stimulus to the young M.K. Gandhi during his residence in London in the late 1880s and that played a part in the shaping of Gandhian ahimsa and the practices of colonial resistance.

For readers of the OScholars, it is likely that Gandhi’s consideration of aestheticism and the encounter between Manmohan Ghose and Oscar Wilde will be of first interest. A selection of Ghose’s poems, along with those of his boyhood friend, Laurence Binyon, were included in the 1890 collection Primavera which was, in turn, reviewed by Wilde in the Pall Mall Gazette. Wilde commended Ghose’s contributions to the work for displaying the ‘quick and subtle ... intellectual sympathies of the Oriental mind’ (Wilde, cit Gandhi p. 143). The slight acquaintance of Wilde with Ghose and Binyon that followed is of less importance here to Gandhi than her persistent investigation of aestheticism, the Wildean version of aesthetic autonomy, and political resistance. To pursue an argument that might endorse the resources of aesthetic autonomy is particularly controversial territory for a scholar in the field of post-colonial studies. Even before the publication of Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest in 1989, the sociological investigation of the function of literature in the 1970s and 1980s had done much to foreground the role of Western literature and art in the cultural dispossession of the British Empire and its subjects. Art, in such readings, is always an interested instrument of hegemony, rather than disinterested autonomous beauty. Gandhi’s work is a welcome and timely return upon this field that looks to Wildean aestheticism as a mediation of the disinterest and absolute autonomy of Kant’s aesthetic judgement. Rather than dismissing the aesthetic as an instrument of social control, Gandhi finds in Wilde’s fairy tales and ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ a rejection of disinterest and isolation in favour of ‘art for the sake of others’ and the will to difference: a paradigm that sits between Kant and Hegel as one of ‘interested autonomy’ (171, 161).

Although the engagement with Wilde’s works is fairly cursory, the insight here is an important one. Gandhi could have taken this argument about an openness to otherness at the heart of aestheticism further if she had started by looking beyond Kant for sources of Wilde’s thinking. It was a passage concerning the Epicurean concept of friendship, gleaned, I think, from Derrida’s work, that appears in the dense and somewhat opaque introduction to this volume that first got me excited about what Gandhi’s thesis could offer to those working on aestheticism and politics. Whilst Aristotle’s polis is structured by philia – friendship with fellow citizens with whom one shares certain characteristics - Gandhi reminds her readers that Epicurus and his followers, by contrast, construed friendship as philoxenia – love for guests, strangers and foreigners (29). Epicurean philosophy generally inculcates the ethical benefits of ataraxia (invulnerability) and autarkia (self-suffiency), but the philoxenic solidarity with otherness brings a constant sense of risk and disruption into the realm of this self-sufficient subject. The vector connecting such Epicurean thought to nineteenth-century aestheticism is so evident in the shape of Walter Pater and the widespread Hellenism of the period that this reflection on the politics of loving strangers instantly shed new light for me on Wildean thought. Although this is not a connection that Gandhi develops or makes explicit, it is this intellectual ambition to think with philosophy, to write of a politics that still matters, that makes this an important book for scholars of late nineteenth-century literature and culture and post-colonial studies. Gandhi’s assumption that ethical socialism ended in 1892 with the publication of Engels’s Socialism, Utopian and Scientific and Nordau’s Degeneration might not sit well with scholars of British labour history, but occasional overstatements like this are intellectual risks well worth taking when making such a bold and ambitious argument about the mild and resilient power of friendship.

v Ruth Livesey is the author of Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (Oxford, 2008)

Note: Terry Eagleton, ‘The Flight to the Real’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken eds. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp.11-22 (p.12).

Review by Paul Fox

Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late-Victorian Poetry, 1872-1900, ed. Caroline Blyth. London, New York: Anthem Press, 2009. xliv + 894 pp. £100 (cloth).

Every anthology is a miscellany of expectations met and thwarted. Caroline Blyth, editing an almost one thousand page collection, is cognizant of this fact, citing ‘quality rather than quantity’ and an awareness of the errant desire for ‘overinclusion’ as informing her ‘agonies of selection’ (xxxv). The one hundred and fifty poets included in the text are considered by its editor to be both ‘characteristic’ and ‘representative’ of the ‘intelligence of the period’, by which she means what the Victorian critic Walter Pater called the ‘sense of a quickness of mental apprehension.’ It should be mentioned here that this Paterian ‘quickness’ to which Blyth refers is the dynamic theory of perception outlined by Pater in his famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, first published in 1873 (the year following that in which the earliest poems in Blyth’s choices were penned). That she should mention Pater’s philosophy of perception so early in her anthology is appropriate, for her forty page introduction is a whirlwind tour of the various strains of thought and belief in the latter thirty years of the nineteenth century, and it is a tour upon which the reader needs be fleet of mind to keep up.

It would seem odd that in a collection of ‘Decadent verse’ there are poets such as Tennyson, George Eliot and the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. Certainly the anthology has also collected together those stalwarts of the Yellow ’Nineties: Wilde, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, Michael Field and Olive Custance. But it is Blyth’s introduction that explains her choice of the title ‘Decadent’ and the inclusions she has made. She has wished to emphasize experimentalism in the verse she has chosen, and begins her introduction by immediately introducing the Victorian sense of time as kairos, the ‘point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end’ rather than chronos, or the sense of time as an existential continuum (2). Again it seems that Paterian ideas of the ‘charged’ moment are not far from the fore here, and the fleeting weft and weave of late-Victorian interests and attitudes, ideas and ideals are presented by Blyth in the following forty pages of her introduction to the poets she has chosen. At no point does she specifically define ‘Decadence’ and one must be thankful for that: as the anthology and its introductory words make quite clear, a single definition is as impossible as it would be necessarily reductive.

Nevertheless, time is of the essence in apprehending what it is that is ‘Decadent’ in this collection. Blyth’s introduction is divided into four parts, the first of which speaks to the ‘Politics of Poetry’ and examines three seminal anthologies from the period under consideration in her book: Matthew Arnold’s Poems of Wordsworth (1879); Elizabeth A. Sharp’s Women’s Voices (1887); and The Yellow Book: An Anthology (1894-1897). Together with Francis Turner Palgrave’s famous anthology (1861), Blyth sees these texts as emblematic of the changes and counter-changes being swiftly undergone not only in late-Victorian poetic attitudes but in the cultural milieu generally. She makes a valid case for the period’s extraordinary vitality, but recognizes also the sense of uncertainty and lack of intellectual ease that motivated writers and thinkers of the time.

The second section in Blyth’s introduction focuses upon ‘Versification’ and finds in the subject a paradox, one also based upon conceptions of time: on the one hand fluid, unsettled attitudes, on the other an interest in fixed, traditional poetic forms. Examining in detail a number of poems from the period, their use of ekphrasis and their ludic approach to the politics and aesthetics of rhyme, Blyth suggests that these experimental attitudes embody how the late century ‘comes to terms with its own voicing’ (22). The idea of ‘Valediction’ is taken up as the theme of the introduction’s third section on ‘Fictions of Empire and the City.’ Blyth examines the ‘tragic cadence of the age’ (32) finding it virtually everywhere, from the death of Prince Albert to the manifold metaphors for death, the host of mania, paranoia and anxieties ‘discovered’ during the final years of the century. If the rhythm of these years is a dirge, it is one which is excruciatingly aware and in fear of its own end.

The final section of the anthology is entitled ‘Turn Off the Century’ and examines two texts in particular detail as being emblematic of the collection’s ‘Decadent’ theme: Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and William Orpen’s painting, ‘The Mirror’ (shown on the cover of the volume). Both are presented by Blyth as examples of a disorientated, uneasy self-consciousness with what had changed so rapidly, a Janus-like quality of apprehending the past as never returning and a fear of a future into which the century was rushing with a lack of understanding that could presage only ill. By the conclusion of the introduction most readers will no doubt have a similar sense of disorientation: it is difficult not to have been submerged under the myriad of details (social, cultural, literary, historical, political, scientific and intellectual) that have passed swiftly over us in the preceding forty pages. It would seem that ‘Decadence’ is this sense of incessant, uneasy, intellectual turbulence, the ever-swifter momentum towards the turn of the century and the unknown events and ideas that 1901 held in store. As such the poems that Blyth has picked (an anthology, as she points out, is literally a collection of flowers) never leave the reader resting easy. This anthology is certainly something of a collection of poppies, gathered here in such a quantity as to be much more likely to leave us with unsettled, disturbed experiences rather than to cater to those looking for easing soporifics. But it would seem that that is what Blyth intends and expects from a ‘Decadent’ posy.

v Paul Fox is the editor of Decadences: Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature (ibidem-Verlag Publishing)

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE

PATRICIA PULHAM. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales. Reviewed by Martha Vicinus. Review of English Studies 2009 60: 323-324 [Full Text] [PDF]

Peter Melville Logan. Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives. Reviewed by Scott Breuninger (Department of History, University of South Dakota). Published on H-Ideas (November, 2009)

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