The New Oscar Wilde Newsletter

This is a free and occasional roundup of Oscar Wilde happenings in case you may have missed a Blog Post, or links to other features in the Archive.

Regular blog postings will continue to appear but The Newsletter is a separate, and even less frequent, way to stay updated with discoveries, literary commentary, and Oscar Wilde related news.

VISIT THE NEW WEB SITE

The website has been redesigned as a hub for the documentary archive Oscar Wilde In America, as well as Wilde’s relationship with Dress, the Oscar Wilde Blog, and a wealth of additional material.

www.oscarwilde.us

FROM THE BLOG

It’s Summer so a good time to visit the rediscovery of a lecture by Oscar Wilde at the seaside resort of Narragansett Pier.

FROM THE BLOG

At Oscar Wilde’s first criminal trial he was asked “What is “the love that dare not speak its name?” In reply Wilde said it was the type of love that existed between David and Jonathan. Discover the rationale behind Wilde’s allusion.

FROM THE NEWS

When King Charles III delivered his historic address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress in April this year, he quoted Oscar Wilde’s remark: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

Visit the quotations archive to see where Oscar first said this, and see a checklist of who it has been attributed to since.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Did you realize that Oscar Wilde wrote THREE separate essays about America and his experiences and observations there? Impressions of America, The American Man, & The American Invasion.

Read them all here.

About the Newsletter

This is the home of the Newsletter of John Cooper on Oscar Wilde—a digest of Oscar Wilde-related articles, discoveries, and news summarizing the latest developments in a project that brings together the work of independent Oscar Wilde scholar John Cooper based on his 30+ years of private study.

John Cooperis a long-standing member of the Oscar Wilde Society in London, a founding member of the erstwhile Oscar Wilde Society of America, and a former manager of the Victorian Society In America, and an Editorial Board member of the Oscar Wilde Society.

He lectures on Wilde, acts as a media consultant, contributes to academic periodicals, and is the author and creator of a leading Oscar Wilde archive and its companion journal the Oscar Wilde Blog. In 2013 John rediscovered Oscar Wilde’s lost essay ‘The Philosophy of Dress’ which form the centerpiece to his book Oscar Wilde On Dress reissued in 2025.

Visit the Archive, Blog, and More.

Dowson’s Dreamful Autumn

Summer’s loss seems little…on days like these.

In October 1892, Ernest Dowson wrote to his friend Victor Plarr¹ to say:

“My muse awoke from her torpor of many months yesterday, here is her feeble utterance, but she may run to another verse by and by.”

The utterance to which Dowson refers were three stanzas he appended in the letter² about the sweetness of the prevailing season—which he describes as a place “Where shadow and the darkness meet.”

His hope was for Autumn to be a hazy respite between the silhouette of Summer and the early twilight of Winter; but Dowson’s shady metaphor betrays the persistence of his melancholy, particularly in regard to an unrequited life. It was a dusk that would never lead to dawn—and as he suggested in the letter, he later added an inevitable final verse about the death of love.³

The full poem was printed in Verses (1896)⁴ where it was given the name Autumnal as follows:

PALE amber sunlight falls across
     The reddening October trees,
     That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer’s loss
     Seems little, dear! on days like these!

Let misty autumn be our part!
     The twilight of the year is sweet:
     Where shadow and the darkness meet
Our love, a twilight of the heart
     Eludes a little time’s deceit.

Are we not better and at home
     In dreamful Autumn, we who deem
     No harvest joy is worth a dream?
A little while and night shall come,
     A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie
     Winter and night: awaiting these
     We garner this poor hour of ease,
Until love turn from us and die
     Beneath the drear November trees.

Dowson died at the age of 32 in 1900 of tuberculosis, an affliction that had also plagued his tragic parents.

During his exile in France, Oscar Wilde spent many pleasant hours with Dowson, and wrote to their co-publisher Leonard Smithers about the death of his friend: “Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb, and rue and myrtle too, for he knew what love is. He was a sweet singer, with a note all the lovelier because it reminds us of how thrushes sang in Shakespeare’s day. If he is not yet laid to rest or unrest, do put some flowers for me on his grave.”⁵

It was a bereavement short-lived. Wilde himself died in the late Autumn of that same year.

© John Cooper, 2025.

Oscar Wilde to Ernest Dowson:
“There is a fatality about our being together that is astounding...

(Complete Letters, 901)

Footnotes:

1. Victor Gustave Plarr (1863–1929). English poet born in France. Founding member of the Rhymers’ Club.

2. Flower, Desmond and Henry Maas, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (1967). 243-4.
   In the letter Dowson titles the three verses In Autumn.

3. Dowson wrote to Arthur Moore on May 26, 1889:
   I am more than ever convinced of the futility of bringing any kind of sentiment into one’s relations with Woman. The whole idea is essentially false & impossible. (Letters, p. 81).

4. Dowson, Ernest, Verses, Leonard Smithers, London, (1896).

5. Complete Letters, 1173.

Oscar Wilde On Dress (2025)
The definitive study of Wilde’s relationship to dress and a unique collection of Victorian dress theory.

PURCHASE

Whitehouse vs. The BBC
Perversely Topical

No, not the White House. But still topical because, coincidentally, Merlin Holland’s new book, Oscar Wilde, The Legacy of a Scandal, tells of a spat between another Whitehouse and the BBC—and a group of perverse individuals.

Anyone of a certain British vintage will associate the name of Mary Whitehouse with the righteous indignation of an evangelical teacher who became the self-appointed guardian of the country’s virtue.

As a campaigner and activist she attempted to stem the tide of the permissive society against what she saw as “the moral collapse in this country.” In particular, she had a longstanding vendetta against the BBC.

The story became relevant to Oscar Wilde when Whitehouse took exception to the BBC’s broadcasting for schools, which by 1971 she thought had become too lax. As a result, a cartoon appeared in the Daily Express mocking Whitehouse’s view of the BBC’s recruitment by showing a queue of famously transgressive archetypes applying for a job. Oscar Wilde could be seen standing in line as a “professor in homosexuality.”

The topicality is that in Merlin’s new book he records this episode (p. 448/9) in connection with his Mother who, in her turn, and protecting what she saw as the image of Oscar Wilde, wrote to the Daily Express

to complain about the cartoon. This was part of several instances of her continuing and ultimately futile attempt to distance the family from the taint of Oscar’s “professorship”.

Mary Whitehouse did not get her way with the BBC; and Thelma Holland did not receive a reply from the Daily Express. By the 1970s, and years after the repeal of the law that had convicted Wilde, such rebuffing of prudery marked the end of an era of supposed innocence.

So in that permissive spirit (and for illustrative purposes only, of course), here is the cartoon in question.

[In the cartoon, whatever is catching the eye of Casanova does not seem to interest Oscar. The lettering behind the line of deviant applicants is not part of the cartoon: it is a headline visible from the previous page about the former champion horse racing jockey Lester Piggott.]

© John Cooper, 2025.

Related:

Oscar Wilde, The Legacy of a Scandal (Europa Editions).
2025, pp. 700, Hardcover.
ISBN: 9781787705920

‘After Oscar’ by Merlin Holland
Reading Between the Lies¹

Merlin Holland’s new retrospective of the societal and family legacy of Oscar Wilde has been over two decades in the making—which is understandable given the research necessary to counter what Holland describes as “…one of the longest continuous acts of hypocrisy in British history.”

The result is a historical accounting that alternates between biography and autobiography into a 700 page feat of storytelling.

‘After Oscar’ is recommended for two types of readers:

—anyone who has never read anything of Wilde’s legacy; to whom we should say, “read this first!” before you become corrupted;

—and anyone who has read anything of Wilde’s legacy; to whom we should say, “read this now!” so as to become uncorrupted.

The corruption in question, of course, is the familiar echo chamber of myth sounded in successive books, articles, and reportage on Wilde, which Holland refers to as the ‘follow-my-leader’ style of biography.

This does not mean that After Oscar adopts a superior position in that sense. The book’s diligent length and breadth of revisionism is interspersed by an affecting depth of feeling—this latter mostly manifested by what have been the author’s gradual coming terms with the act of disclosure, and his maturing sense of place within the legacy.

While the book is corrective where necessary and its stated aim is to shock, it does take an accepting view of people’s motives given their historical context. However, this is not usually the case, and no one is spared a candid appraisal; and it is refreshing to note that Holland’s apportioning of forgiveness and blame is not influenced by family ties.

Far-reaching though all this is, the narrative is episodic and therefore remains an engaging read, especially for the Oscar Wilde fraternity—because for anyone who knows Merlin’s “voice,” the reading experience is like a long conversation with him. It is also a frank conversation, personally revealing, perhaps to a fault, but full of esoteric research and knowledge.

The Wilde story will always be an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, but this book is an extremely large and important piece that we did not know was missing. Or I should say, were not able to know: because if ever an Oscar Wilde book could have only been written by one person, this is it.

© John Cooper, 2025.

After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal is published by Europa Editions.
2025, pp. 700, Hardcover
ISBN: 9781787705920

The book launch at Maggs together with a display of Oscar Wilde items in their Bedford Square show room.

LINK

The Guardian book review by Matthew Sturgis.

LINK

Footnote:

1. ‘Reading Between the Lies’ was Merlin’s typographical slip that suggested a possible a subtitle for the book. [After Oscar p. 17]

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“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan…

Oscar Wilde

The sentiment “I am the love that dare not speak its name” comes from the poem “Two Loves” by Alfred Douglas, which debuted in the only issue of the Oxford university magazine The Chameleon in 1894. It appeared alongside other same-sex verse and a notorious love story by John Bloxam titled “The Priest and the Acolyte.”

Oscar Wilde had been prevailed upon to also support The Chameleon and he obligingly furnished the publication with a series of witty “Phrases And Philosophy For Use Of The Young.” Despite these aphorisms being tame compared with the rest of the issue, and constituting only three out of the 60 pages, it suited Wilde’s detractors to associate him with the content of the magazine as a whole.

Whether there was any actual homoerotic alignment among the contributors in private can be debated; what is certain is that it was not an alliance Wilde would have wanted aired in open court.

Unfortunately for Oscar, that is precisely what happened.

The first criminal trial of Oscar Wilde opened at the Old Bailey on April 26, 1895. On the fourth day Wilde took to the stand and was asked in cross-examination by prosecutor Charles Gill, “What is “the love that dare not speak its name?”

Wilde gave a spirited and now famous response¹ that begins:

“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan…

As this specific reference to David and Jonathan is often overlooked, it is worth examining the rationale behind Wilde’s allusion.

The story of David and Jonathan comes from the Bible, specifically the Book of Samuel, which relates the friendship between David, the future king of Israel, and Jonathan, the crown prince. When Jonathan is slain along with his father (King Saul) in a battle against the Philistines, David laments him by saying:

“More wonderful was your love for me than the love of women.”²
[2 Samuel 1:26]

Joel S. Baden of the Yale Divinity School was in no doubt about what this means: “the comparison to the love of women can hardly have a political valence; this is as close to an expression of romantic attachment between two men as we find in the Bible.”³

But how romantic was it? Theological opinion of David and Jonathan’s relationship devolves to a question of interpretation. In the language of modern sexology, this implies weighing our meaning of homosexual against what the Greeks, for instance, understood to be homosocial.

This interview with Tom Crewe leans towards the intellectual mentorship inherent in the latter:

In the Republic, Plato has Socrates say that ‘sexual pleasure mustn’t come into’ relationships between the guardians and the young boys they are educating, ‘if they are to love and be loved in the right way.’ And the institution of paiderastia itself was an exclusively aristocratic and male one, all about initiating noble young men into the highest level of Greek social and political hierarchy.

And thus 21st century scholars conclude that “Greek love is not a prefiguration of modern homosexuality.⁴

But Oscar was a man out of his own time. He appreciated back in the 19th century, what we now more clearly understand as Greek Love, referring to Douglas in a letter read out in court as “Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly.”

But was he naīve in not realizing that a devout Victorian courtroom faced with the graphic testimony of rent boys from the street and servants from the Savoy Hotel, was no forum for modern gay theory or the platonic ideals of the ancients?

Or,, perhaps, Douglas’s quotation which he was being asked to defend in real time in the witness box, had backed Oscar into a corner and he had no other plausible response to “the love that dark not speak its name”.

Either way, Wilde was to appreciate about his judge and jury a lesson still being learned today.

That men with a philistine (often hostile) indifference to culture and the arts will always be horrified by male camaraderie; just as, in the illustration above, the decapitated Goliath will ever remain aghast beneath the brotherhood of David and Jonathan—although in Goliath’s case his attitude is less surprising because he literally was a Philistine.

© John Cooper, 2025.

Footnotes:

1. “The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

   ︎

2. cf. In his civil trial, Edward Carson challenged Wilde on having Basil Hallward say, “Somehow, I never loved a woman”, in the magazine version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

   ︎

3. https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2013/12/bad378027

   ︎

4. Eriobon, Didier. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, translated by Michael Lucey (Duke University Press, 2004)

   ︎

VYVYAN OSCAR BERESFORD WILDE
December, 1891

This photograph is not new, but it is not often seen in close up like this, nor usually as a full cabinet card [below] which is in the Oscar Wilde Collection at Trinity College, Dublin.

VYVYAN at V YEARS

The photograph is of Oscar Wilde’s second son, Vyvyan Holland (né Wilde) in December, 1891, aged five years, taken at the studio of William Salmon—which was on London Street, in Reading, UK.

Other details to be gleaned from the photograph include the information on the back of the card, the toggled closure of Vyvyan’s coat, and a close-up of his laced-up boots.

Related:

Born Too Late: Vyvyan Holland and Oscar’s father, Sir William Wilde

Vyvyan Holland: Video footage Vyvyan Holland on TV

© John Cooper, 2025.