An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Vol. IV No. 3

Issue number 34 : March 2007

Stained glass window at the Church of St Helen’s, Witton, situated in the centre of Northwich (England), showing scenes from The Selfish Giant.

The window was designed by children from Church Walk school and constructed by Lightfoots of Manchester.

Navigating THE OSCHOLARS

Clicking takes you to the Table of Contents; clicking takes you to the hub page for our website; clicking takes you to the home page of THE OSCHOLARS.

The sunflower navigates to other pages of this issue.

We do not usually publish e-mail addresses in full but the sign @ will bring up an e-mail form. This replaces our earlier sign , with which we were never satisfied.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Click on any entry for direct access
I. The Editorial team	continued from col. 1
II. News from The Editor	IX. NOTES AND QUERIES
III. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS	1. Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan
IV. NEWS FROM READERS	2. Oscar Wilde at Oxford
1. Ellmann and after: A proposal	3. Finding publication details
2. Lord Alfred Douglas	4. Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph
3. Ferdinand Khnopff	5. Wilde on the Curriculum
4. George Moore	6. Drinking with Oscar
5. Literary London	7. Whistler
6. The London Adventure	8. A Wilde Collection
V. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	9. Oscar Wilde and Thomas Moore
VI. PUBLICATIONS & PAPERS	10. A Source for the Canterville Ghost?
VII. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE	11. Oscar in Popular Culture
1. Wilde at Harvard	X. ‘Mad, Scarlet Music’
2. The Viennese Café	XI. GOING WILDE: Productions
3. Reading and Literary Discussion Groups	XII. SHAVINGS
4. Exhibitions	XIII. WEB FOOT NOTES
5. Society News	XIV. SOME SELL AND OTHERS BUY
6. Conferences, Seminars, Lectures	XV. THE WILDE CALENDAR & CHRONOLOGY
7. Dublin Gay Theatre Festival	XVI. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.P. Wearing
8. Museums & Galeries: Threats & Promises	XVII. AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?
9. The British Cemetery, Florence	XVIII. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS
10. The Victorian Newsletter	1. The Oscar Wilde Society
11. Work in Progress	2. The Société Oscar Wilde
12. Awards	3. The Oscar Wilde Society of America
VIII. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS	4. Project Oscar Wilde
To top of column 2	5. The Oscar Wilde Society of Japan

1. THE EDITORIAL TEAM

Editor:

D.C. Rose

M.A. (Oxon), Dip. Arts Admin. (NUI)

late of the

Department of English

Goldsmiths College

University of London

Associate Editor for Australasia

Angela Kingston

formerly of the

Department of English
Adelaide University

Redactrice pour la France

(Affaires culturelles) /

Associate Editor for France

(Cultural Affairs)

Danielle Guérin

Redakteurin fur Österreich

und deutsche Schweiz /

Associate Editor for Austria and German Switzerland:

Sandra Mayer

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Universität Wien, Österreich

Redacteur voor België en Nederland/

Associate Editor for Belgium and The Netherlands:

Eva Thienpont

Vakgroep Engelse Literatuur

Universiteit Gent

België/Belgique/Belgien

Redakteurin fur Deutschland /

Associate Editor for Germany:

Lucia Krämer

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Universität Regensburg, Deutschland

Associate Editor for Ireland:

Maureen O’Connor

Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow, Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway

Associate Editor for China, Taiwan

and Singapore:

Linda Piu-Ling Wong

Department of English

Hong Kong Baptist University

Kowloon Tong

Hong Kong

Associate Editor for India:

Gulshan Taneja

Department of English

Ram Lal Anand College

University of Delhi

Associate Editors for Italy:

Elisa Bizzotto

Università di Trento

Rita Severi

Università di Verona

Associate Editor (Music):

Tine Englebert

Rijksuniversiteit Gent

België/Belgique/Belgien

Associate Editors (Theatre):

Michelle Paull (England) Tiffany Perala (USA)

St Mary’s University College Marylhurst University

Twickenham, Middlesex Portland, Oregon

@ @

Associate Editor (Conferences)

Florina Tufescu

Dalarna University College,

Sweden

Associate Editor: The Sibyl *

Sophie Geoffroy

Université de la Réunion

Associate Editor: Moorings **

Mark Llewellyn

University of Liverpool

Associate Editor, Shavings

Barbara Pfeifer

University of Vienna

Associate Editor, NOCTURNE

Elaine Saniter

University of Glasgow

Associate Editor for the Richard Ellmann Special Supplement

Michèle Mendelssohn

University of Edinburgh

Webmaster and Publisher

Steven Halliwell

The Rivendale Press

* New quarterly supplement on Vernon Lee, of which the first issue is now on our website.

** New quarterly supplement in advanced preparation on George Moore.

2. News from the Editor

This is the second issue of THE OSCHOLARS to be published on our new website, provided and constructed by Steven Halliwell of The Rivendale Press, a publishing house with a special interest in the fin-de-siècle. This when complete will house all our publications as a fully navigable, searchable and sophisticated website. Mr Halliwell joins Dr John Phelps of Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Mr Patrick O’Sullivan of the Irish Diaspora Net as one of the godfathers without whom THE OSCHOLARS could not have appeared on the web in any useful form.

Much has now been transferred to the new site, although it has been this work that has delayed the publication of this issue of THE OSCHOLARS. We will continue to get as much up as quickly as possible.

Our quarterly supplement devoted to Vernon Lee (The Sibyl), under the editorship of Sophie Geoffroy (Université de la Réunion) is now fairly launched; and preparations continue for Moorings, a supplement devoted to George Moore and his circle, edited by Mark Llewellyn of the University of Liverpool. All issues of our French language sister publication rue des beaux-arts, edited by our Associate Editor for French Cultural Affairs Danielle Guérin, are now posted at www.oscholars.com and all future issues will appear there.

The first two of our planned special, once-off, supplements, are in train. One of these will be to mark next October the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde; the guest editor for this is Dr Michèle Mendelssohn of the University of Edinburgh. @

The other supplement is on Teleny. We believe it is high time that scholarship on Teleny is brought together and the arguments about it properly marshalled. This will be edited by Professor John McRae of the University of Nottingham, whose edition of Teleny was the first scholarly unexpurgated one published. Readers who would like to submit an article discussing any aspect of Teleny should contact Professor McRae, in the first instance outlining their approach; but we are slowing down our planning for this as we need to absorb all the other developments. @

What will probably be our final innovation until all has bedded down is the recreation of a correspondence page. Your editors have discussed at length the form that this should take: our old JISCmail service never functioned fully. We considered trying to revive it, or creating a listserv as H-Fin-de-siècle, or a blog. While none of these are ruled out for the future, it was eventually decided to set up a group with Yahoo, which despite its unattractive name and often unattractive material, is familiar to most people, and easy to operate and govern. We have laid down fairly strict guidelines for postings, and we hope that it will avoid acquiring some of the useless baggage that is a characteristic of some of these groups.

The forum was set up for us and intitially moderated by Colleen Platt, a committed Wildëan and experienced moderator. Unfortunatley pressure of other commitments has led her to step down form the position of moderator, although we hope she will take this up again in the future. The task is taken up by Dr Mark Llewellyn and myself. Our model is VICTORIA, and we hope to stimulate the same sort of scholarly discussion, although with a different emphasis encompassing all the concerns of our journals, and the fin-de-siècle in its broader aspect internationally. It will also be a very convenient way of making announcements that fall between issues of THE OSCHOLARS, or to herald the arrival of the new issues. As only subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS and its sister publications will able to contribute, we hope for some serious debate.

We do urge all our readers to sign up for this, even if only to ensure they get regular news by this means. All (including the rules for submission) can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oscholarship. There is a short registration process, as there is for all such groups and lists. If you set your preferences either to digest or to individual e-mails, this will overcome one problem for us, for at the moment sending e-mails to all our subscribers is a very long business, with so many mailboxes not accepting mass mailings. We will sprinkle its link here and there in our pages, where we think readers may (or should be) prompted to express a view. The icon is .

One more and very welcome announcement: our Editorial team has been joined by Dr Cristina Pascual Aransáez of the University of La Rioja, the leading Wilde scholar in Spain. She has endorsed with great conviction the aims and aspirations of THE OSCHOLARS and will be a regular contributor on Wilde matters south of the Pyranees. She has already kindly given us permission to republish an article by her on Wilde and Anatole France and this will be found in our Library, reached by clicking its icon.

This increase in our team has suggested a further change: in future instead of listing the team each month on this page, a permanent page will be created on the site with a link from our hub page. This will enable us to give more room to each Associate Editor, with some biographical and bibliographical details.

Information that falls within the spheres of influence of each of our Associate Editors (news of publications, papers, conferences, productions, and requests for review copies etc) should be sent to the appropriate AE for processing and onward transmission to the Editor. The work of the AEs in undertaking this, as well as in obtaining new readers for THE OSCHOLARS is invaluable, and the compliments that are quite often directed to the Editor are properly theirs as well as his.

THE OSCHOLARS is therefore developing well along the lines previously laid down. Its international scope is being extended and its reviews section will be much enlarged. Oscar Wilde will always at the centre of our concerns, of course, but by covering in greater depth the epoch we call the fin-de-siècle, we reveal Wilde’s essential stage setting and, we hope, augment his place within it.

THE OSCHOLARS has hitherto been composed in Bookman Old Style, chiefly 10 point. If you do not have this font, you will view the journal in your standard default font. It has been suggested that Bookman O.S. is not a good font for internet use and that 10 point is too small. As an experiment we shifted to a standard of 11 point, but this was not thought superior. On this, as on all other matters, we seek the opinion of our readers. If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, you can adjust by using the text size command in the View menu. The same is true for Firefox and it may be the same for Netscape.

THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

· In July 2003, to celebrate our entry into our third year, we decided to offer readers who have published articles on Wilde in anthologies or journals that are not readily accessible outside university libraries (and not always then) the opportunity to republish them (amended if desired) on THE OSCHOLARS website. This offer is also extended to abstracts or précis of unpublished doctoral theses. In either case, these must come as e-mail attachments formatted in Word or on diskette. In the former case, the name of the anthology or journal, its volume and number, editor, place and date of publication, and indication of revisions if any must be given; in the case of the latter, the date of the doctoral award, the university, and the name of the supervisor must be given. This is a development of our republishing short pieces in 'And I? May I Say Nothing?'

· Should the author so wish, access to the article or thesis can be by password only, provided by the author at the request of the intending reader. In this case, the author can decide whether she or he will charge for the password before giving it. If such a charge is made, we will look for a commission of 10%. Otherwise, we will maintain freedom of access.

· All work so published will remain copyright to the author.

· We also intend republishing articles on Wilde, made obsolete by the march of scholarship, that may still have some value in charting how he was viewed by earlier writers.

· Such articles appear in a section called LIBRARY. Its logo, which can be clicked for access, is

This will bring you to a Table of Contents from which you can link to each article. Transfer of these articles is not yet complete.

Newly posted to LIBRARY:

Charles Nickerson: Vivian Grey and Dorian Gray.

Cristina Pascual Aransáez: A Comparative Study of Two Extreme Versions of Subjectivist Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Intentions and Anatole France’s La Vie Littéraire.

THE OSCHOLARS APPENDICES.

It is now possible to view on their own pages a number of Tables and material gathered from different issues of THE OSCHOLARS in Appendices. A guide to these is below, or click here to go its cover page. The Appendices are:

a. The Amalgamated Table of Contents for The Wildean.

b. The Wilde Calendar and the Wilde Chronology.

c. In Table form, a list of all the books and plays and exhibitions that we have reviewed, together with a list of the essays that have appeared in 'And I? May I Say Nothing?'. To reach it, click wherever you see this icon

d. All the material published in the monthly section 'Web Foot Notes' has now been brought together one page called 'Trafficking in Strange Webs'. Monthly reviews will continue as before and these will be added to the total. To see this page, click

e. Our Poster Wall of film posters, gathered from the section ‘Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph’, is to be found in its own similar folder. Click its icon to reach its Contents page.

Nothing in THE OSCHOLARS© is copyright to the Journal save its name (although it may be to individual contributors) unless indicated by ©, and the usual etiquette of attribution will doubtless be observed. Please feel free to download it, re-format it, print it, store it electronically whole or in part, copy and paste parts of it, and (of course) forward it to colleagues.

As usual, names emboldened in the text are those of subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS, who may be contacted through melmoth@aliceadsl.fr. Underlined text in blue can be clicked for navigation through the document or to other addresses.

We are pleased to record that since our relaunch in October 2006 we have gained 78 new readers and recovered some whose addresses had been lost. We hope this will continue, and we ask readers to recruit colleagues: the large readership increases our influence with publishers in obtaining book for review, and of course rewarding our contributors with the knowledge that their words are read. If we recovered all our missing readers we would have a subscription list of about 1500.

3. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS & CORRESPONDENCE

Rather than repeat this each month, as was our former practice, we have posted the Guidance for Submissions and Correspondence on it own page where it can be consulted by clicking here.

4. FREQUENTING THE SOCIETY OF THE AGED AND WELL-INFORMED: NEWS FROM READERS

1. Ellmann and After: A proposal

We wrote in our leading article of our plans to issue a special supplement to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde. This will have the general theme of ‘Richard Ellmann: Revalued / Re-evaluated’. Trevor Fisher writes

5th October 2007 will see the 20th anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde. This has become the definitive statement for the current era. Although the book has drawn criticism, its magisterial quality and voluminous research have given it the pre-eminent role in Wilde studies since its appearance. Few biographies in the late twentieth century received so overwhelmingly favourable a reception. The views of Claire Tomalin that this was ‘a near perfect biography’ and Anthony Burgess summing this up as ‘A Great Book’ were typical. The book established a reputation which has grown over the last two decades.

The book summed up a paradigm which had been emerging since the early 1960s, the view of Wilde as victim, and established this theme as the framework within which Wilde studies has developed thereafter. Criticism and alternative versions of Wilde’s career have made little impression on the dominance of Ellmann’s interpretations of Wilde’s life and downfall. It became a major influence on popular views on Wilde through the film Wilde (1997) which was scripted by Julian Mitchell from Ellmann’s book.

Ellmann’s book has thus had a major academic and popular impact which is continuing. The predominant effect of the book has been to reinforce the view of Wilde as an iconic figure who was both a literary genius and a social victim – or as Wilde himself said of his future, ‘I shall now live as the Infamous St Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr’ (1) Ellmann’s achievement was to encapsulate this image of Wilde for a generation (2)

The magisterial quality of the book ensured it would supplant more sceptical and critical views, and it has come to overshadow Hesketh Pearson’s 1946 work and the Richard Pine biographical sketch of 1983.

However two decades on, the qualities which made Ellmann’s book the definitive biography for its time demand reconsideration. Horst Schroeder has alleged there are a large number of factual errors (3), but these are less important than the perspective from which Ellmann approached his subject. He adopted a view of Wilde which ran the risk of special pleading. John Bayley reviewed the book approvingly, commenting that Ellmann ‘adores Wilde and such a love is the foundation of the best biography’. But if love is blind, is adoration not close to hagiography?

Despite the immense authority of the Ellmann biography, it’s impact needs critical consideration and the twentieth anniversary of its publication seems appropriate for such consideration. Apart from the book’s intrinsic interest for Wildeans, its reception and subsequent history raise wider cultural issues about the role of biography in a celebrity obsessed age. Ellmann was pre-eminently a scholar and his work evidence based. It remains the essential starting point for serious study of Wilde.

However the use of the book seems increasingly to be as a function of a celebrity obsessed and gossip relating age to produce images which are increasingly unrealistic. What price biography in the Age of Reality TV? (4) Both the work itself and its cultural role need scrutiny. Ellmann essayed a sympathetic reading of his subject, but this has taken on a life of its own.

I am suggesting a day school be organised in October 2007 to consider such a scrutiny. Clearly this will need a body of opinion in support, from the widest possible spectrum of expertise, and considerable planning.

This note is to test whether there is sufficient support for such a project to be undertaken. I would like to gauge whether enough support exists, and would ask anyone interested in supporting such a project in principle to contact me, without commitment, to discuss how the project might be carried forward.

My email is @ and I will respond to any reasonable suggestions in response to this proposal.

(Trevor Fisher is the author of Oscar And Bosie; A Fatal Passion, Sutton 2002. His recently published pamphlet on the Wilde Phenomenon, Oscar Wilde; The Legacy: Essays on critical issues of Wilde Studies: can be obtained from Outlook Services, PO Box 2028, Stafford ST16 3WA, price £3. Cheques should be made out to Trevor Fisher.)

(1) Complete Letters 2000 p.1041, letter of 18th March 1898

(2) The key phrase was used, without quotes, on the front cover of the Times Literary Supplement of 9th February 2001, as the main headline.

(3) Horst Schroeder: Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, Braunschweig 2002.

(4) The actor Rupert Everett was quoted in the Wilde Society newsletter Intentions (December 2006) as wanting to make a film of the last years of Wilde because ‘He was the last of the great vagabonds – this syphilitic hobbling man who sat drunk in the corners of nightclubs – I can identify with that’ (p.15) This caricature of Wilde’s last years owes something to Ellmann, particularly the syphilis.

a. Editor’s note: Richard Pine’s ‘biographical sketch’ mentioned above refers to his Oscar Wilde in the Gill & Macmillan ‘Irish Lives’ series (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1983; re-issued with revisions 1997), and not to his far more substantial The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1995).

2. Lord Alfred Douglas

Caspar Wintermans informs us of the publication of his Lord Alfred Douglas: A Poet's Life and His Finest Work by Peter Owen Ltd with a launch party in London on 29th March.

3. Ferdinand Khnopff

Isa Bickmann writes that her article on the Khnopff exhibition in Salzburg is finally published in Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte, No. 2, 2007.

4. George Moore in Lille and Hull

Ann Heilmann (University of Hull), Fabienne Dabrigeon-Garcier (Université Lille 3), Bernard Escarbelt (Université Lille 3), Christine Huguet (Université Lille 3), Alain Labau (Université de Caen), and Mary Pierse (University College Cork) were responsible for arranging a George Moore Conference at the Université de Lille Friday 30th and Saturday 31st March, titled « George Moore: le passage des frontières ». A report will appear in Moorings.

A follow up Conference in planned for Hull in 2008.

5. Literary London

Lawrence Phillips (University of Northampton) draws our attention to the 2007 Literary London Conference, the 6th in the series, which will be hosted by the Department of English, University of Westminster, London, at their 309 Regent Street building. (http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-42). Dr Phillips is the founder and director of this conference. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 31st March. The Call for Papers can be found in our section ‘Being Talked About’.

Click

6. The London Adventure

Nicolas Granger-Taylor sends us the following announcement.

THE LONDON ADVENTURE

EXPLORATIONS INTO HIDDEN LITERARY LONDON

All walks are free

After each walk there will be a collection for voluntary donations to

The London Adventure Children’s Fund

The information given here is correct at time of publication. For further information and updates on London Adventure walks and The London Adventure Children’s Fund, and to be on the mailing list, please visit the website: www.thelondonadventure.co.uk or contact Nicolas Granger-Taylor at the address below.

Nicolas Granger-Taylor, 35 Grafton Way, London W1T 5DB

Email: @

2007 CALENDAR OF WALKS

UPDATE

FIRST WALK OF THE YEAR

DION FORTUNE

Priestess of the Mysteries

Presented by Christina Oakley Harrington

Saturday 12th May 2007, 3pm

Your rendezvous with Dion Fortune commences at the entrance to Bayswater Underground Station. Look for a blonde lady of a certain age, holding a long black umbrella that signals Edwardian London, and join her on a tour of the London haunts of Dion Fortune (1890-1946), one of the most influential occultists and probably the most preeminent esoteric novelist of the 20th century.

Trained in Western kabbalistic occultism in a lodge of the Golden Dawn, Dion Fortune went on to found her own order, Servants of the Inner Light. She wrote novels which included Egyptian reincarnation, erotic rituals, Celtic mysticism, derring-do, psychic attacks, and instruction in the philosophy of We s.t.ern occultism.

The walk will last 2-3 hours, concluding at a local public house.

5. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

Last month’s review section contained reviews by Maureen O’Connor of The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross; by Marco Pustianaz of The Dedalus Book of Decadence; by Frederick Roden of Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction; by R.K.R. Thornton of Bound for the 1890s: Essays on Writing and Publishing in Honor of James G. Nelson; by Ruth Livesey of British Æstheticism and the Urban Working Classes; and by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas of Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre ; while Katherine Maynard reviewed a recent production of Gross Indecency: the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. These reviews may be found be clicking

This month we carry a review by Neil Sammells of David Haven Blake: Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity; by Grace Brockington of Talia Schaffer: Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, to which Dr Schaffer has written a response.

These reviews may be found be clicking

Clicking will take you to the Table of Contents of all our reviews.

We welcome offers to review from readers.

6. PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

<< More than half of modern culture depends upon what one should not read >>

For a list of recent and forthcoming publications and papers (with abstracts of the latter when available), click

7. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE

1. Wilde at Harvard

The Harvard University Libraries have launched a new digital collection, Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914.

Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections,Studies in Scarlet presents images of the texts of more than 450 separately published trial narratives printed in the United States or the United Kingdom from 1815 until 1914. Especially valuable as sources for women's studies, the cases involve not only trials for divorce, domestic violence, adultery, bigamy, breach of promise to marry, and the custody of children but also those for murder and rape. Featured are trials concerning the wealthy and the renowned, such as Caroline, Queen Consort of George IV; Oscar Wilde; and Harry Thaw, who murdered the architect (and alleged seducer) Stanford White. The larger part of the collection, however, consists of the stories of ordinary men and women thrust into the public eye when their marriages and love affairs went wrong, or their relationships did not conform to social standards.

The collection may be viewed at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:sscarlet

2. The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture Research Project

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England, this multi-disciplinary project investigates the lasting significance of the Viennese café. The unique dynamism of Viennese culture at the beginning of the twentieth century was manifested by the innovations of its artists, writers, composers, designers, psychoanalysts and scientists. The city’s famous cafés played a crucial part in this vibrant intellectual and artistic environment. Here pursuits of refreshment, communication, leisure, work, and intellectual exchange co-existed, challenging conventional boundaries between public and private life.

Research will focus on the historical, cultural and artistic complexity of the Viennese café as an urban space in order to better understand the culture of cafes, both past and present. Attention has long been focused on Paris as a cradle of modernity and artistic modernism. Through its focus on the Viennese café, this project aims to redefine our understanding not only of the arts in Vienna, but also of modernity and modern life more generally.

The project is run jointly by Dr Tag Gronberg and Dr Simon Shaw-Miller in the Department of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London and Prof. Jeremy Aynsley in the Department of History of Design at the Royal College of Art.

More information on the project can be found at www.rca.ac.uk/viennacafe. We will be covering this carefully, from both the London and the Vienna ends, and are grateful to the organisers for their co-operation.

3. Reading and Discussion Groups

This groups are monitored as charting a largely non-academic audience for the literature of our period. The discussion is often informative, and remains in the on-line archive of each group. It is interesting to see which books are chosen by more than one group, and taken together they form a sort of extra-university anti-canon.

18th19th Century Novel.

This group announces that it will be reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in June. It can be found at http://groups.Yahoo.com/group/18th19thCenturyNovel

The Nineteenth Century Literature Group

This describes itself as ‘a forum for people who enjoy the literature of the 19th century and includes works from all countries. List members participate in group reads and discussions which are not limited to the current selections, and are actively encouraged to recommend other authors or books and to discuss all facets of the 19th century.’

This active group is currently (March) discussing Armadale by Wilkie Collins, to be followed by Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Knut Hamsun’s Pan.

The group has 331 members. 133 messages were posted in February.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/19thCenturyLit/

Epoque Victorienne Anglaise En Lisant

This French language group, once very active in discussing British Victorian literature, has languished recently, and although it still has 20 members may be regarded as having ceased to operate. We will advise readers if it is revived. It can be found at http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/EpoqueVictorienneAnglaiseEnLisant/.

French Literature

This is the counterpart of the above, an active English language discussion group of French literature, heavily weighted towards the 19thc. The February book was Mademoiselle de Maupin (83 messages), that for March La Terre, to be followed in April by Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century.

It can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FrenchLiterature/ and has 183 members.

Visions

This group is currently reading and discussing books about Vlad Tepes [also known as Vlad the Impaler - Dracula]. Dracula is a subject that we have not hitherto considered for THE OSCHOLARS, as the Wilde connection is rather tenuous (Florence Balcombe / Bram Stoker); but Stoker’s book must be considered part of the decadent literature of the fin-de-siècle.

The schedule is as follows:

Core book: In Search of Dracula by Radu Floresca. 1st to 23rd March/

Fiction: CHOICE OF The Castle in Transylvania by Jules Verne OR Vlad: A Novel by Melodie Romeo. 24th March to 15th April.

Social History: CHOICE OF: Vlad Dracula, the Life and Times of the Historical Dracula by Kurt Treptow OR Transylvania: A Short History by Istvan Lazar. 16th April to 10th May.

Journal: The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing by Allen Kupfer. 11th to 31st May.

Also:
Vlad Dracula the Dragon Prince by Michael Augustyn; Dracula: Prince of Many Faces by Radu Florescu; and of course Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The group is to be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VisionsPP/ and has forty members.

English Literature, Culture, and Society 1880-1920

This group ‘is dedicated to the sharing of information and ideas about any and all aspects of British, North American and European literature, culture and society in the four decades 1880-1920.’

Formerly run from the University of Toronto by Greg Grainger, this has been for the last few years in charge of Rachel Bright (Temple University). The group’s archives to June 2006 can be found at http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/elcs-l.html and a subscription can be effected from that page or by contacting the list owner. There were no postings between June and December last year, and this year of the five postings three are conference announcements and two concern a television adaptation of Jane Eyre, which hardly qualifies as 1880-1920. ELCS is perhaps overshadowed by the VICTORIA group and can really be considered in abeyance.

The Poetry of Thomas Hardy

This is an offshoot of the Thomas Hardy Association. Each month a new poem is discussed. Users have to subscribe in order to participate. To subscribe, please go to the Thomas Hardy Association website:

http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Welcome/welcomet.htm

Click on the Poetry Discussion Group button, and then fill in the simple form provided. Once you have subscribed, you will automatically receive all POTM messages and will be able to contribute to the discussions via email.

The March poem is ‘Jezreel’; that for April ‘The Five Students’; that for May, ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’; for June, ‘Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard’.

British Studies

NWCBS (North Western and Western Canada British Studies Group) is a low-traffic, non-commercial list for scholars, professors and researchers in British Studies who are located in the Northwestern United States and Western Canada. Members are encouraged to join the North American Conference on British Studies.

Subscribe: NWCBS-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Post message: NWCBS@yahoogroups.com

Unsubscribe: NWCBS-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Margaret DeLacy, List moderator.

Bookies Too

This group will be reading Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George in May.

See http://www.geocities.com/bookiestoo/ or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BookiesToo

TBRBookstoshare

This group will be reading The Bostonians by Henry James in September. Discussions start on the 18th of each month. If you'd like to join or learn more about the group, please visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TBRBookstoShare/

Classic Books

This group will be reading Conrad’s The Secret Agent in June. One can join this group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Classic_Books/

Timeless Tales

This group will be reading Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady in May. See http://groups.msn.com/TimelessTales/_whatsnew.msnw

British Classics

This group will be reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins in May; Hardy’s The Return of the Native in and The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, in August. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/British_Classics/

ClassicGothicHorror

This group will be reading The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen in May. This group reads and discusses one classic gothic horror book each month. Authors include but are not limited to Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Maturin, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Matthew Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving and others. We choose our books through nominations and polls.

(Note: this group does not deal with the modern definition of gothic, goth or the goth lifestyle, nor do we discuss vampires in any connotation outside of these novels.)

The group has 120 members and 110 messages were posted in February. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicGothicHorror/

4. Exhibitions

We believe the visual arts of the fin-de-siècle have been under-represented in THE OSCHOLARS. We intend to rectify this by noticing exhibitions and publications, and reviewing them when possible in tandem with those on the writers of the period. This section has its own page, reached by clicking

Exhibitions noticed this month are:

Bastien-Lapage	Von Stück
Bernard	Tiffany
Burne-Jones	Van Gogh (1)
Carriès	Van Gogh (2)
Cézanne	Van Gogh (3)
Couperus	Vollard (1)
Denis	Vollard (2)
Drouet, Juliette	American Artists
Flandrin	Art Nouveau
Klinger	Australian Impressionists
Lalique	Belgian Art
Macdonald & McNair	Belle époque
Manet	Kinema
Monet	Giverny
Moser	Light
Pissarro, Camille	Orientalism
Pissarro, Lucien	Periodicals
Redon	Plein-Air
Renoir	La Plume
Rodin (1)	Pre-Raphaelites
Rodin (2)	Salon Painting
Sargent (1)	Symbolism
Sargent (2)	Times of Harmony: The Artist’s Paradise in the 19th Century
Sorolla	Women

5. Society News

We do not wish this list to be anglocentric and welcome information about similar organisations in all countries, although French societies are chiefly listed in rue des beaux-arts. News of Societies and Associations are on their own page, and links to the Societies' own websites are included; new ones are added each month. All have been updated.

Societies listed are

HERO SOCIETIES
1. The Louis Couperus Society	10. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society
2. The Stephen Crane Society	11. The Octave Mirbeau Society
3. The Ford Madox Ford Society	12. The William Morris Society
4. The A.E. Housman Society	13. The William Morris Society of Canada
5. The Ibsen Society of America	14. The William Morris Society of the U.S.A
6. The Irving Society	15. The John Ruskin Society
7. The Henry James Society	16. The Robert Louis Stevenson Society
8. The Arthur Machen Society	17. The Edith Wharton Society
9. The George MacDonald Society	18. The Emile Zola Society
SUBJECT SOCIETIES
1. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings	8. The Furniture History Society
2. The Irish Association of Art Historians	9. The Association of Historians of Nineteenth Century Art
3. The Scottish Society for Art History	10. The Irish Society for Theatre Research
4. The Arts & Crafts Society of New York	11. The Pre-Raphaelite Society
5. The Bedford Park Society	12. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education
6. The Decorative Arts Society	13. The Society for Theatre Research
7. The Eighteen-Nineties Society	14. The Victorian Society
	15. The Victorian Society in America

Click to reach The Society Page.

We welcome news from all Societies whose remit covers the period 1870-1900, or perhaps beyond: the long fin de siècle. We will also be happy to publish their journals’ Tables of Contents if sent as e-mail attachments to melmoth@aliceadsl.fr.

6. Conferences, Seminars, Lectures

As with the Calls for Papers we maintain this on its own page as a rolling list, adding and subtracting each month. News of Conferences, Seminars and Lectures for inclusion should be sent to our Associate Editor responsible, Dr Florina Tufescu.@

Conferences in this issue:

1. Seminar series on Oscar Wilde

2. Fin de Siècle Studies at Oxford

3. Victorian Literature & Culture

4. Victorian Periodicals

5. Matisse

6. Victorian Pantomime

7. Tradition and Innovation

8. Birth of the Bestseller

9. George Moore

10. Victorian Cosmopolitanism

11. Museums and the Web

12. Theatre Research

13. Theatre, Fin-de-siècle and the Boundaries of Modernism

14. 19th Century Group at UCLA

15. Irish Studies in Hungary

16. Council for European Studies

The page can be reached by clicking

We used to draw readers' attention to the list of lectures taking place in London compiled by Ben Haines at www.indiana.edu/~victoria/lectures.html. This link no longer responds, but the list still exists as part of the Victoria Research Web (click the banner) at http://victorianresearch.org/lectures.html.

<< After we have discussed some Chambertin and a few ortolans,

we will pass on to the question of the critic considered in the light of the interpreter >>

7. The Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.

Inaugurated in 2004 during our period of suspension, the Festival takes place during the first full fortnight of May each year with the 2007 dates being 7th to 20th May. The festival is for men and women of all ages, regardless of their sexual orientation. For more information click the Festival’s banner.

8. The Theatre Museum, London; the British Library; the William Morris Gallery; the Wellcome Library

As previously reported, The Theatre Museum in London’s Covent Garden went dark in the New Year. This is part of the policy by the owner, the Victoria and Albert Museum, to improve its service to the public, or, as they put it themselves ‘Although the Theatre Museum's site in Covent Garden will be closed from January 2007 there is no intention to change the status, role or strategy of the Theatre Museum as the UK's national collection for the performing arts.’

Not surprisingly a Theatre Museum defence association has been founded, the Theatre Museum Guardians’ campaign. More information from Ian Herbert ian@herbertknott.com or office@theatremuseumguardians.org.uk; and at www.theatremuseumguardiansd.org.uk.

The controversy surrounding this goes on and can be followed on the SCUDD list. The most stark case against the Victoria & Albert is made by Stuart Bennett of London Drama : ‘The V and A has reneged on its responsibility to display the theatre collections by closing the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. According to Paula Ridley, Chair of the Trustees, the reason for closure is the V and A's priority is
the decorative arts. The Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at South Kensington need refurbishing, and the nation's Theatre Museum must close to save costs to finance this. It [the V& A] has turned a deaf ear to viable proposals to reopen and redevelop the Museum. Its staff (apart from the curators) have been dismissed, and it has been removed from its [the V & A’s] web-site.’

The counter-claim is put by Dr Kate Dorney, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Performance, V&A Theatre Museum Collections:

We are now being referred to as the V&A Theatre Collections but for the sake of continuity, the name Theatre Museum is still being used in many circumstances. There will be a new permanent gallery at the V&A and major new exhibitions and touring displays. An exhibition on Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes is scheduled for 2009. Far from being "removed", the website is being developed and enhanced - see www.vam.ac.uk/theatre.

We possess the largest collections in the world relating to the UK's performing arts. These are constantly updated with new material relating to both contemporary and historical performance. We continue to acquire very actively and to welcome approaches from prospective donors. As part of the Victoria and Albert Museum, our acquisition process is governed by the National Heritage Act 1983 and Museums and Galleries Act 1992. Once items are transferred to our ownership, we are committed to preserving them in perpetuity and in accordance with the highest standards of curatorship.

There is no intention to change the status, role or strategy of the Theatre Museum / V&A Theatre Collections as the UK's national collection for the performing arts. Our work of documenting performance and developing our collections continues, and research access to them will go on being provided, as now, at our premises in Kensington Olympia, where the collections have been located since June 2005.

We would be interested to hear from any reader who has recent experience of research under the new dispensation, and, indeed, from anyone who can tell us what is happening to the former Theatre Museum building in Covent Garden.

Other scholarly resources are being menaced. As London prepares to sink hundreds millions of pounds into hosting the Olympic Games, it appears that the cultural institutions will have their grants raided (it is said that it would only have needed £600,000 to save the Theatre Museum). According to one report the British Library will start charging researchers, reduce opening hours, will pulp 15 per cent of its collection, and close the newspaper collection at Colindale. Help is requested: the BL management have said that the more letters of protest (to them, or to the newspapers) the better. The Library is ultimately at the mercy of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, an ill-assorted set of triplets, and will itself contest any cuts. Please e-mail chief-executive@bl.uk or supporters_forum@bl.uk with your name, contact number and message, or write to Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2D8. There is also http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/library/ to be used.

More can be found at www.bl.uk/spendingreview.html, a forum set up for supporters and to keep everyone informed and engaged with developments.

A similar tale is being told of the William Morris Gallery: deep cutbacks in hours – changes that, according to the local councillor Clyde Loakes ‘are aimed at making the treasures held by our museum and gallery more accessible to the local people who pay for the service.’ Full information, including press coverage and a petition that readers might be interested in signing, is at
http://www.keepourmuseumsopen.org.uk/ or http://www.petitiononline.com/savewmg/petition.html.

Better news comes from the Wellcome Library which will shortly be moving back to its historic home at 183 Euston Road and re-opening there on Monday 16th April. Full details can be found on the website at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk. Moreover, in Manchester, ‘after a £17m facelift, general visitors are welcomed back to the Deansgate building of the John Rylands Library where the exhibition galleries will be re-opened.’ The refurbishment of the neo-Gothic library is said to be ‘stunning’, giving us to understand that the facelift refers to the building and not to the general visitors.

9. The British Cemetery in Florence

This item seems to fit well with the last: we have copied it from VICTORIA. It is signed Reynold Harrs.

In October of 2006 I visited the English Cemetery in Florence and was quite shocked to discover that the cemetery had fallen into such a dilapidated state. As you are aware, this plot of land holds a special significance for anyone interested in the 19th century and earlier. Not only English, but Americans, Canadians, Swiss, Germans - and many other nationals of the Western world are buried there. For those interested in Victorian studies, two names stand out, namely Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough.

The cemetery has fallen on hard times because the Swiss Evangelical church, which was the original owner of the plot, has abandoned its claim and responsibility, and no institution or country has come to the rescue. Currently, Sister Julia Holloway and her Italian assistant care for the cemetery with the occasional help of volunteers from the United States or Europe. For example, a young woman from Austria volunteered her time to rescue several of the gravestones. Unfortunately, heroic though it be, their contribution can be no better than a finger attempting to damn up a hole in a dam, for what is needed is major financial support. I do believe Sister Julia is campaigning to have the cemetery recognised by the United Nations as something worthy to be preserved.

Accordingly, I am writing to you to lend your voice to the rescue of the English Cemetery in Florence. Anyone who has studied Victorian literature or history is aware of the English Cemetery since, as I mentioned above, it is the burial place of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough, as well as other well-known authors and preachers. I believe that the study of the Nineteenth Century would be so much the poorer if the cemetery were allowed to decay to the point that its monuments cease to exist. Therefore, I am writing to you, as keepers of the Nineteenth-century culture to use your academic network to -- at the very least -- lobby for the UN Heritage designation. If some of you would embrace this cause as your own, then all the better. I am certain that Sister Julia and her
friends can always use energetic volunteers to aid their cause to preserve
the cemetery.

Here are some links to the English Cemetery:

http://www.florins.ms
http://www.umilita.net
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com

Sister Julia's email: juliana@tin.it

Mr Harrs also added the following from Sister Julia (i.e. Julia Holloway):

We could add Walter Savage Landor and Fanny Trollope to the list! Fanny Trollope wrote the first anti-slavery novel, Richard Hildreth, an American Consul, wrote the second and is also buried here, then Harriet Beecher Stowe copied both of them! We also have buried here Nadezda, who came, a black slave at the age of 14, from Nubia to Florence, her story told in Cyrillic characters inRussian on her marble cross.

Actually, things are looking up. The Swiss cold not raise funds for the restoration and did not have such sums themselves, having already paid something like a million for the repair of the wall at the order of the Comune. Which wasn't quite fair as the wall was built by the Comune and belonged to the city, not to the little church of just 20 members. But neither church nor city did the research I did into the archives of 125 years ago to find this out! The Comune has magnificently put in traffic lights and a crosswalk! The Museo Archeologico Nazionale currently has an exhibition on the Egyptian motives in the English Cemetery and hasrestored Arthur Hugh Clough's tomb because of the winged sun disk on it. My Aureo Anello Association has funded EBB's tomb restoration. Friends of Leighton House will be completing this task. We are now seeking funds to restore Walter Savage Landor's, William Somerville's (husband to Mary Somerville, the great mathematician), and Ann Susanna Horner's tombs, this last sculpted by the same sculptor as who did Mary Somerville's magnificent tomb in Naples, as they were all friends. We are also now restoring the cemetery to the English garden it was in the nineteenth century and have planted masses of daffodil bulbs to join the irises we already have, as well as grafting the one myrtle left for new ones to replace those the Swiss rooted out to save money and which had been
planted in the nineteenth century, etc. What we are hoping is that the Regione's government will fund the consolidation of the hill which is at risk. We know we can do all this for about 350,000 euro. We are now at 3000 signatures for our petition to UNESCO to be considered a World Heritage site.

It remains for us to add that another who is buried here is Vernon Lee, to whom our new journal The Sibyl is consecrated.

10. The Victorian Newsletter

Following the retirement of Ward Hellstrom, the long serving editor of Victorian Newsletter, it is announced that that the new editor is Professor Deborah Logan, Department of English, Cherry Hall, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY 42101. Submissions are invited on all aspects of Victorian literature and culture. Inquiries: victorian.newsletter@wku.edu

11. Work in Progress

In December 2006 we published a list of fin-de-siècle doctoral theses being undertaken at Birkbeck College, University of London. We should very much like to hear from readers who teach at other universities with news of similar theses they are supervising. We also welcome all news of research being undertaken on any aspect of the fin-de-siècle.

Thomas Wright is currently researching the subject of Oscar Wilde’s reading and would gratefully welcome any information on the current whereabouts of any books formerly belonging to Wilde. He would also be interested in any curious or obscure information relating to books Wilde read and to his reading habits generally. Contact him at @.

John Tepe, a first year PhD student studying at University of Birmingham with Deborah Parsons in the English Department, writes

I hail from Philadelphia, USA and did my undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. I completed my MA last spring at the University of Arkansas. My general academic interests include aestheticism, symbolism, Baudelaire, Symons, urbanism, technology, and travel/movement. My thesis work focuses on the Symbolist movement and looks to explore the visual poetics developed by Baudelaire in Paris and then continued in London by Arthur Symons and others. I am also quite interested in the critical receptions and portrayals of symbolism within the literary field. I am involved in some interdisciplinary projects with the History of Art department and the Midlands Interdisciplinary Studies Seminar series as well.

Since I am relatively new to the Birmingham area and UK academia in general, I look forward to discussing fin-de-siècle issues with all of you via the Oscholars list.

12. Awards

Since January 2007 this section has been transferred to its own page.

To reach it, please click .

We welcome news of awards offered for any aspect of the period 1880-1914.

8. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS

This section has its own page. To reach it, please click . We hope these Calls may attract Wildëans.

Any specific papers on Wilde will be noted in future issues of THE OSCHOLARS. Here we draw your attention particularly to this Call for articles for a Special Issue of Modernism/Modernity on British Decadence/aestheticism and modernism from Professor Cassandra Laity.

I am calling for submissions for a special issue on British Aestheticism (or Decadent/Aestheticism) and modernism of Modernism/Modernity (14.5, September 2008). Submissions may treat any aspect of Aestheticism and its relation to modernism and/or the formation of 20th-century ‘modernity.’ The field is open, but topics such Aestheticism and/or decadence and Victorian visualities, technology, architecture, or science in 19th-century painting, poetry, literature as they ‘interface’ with related phenomena and art in modernism are welcome.

Deadline: 1st February 2008.

Send by attachment to: <claity@drew.edu> and <tdiefenb2002@yahoo.com> or by post to Prof. Cassandra Laity, Department of English, Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940.

We have arranged with Professor Laity to publish abstracts of the articles submitted to this special issue of Modernism/Modernity.

Other calls listed this month are:

1. Expositions	14. Children’s Literature (2)	27. Literary Scholarship (3 Calls)
2. Venice 1890-1912	15. Red Light Literature	28. Victorian Emotions
3. Queer Space & Time	16. Currents	29. Symbiosis
4. Irish Literature & Film	17. Ragged London	30. Male Beauty
5. Sex	18. The Playboy of the Western World	31. Americans in Munich
6. Gay, Lesbian Studies	19. Lesbian Image	32. British Studies (2)
7. Utopian Studies	20. Irishness	33. Art History (2)
8. Literary Tourism & 19thc Culture	21. British Studies (1)	34. Ruskinian Theatre
9. Edith Wharton	22. Decadence	35. Victorian Art Criticism
10. Æstheticism	23. Kipling	36. George Gissing
11. Children’s Literature	24. Art History (Scotland)	37. Thomas Hardy
12. Power	25. Literary London	38. Victorian Women & The Occult
13. Queer Theatre	26. High / Low Culture	39. Ford Madox Ford
Go to column 2	Go to column 3

9. NOTES AND QUERIES

« Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are. »

1. Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan

To commemorate the anniversary of the death of Brendan Behan this month, we republish his poem Oscar Wilde, in the translation by Ulick O'Connor from Behan's Irish. We are very grateful to Mr O'Connor for copyright permission. The poem was inspired by a visit to the rue des Beaux-Arts.

Oscar Wilde, Poète et Dramaturge, né à Dublin le 15 Octobre 1856, est morte dans cette maison le 30 Novembre, 1900.

After all the wit

In a sudden fit

Of fear, he skipped it.

That body once lively

Dumb in the darkness.

In a cold empty room

Quiet, but for candles

Blazing beside him,

His elegant form

And firm gaze exhausted.

With a spiteful concierge

Impatient at waiting

For a foreign waster

Who left without paying

The ten per cent service.

Exiled now from Flore

To sanctity's desert

The young prince of Sin

Broken and weathered

Lust left behind him

Gem without lustre

No Pernod for stiffner

But cold holy water

The young king of Beauty

Narcissus broken.

But the pure star of Mary

As a gleam on the ocean.

ENVOI

Sweet is the way of the sinner,

Sad, death without God's praise.

My life on you, Oscar boy,

Yourself had it both ways.

Quartier Latin

May 1949.

2. Oscar Wilde at Oxford

Douglas Sladen, who went up to Oxford on the same day as Wilde (but to Trinity College), tells how Wilde ‘began his æsthetic poses when he was at Oxford, but his fellow undergraduates at Magdalen put him under the college pump because they were so ashamed of him.’ (Douglas Sladen: My Long Life, Anecdotes and Adventures. London: Hutchinson 1939 p.44.) Is there any other source for this tale, so much at odds with the Benson story of Wilde throwing hearties down the stairs? Or was Sladen confusing Oscar at Magdalen with Robbie Ross at King’s?

3. Finding publication data for Victorian novels

We reproduce the following from the VICTORIA list, to which we recommend all our readers to subscribe.

[Many of us on VICTORIA may find interesting a reply that Mark Samuels Lasner gave on SHARP-L yesterday, in response to a question about how to find out what editions of certain Victorian novels were published in different places, and in what numbers. Many thanks to Mark for letting me cross-post this, as it is by far the best short guide to Victorian bibliographical research I've ever seen. – Patrick Leary]

-------- Original Message --------

John Plotz has asked how to find publication data for several Victorian novels. This is a situation I deal with virtually every day as a collector and as a librarian (of sorts).

Over the years I have developed an organized procedure for this kind of research, involving a hierarchy of sources. Likely others have done the same and will share their ideas here.

1. My first step–sometimes the ONLY step necessary–is to consult the descriptive bibliography (or bibliographies) of the writer. These can best be identified in T. Howard-Hill's ‘Bibliography of British Literary Bibliography.’ Do not–unless you are looking for a very recent publication–bother with any library's online catalogue. Howard-Hill is much more comprehensive, for his multi-volumes list not only separate works but also collective bibliographies, catalogues of collections and exhibitions, and articles which range from checklists to detailed studies of individual works. Most Victorian authors who have interested collectors, scholars, or librarians are served by a descriptive bibliography of one kind or another. Though the quality, depth, and accuracy of a bibliography may vary (the newer ones are not always the best), in many cases the date of issue of a book and number of copies printed will be given, or at least estimated.

For Morris's ‘The Sundering Flood,’ for example, Eugene Le Mire's recent descriptive bibliography gives the publication date and number of copies printed for various editions.

What about an author for whom there is no trustworthy descriptive bibliography?

2. Here I check the writer's published correspondence or diary, if such an edition or editions exist. Quite often, publication details will be found here, possibly in a footnote. It is always worth checking the letters and diaries of the author's friends, associates, and enemies.

3. After letters and diaries comes biographies and autobiographies. Although Victorian and early twentieth-century biographies and autobiographies are short on financial facts because many considered the subject of money in bad taste (Trollope's reputation is said to have suffered when he told how much he made), one can be surprised at the wealth of publishing history such books contain. The authors of modern biographies pay more attention to the ‘business side’ of a writer's life, providing the results of their forays into publishers' archives and unpublished letters and documents. Rarely does relevant information appear in critical works, unless these are concerned with a writer's ‘career,’ authorship, or literary reputation.

4. The next kind of source to consult is the history or biography of the publisher. These come in all shapes and forms and varying degrees of usefulness. Facts and figures abound, though what you want will not always be accessible from the index (I often end up reading whole sections . . . so easy to get hooked).

5. Then, publishers' publications, and 6. trade publications about publishing By these I mean, in category 5, such works as Macmillan's ‘Catalogue of Publications,’ the Bentley ‘private list,’ John Lane and Leonard Smithers's catalogues, publisher-issued anthologies and magazines, and the advertisements found in periodicals and in the back of the books themselves. No. 6 would include ‘The English Catalogue,’ ‘Publisher's Circular,’ and the American equivalents. Most libraries are poorly supplied with trade publications–which cry out to be digitized and indexed.

7. Finally, there are publishers' and authors' archives–and the seemingly endless number of institutional libraries and private collections likely to hold letters by, or relating to, the author or the publisher in question. Here the online Victorian Research Web, the ‘Location Register of British Literary Manuscripts,’ Lee Ash's classic guide to archives in the United States, the several printed lists of publishers' archives, and the WATCH directory (online listing of writers and their copyright holders, maintained by the U. of Texas Ransom Center) are among the tools I use to track these down.

Some things I've learned:

– If you get to source level 7 be aware that you may have embarked on a soul-destroying quest. – Talking to a reference librarian, a rare books or manuscripts curator, an antiquarian bookseller, or another scholar may be more useful and much more efficient than searching on the internet. – No publisher's or author's archive, no matter how extensive, has everything related to the publisher or author. – Virtually all books described as ‘suppressed’ exist in more copies than one might expect. (Same holds true for books said to have been burnt in a fire at the publishers or in a warehouse.) – The more you look for a particular piece of information, the less likely you are to find it.

Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library, 181 South College Avenue, Newark, DE 19717

4. Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph

News

We have heard nothing recently about the Al Pacino Salome film but reproduce here a photograph of Mr Pacino in Dublin.

Posters

This section, in which we are displaying film posters, began in April 2003. After appearing here, these are posted on their own page, called POSTERWALL, gradually building up a gallery that will make the images more accessible than by searching the Internet. This can be found by clicking on the icon

This month’s posters were found for us by Danielle Guérin.

5. Wilde on the Curriculum

We are always anxious to publicise the teaching of Wilde at both second and third level, and welcome news of Wilde on curricula. Similarly, news of the other subjects on whom we are publishing supplements (Whistler, Shaw, George Moore and Vernon Lee is also welcome).

This month we publish an account of teaching Wilde by one of our Associate Editors, Tiffany Perala, of Marylhurst University, Portland, Oregon.

Wilde in the Curriculum: A Separation of Sex and Text

Approaching Oscar Wilde in the undergraduate classroom prompts critical discussions and creative methods of teaching based on my recent experience teaching Literature 382E: Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture at Marylhurst University. Marylhurst's mission states: ‘Animated by its Catholic and liberal arts heritage, Marylhurst emphasizes the uniqueness and dignity of each person, and is committed to the examination of values, as well as to quality academic and professional training.’[1] I have found this mission true and the faculty and students innovative and engaging. With this assurance, I approach Wilde's texts as they were written and encourage students to do the biographical research independently, bringing their insights, interpretations, and questions back to our seminar discussions. My aim is to encourage students to examine the text independent of the author, as far as an objective textual approach is possible. This week one of my students who is new to Wilde discovered the problem of Wilde's sexual difference in her biographical research. ‘Homosexuality has always given rise to myths,’ John McRae explains, ‘And no homosexual figure has more myths surrounding him than Oscar Wilde.’[2] This proved to be the case in my recent class experience teaching Wilde.

Wilde's sexuality is well-known by many, insignificant to others, and still shocking to some. In my particular university role, I attempt to balance respect for the personal needs of students while maintaining an academic environment that promotes freedom of thought, academic honesty, and experimentation with ideas in an open dialogue controlled setting. Guiding students toward the liberty of expression and demonstrating the knowledge and skills requisite to critical research instills a confidence that the banking method of education failed to tap in past decades. Fortunately, for the student who took offense to Wilde's sexual difference upon her discovery, she was able to approach the required reading of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray on her own terms given the separation of sex and text.

Her biographical discovery was prompted by an open dialogue discussion of Dorian Gray. One student had commented that the relationship between Basil and Dorian seemed fatalistic (well done) and questioned whether or not any of the other students got the impression that Basil was homosexual. About three students responded that Wilde himself was known to be a homosexual and that maybe the book was autobiographical. This sparked more dialogue and one interesting misquotation: ‘Wasn't it Wilde who said 'a man can be happy with any woman as long as she is a man'?’ The line is Lord Henry's from Chapter 15 of Dorian and actually reads: ‘A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.’[3] This misquote triggered the offended student to respond to me directly in an email. She said she was concerned that reading Wilde compromised her faith and that she feared that she could not write a term paper on the topic objectively or otherwise.

Her response got me thinking more about the complexity of the author's relationship to the text and how iconic authors in particular, such as Wilde retrospectively is, effect the reader's reception. It also demonstrates the complexity of the novel and the notion of the poisonous book. Does Dorian have the capacity to corrupt readers just as ‘Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book?’[4] Let us not forget that Dorian was listed on the Marquess of Queensberry's plea of justification in Wilde's 1895 libel suit. Queensberry's plea was that Dorian was a public threat and corrupted youth. My student's plea, as she phrased it, was based on similar, though personal, grounds.

I always incorporate links to images and ask students to view the artwork associated with the written works we are reading if it exists. In Wilde, we have Aubrey Beardsley's grotesque illustrations of Salomé as well as Wilde's own projected images, in particular the Napoleon Sarony photographic portrait series of Wilde. The student told me that she had only come across the Sarony images and admitted her immediate fascination with Wilde's projected image. She approached Dorian with this image of Wilde fresh in her memory. The images speak for Wilde: neither masculine or feminine, but Wilde in his element, cane or yellow book in hand, self-possessed, statuesque, refined, dreamy, and Decadent are some descriptors that approach justification. Imagine the shock of an eighteen-year old undergraduate captivated by Wilde's bold visual and reading Dorian full of expectation before coming to the realization, based on fellow students' responses, that her icon might be gay, thus in conflict with her beliefs. It is akin to going on a date with a transsexual before the revelation, for a naïve reader, and an important inaugural lesson for any English Studies major.

I thought of responding first with Wilde's Old Bailey defense of Hellenic love that received a standing ovation, but using Wilde's defense as a precedent to defend the inclusion of Dorian in our syllabus might make matters worse for the student. Instead, I thought back to my undergraduate experience in Shakespeare 222 and the advice our Professor gave us the first day: that he was not there to make ideas safe for us, but us safe for ideas. So, I recycled his speech and added to it that her unbiased reading of Dorian is precisely what is lacking in a considerable amount of Wilde research. As academics, we should neither attempt to reclaim Wilde's heterosexuality or essentialize his homosexuality. Our role is to see the text as in itself it actually is (thank you Matthew Arnold) and then to understand our impressions of the text as they actually are (thank you Walter Pater). Naturally, the intertextual reader will recognize the codifications and allusions more readily, but not doing so does not necessarily affect the pleasure of the text for readers who come to it naïvely.

As one of my thematic concerns with Nineteenth-Century British Literature is to get students to understand the notion and tradition of influence and originality, I thought appropriation was the respectful way to show her that ideas are regenerative, interpretable, and endless, similar to the theories of Creation, Evolution, and Tradition. Certainly, Wilde struggled with his interest in Catholicism and the apparent conflict art and sexuality presented to it prior to his deathbed acceptance into the faith—conscious or not. We have a similar example in John Gray and Gerard Manley Hopkins—both on our syllabus this term as well, but their biographical details were somehow glossed over in our discussions, or perhaps not as interesting to the students as Wilde's. I find that interesting given the fact that Gray (in part the persona Wilde modeled Dorian Gray on) lived in cloistral seclusion as a converted Catholic Priest in Edinburgh with his partner Marc-André Raffalovich and both continued to write poetry, mostly devotional, and support young artists. As for Hopkins, he burnt his early poems until the Jesuits encouraged him to pursue his poetic gift, though his work was only published posthumously by his literary executor Robert Bridges in 1918, twenty-nine years after his death. Clearly, the link between Catholicism and Decadence was established in the Victorian fin de siècle and could even be viewed as a refuge of sexual and artistic expression. George Moore's Decadent novel Mike Fletcher conflates the practice of asceticism, aesthetics, religion, and homosexuality in the persona John Norton, to give one more example of the phenomenon.

Thus, if we consider the interdependency of ideas and the need for progression, as opposed to the alternate route of ascetic denial as Moore demonstrated with Norton, the would-be conflicting aspects of religion, sexuality, and art begin to coalesce, not contradict or compromise personal beliefs. Wilde's De Profundis exemplifies the idea of concord, not discord in the example of Christ. To a large extent, Wilde's contemporary appeal relies on the fact that his texts are interpretable on multiple levels and for multiple readers. This particular student decided that she could write her paper on Dorian's relationship with Sibyl Vane, and this reifies the utility of the ‘Preface’ to Dorian, especially the aphorism: ‘All art is at once surface and symbol.’ You know the rest.

Interestingly, she focused on the play of shadows in Sibyl's life, as portrayed through Shakespeare's heroines, and her eventual awakening. We know that the death of Sibyl's life in art brought about Dorian's cruel rejection and her subsequent suicide. Of course, Dorian suffers a similar fate and it is art that is restored, not life. Heavy material for a student who felt compromised by Basil's, and Wilde's, revealed/concealed sexuality. We had read Alfred Lord Tennyson's ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in Week 2, and I encouraged the class to consider Wilde's appropriation of Tennyson's line: ‘I am half sick of shadows’ and the use of Prince Charming (Dorian) to Sir Lancelot: ‘My Love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life! I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art ever can be,’[5] Sibyl cries on her knees. The Lady of Shalott dies a similar sacrificial death once she faces life, and thereby her curse, directly as opposed to through her mirror. The student felt a connection to Tennyson's poem foremost and ended up writing an excellent paper on Dorian that incorporated Tennyson. Thereafter she emailed me once again to say that she is beginning to understand literature the more she reads and makes connections. Mirrors, shadows, and doubles are deceptive literary motifs after all.

This brings us to Week Nine on the LIT 382E Syllabus: Michael Field and Robert Louis Stevenson. Sigh with me. I suppose I'll need to appropriate Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘différance,’ Roland Barthes's and René Girard's teachings on lover's discourse, mimetic desire, scapegoats, and the monstrous double. This experience reassures me that Wilde Studies are alive and engaging and that sometimes a separation of sex and text is the most enlightening approach to seeing both objectively.

v If you wish to develop any of the points raised in this article, you may like to do so in our discussion forum .

6. Oscar Wilde, shaken and perhaps stirred.

In January we drew readers’ attention to the fortuitously named champagne Pol Carson, brut. This followed a short piece in our autumn issues on the Bordeaux wine Mille Secousses, which Robert Sherard reported as a favourite with Wilde and Whistler while they were still on drinking terms. In February we reproduced the recipe for the cocktail Wilde Mule, which we gave in a very early issue of THE OSCHOLARS.

1 shot Sebor absinthe

freshly squeezed lime juice

top up with ginger ale.

We conclude this jovial short series with a reminder that when masquerading as brother Ernest at Woolton, Algernon ‘drank, I've just been informed by my butler, an entire pint bottle of my Perrier-Jouet, Brut, '89; a wine I was specially reserving for myself.’

Algernon himself of course kept a good cellar:

ALGERNON: Oh! . . . by the way, Lane, I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed.

LANE: Yes, sir; eight bottles and a pint.

ALGERNON: Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.

LANE: I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.

We know that champagne was often served in pint tankards, but the reference to a pint bottle is curious.

7. Whistler

The names of Whistler and Wilde being inextricably linked, we devoted a good deal of space to Whistler in his centenary year of 2003. This monthly section developed its own page called Nocturne. We have been editing and collating the material, and Nocturne will form a permanent supplement to THE OSCHOLARS, where any new information on the Whistler will be published, as well as exhibition and book reviews. This will be mentioned in future Notes & Queries under Whistler, with a link to Nocturne, into which it will then be incorporated. Elaine Saniter from the University of Glasgow is Associate Editor with responsibility for developing this page, and information should be sent in the first instance to her. @

Notice of three exhibitions and an article were posted in February 2007.

To see Nocturne, click

8. A Wilde Collection

There is no universal handbook or vade mecum to the various Wilde Collections, and we plan to make a start here. Sometimes where a collection’s contents are published in detail on-line we will simply give an URL; or we may be able to give more details ourselves. We hope then to be able to bring these together as a new Appendix.

In our January 2007 edition we published a description of the Wilde Collection (Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection) now in the University of Leeds. Joseph Donohue subsequently sent us this note:

I note the information about the Elliott gift of Wilde manuscripts to Leeds. One of them, the 1883 manuscript of The Duchess of Padua, figures in a central way in the edition I have just completed of this play for the Oxford English Texts edition of the complete works. This is the first of several plays in a group that I'm in the process of editing for the OET Wilde. Fortunately, several years back, Fay Elliott allowed me to make a transcription of the 1883 Duchess manuscript. It is as the catalogue entry has it. An article of mine about the 1883 private printing of the play, based on the manuscript of the same year, is forthcoming in The Wildean.

Also forthcoming in The Wildean is an article on the failed production of the play by E. W. Godwin, who tried in late 1884 to get a production of it up at the Olympic, but something happened and it never materialized. Godwin's production book, made on a copy of the privately printed 1883 edition, is now in the Duke University Library.

The most important Wilde collection is that of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California - Los Angeles, to which Wilde scholars are so greatly indebted. The holdings are well represented on the web, and the URL http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf338nb1zb will bring you to the relevant page.

The Library of the University of Reading in England houses the Sherard Collection.

Robert Harborough Sherard (1861-1943) was a journalist, biographer and novelist, best known today for his friendship with Oscar Wilde and his publications in Wilde's defence. The collection includes letters written to Sherard, diaries, works in manuscript and typescript including novels and short stories, and sundry papers. There are also about 40 printed books, plus periodicals, offprints, and pamphlets, mainly by Sherard himself.

Reference: MS 1047
Title: Papers of Robert Harborough Sherard
Dates of creation: 1887-1957 (bulk 1910-1943)
Extent: 14 boxes containing c. 1000 items

Administrative/Biographical History

Robert Harborough Sherard was born in London on 3 December 1861, the fourth child of the Reverend Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy. His father was the illegitimate son of the sixth and last Earl of Harborough and his mother, Jane Stanley Wordsworth, granddaughter of the poet. In 1880 he went up to New College, Oxford but after a quarrel with his father, who cut him off from the expected family inheritance, was forced to leave for financial reasons. At this time he dropped the surname Kennedy. He left for Europe and later enrolled at the University of Bonn to study law and oriental languages, but again had to leave for lack of money. At the age of twenty he settled in Paris to earn his living as a journalist and novelist. In Paris he became acquainted with a number of the leading French literary figures of the eighties and nineties, including Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, and also with Oscar Wilde, with whom he formed a close friendship, although they fell out after Wilde's release from prison. In 1902, two years after Wilde's death, he published Oscar Wilde: the story of an unhappy friendship, which was to be the first of several works in which he maintained Wilde's innocence of the charge of homosexuality. Others include Oscar Wilde twice defended (1934) and Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde (1936).

Sherard supported himself mostly from journalism, contributing articles to papers in France, England and America. He was also a prolific writer of novels, biographies and social commentaries, publishing 33 works in total. The biographies, besides those on Wilde, are Emile Zola (1893), Alphonse Daudet (1894), and Guy de Maupassant (1926). His social investigations, during which he lived with the poor and studied their conditions, resulted in works such as The White Slaves of England (l897). He lived in France for most of his life but died in Ealing on 30 January 1943.

Scope and Content

The collection contains around 650 personal and business letters written to Sherard 1908-1943 by over 200 correspondents, including Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert Ross. There are copies of three letters from Oscar Wilde. In addition there are around 200 letters written by Sherard 1906-1937 (mainly copies), around 70 letters to Alice Muriel Fiddian, Sherard's third wife, and 35 other items of correspondence. There are two of Sherard's diaries, one covering the period July 22 - December 31 1934 and consisting chiefly of a record of letters written, and the other relating to Oscar Wilde twice defended and covering the period 1933-1939. The collection also contains newspaper cuttings 1887-1943, mainly relating to Sherard's work. There are around 60 typescripts and manuscripts of his articles, novels and short stories. Other items include photographs and prints of people and places c. 1920-1939, two family wills, documents relating to legal disputes, notes and other sundry papers.

The collection is supported by around 40 printed books by Sherard, plus pamphlets, periodicals and offprints containing his work.

System of Arrangement

The collection is divided into seven classes: correspondence, diaries, newspaper cuttings, works in manuscript and typescript, photographs and prints, wills, and sundry papers. Correspondence is divided into that received by Sherard, written by Sherard, received by Alice Fiddian, written by Alice Fiddian, and other letters. Within each, letters are filed first alphabetically by author/recipient and then chronologically.

Administrative Information

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Purchased February 1 1964 from Rupert Hart-Davis.

Access Conditions

Open to all researchers. No reader's ticket is required but an appointment is necessary. Check the Library’s Special Collections Service page for contact details and opening hours.

Further Information

Finding Aids

The collection is listed at file level, and at item level in the case of the correspondence.

9. Oscar Wilde and Thomas Moore

Jerry Nolan asks if any views of Wilde on Thomas Moore have survived, or if any literary links have been established between the two. Mr Nolan can be contacted at @

10. A Source for the Canterville Ghost?

We carried this in our February edition, but we find it sufficiently amusing to mention it again here.

1891. ‘I lunched at Wadham [College, Oxford], with a family named Worthington, father, mother, son and daughters. They had all lived for fifteen years in a vicarage where a ghost made frequent and apparently quite meaningless appearances. Commonly identified with Abraham Cowley, it paid no attention to citations from that poet’s works; frightened nobody except newly arrived maidservants, and had once been unwise enough to venture out on to the lawn, whence the irreverent youngsters chased it with tennis-rackets through the net.’

–C.J. Holmes: Self & Partners (mostly Self). London: Constable 1936 p.124n.

11. Oscar in Popular Culture

In The Times Literary Supplement’s competition no. 1,340 (16th March 2007), readers were invited to identify the authors of three paragraph-long quotations, of which the second was

I had a huge iced cake with Jubilé de la Reine Victoria in pink sugar just rosetted with green, a great wreath of red roses round it all. Every child was asked beforehand to choose his present: they all chose instruments of music!!!… They sang the Marseillaise and other songs, and danced a ronde, and also played “God Save the Queen”; they said it was “God Save the Queen”, so I did not like to differ from them.

10. 'MAD, SCARLET MUSIC'

This section is compiled by our Assistant Editor for Music, Tine Englebert of the Rijksuniversiteit Gent, Belgium, who welcomes contributions and observations. @

To go to the 'Mad, Scarlet Music' page, click .

11. GOING WILDE

This section also has its own page specially for it. To reach it, click

Contributions to this section of THE OSCHOLARS from anywhere in the world will be very welcome indeed. We will do our best to arrange reviews, and volunteers are sought. Complimentary tickets can usually be provided.

We thank those readers who have drawn our attention to many of these productions.

12. SHAVINGS

Our supplement Shavings (news of productions and publications on George Bernard Shaw, and of the Shaw Societies) is being moved into its own subsite as part of www.oscholars.com. As noted above, we will in future have the assistance with Shavings of Barbara Pfeifer of the University of Vienna, and without usurping the functions of the many excellent Shaw sources that already exist, we hope we can complement Shaw studies in our way.

Reach Shavings 23 (March 2007) by clicking the picture of a cornet:

13. WEB FOOT NOTES

Our monthly look at websites of possible interest. Contributions welcome here as elsewhere.

All the material thus far published in the monthly 'Web Foot Notes' was brought together in June 2003 in one list called 'Trafficking for Strange Webs'. New websites will continue to be reviewed here each month, after which they will be filed on the Trafficking for Strange Webs page. A Table of Contents has been added for ease of access.

Each month we revisit these sites and our comments on what we find there are posted under the original entry. Thus, this month we have revisited the sites on which we reported in previous Marches and updated our reviews, also noting those sites that no longer exist or have fallen into desuetude.

‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’ surveys 48 websites devoted to Oscar Wilde.

The Société Oscar Wilde is also publishing on its website two lists (‘Liens’ and ‘Liaisons’) of recommendations.

To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’, click .

To see ‘Liens’, click here.

To see ‘Liaisons’, click here.

Sites newly visited

We copy this from the Irish Diaspora list , 13th March 2007:

Forwarded on behalf of Aidan Arrowsmith. Subject: British Association for Irish Studies website.

Some of you will have noticed that, since before Christmas, we have been having major problems with our website. To cut a very long story short, our domain name, which we have owned for many years, was mistakenly sold by our hosting company, and despite protracted negotiations, it has proved impossible to buy it back.

As a result, we are taking the opportunity to overhaul the BAIS website with the aim of making it a genuine hub for Irish studies in Britain. We have a new address, www.bais.ac.uk and have already posted a redesigned, temporary site containing important information about forthcoming events, deadlines and contact details. Over the next few weeks and months, this existing site will be thoroughly expanded to include a wide range of information, which we hope will be of great interest and use to you.

In the meantime, please do visit www.bais.ac.uk - and update your bookmarks!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde is (obviously) the Wikipedia address for Oscar Wilde. The long entry is sound enough, though besprinkled with small errors (‘Sir Edward Clark’ … ‘’The Reverend Stuart Hedlam’ … ‘Chief Justice Sir Alfred Wills’) and is sometimes rather naïvely written. We have little experience of Wikipedia, and do not know how the article rates by its usual standards.

14. SOME SELL AND OTHERS BUY

Our guide to Wilde and other items for sale and related bookshops, has its own page .

Booksellers may like to note that we are very happy to post news of items for sale between catalogue times, and of course we will carry any items for sale or wanted by readers. Our discussion group can also be used for immediate communication.

15. THE WILDE CALENDAR & CHRONOLOGY

The Calendar is a day by day record of events concerning Wilde, originally monthly published in THE OSCHOLARS from July 2001 to June 2002.

Corrections and additions are anxiously sought and will be published here with acknowledgments before being added to the Calendar.

We have now also designed this as a Chronology, where the events are given in sequence. We thank John Cooper for suggesting this.

To go to the Calendar, click here; to go the Chronology, click here.

16. BIBLIOGRAPHy

In this section we have been publishing since February 2003 brief bibliographies of works chiefly concerning Wilde but also dealing with wider aspects of the fin-de-siècle. These are in a simple form as references, rather than detailed lists in a bibliophile sense.

A new bibliography is published here each month, with a brief guide to the bibliographies previously given. Each is subsequently posted in an Appendix, reached by clicking

New items are regularly added to the lists.

In February 2003 we published a list of works on Wilde by Rainer Kohlmayer (University of Mainz) and by Rita Severi (University of Verona), and in March 2003 we listed the articles on Wilde by the late Jerome Buckley as well as a list of articles on Wilde published in English Literature in Transition. In April 2003 to coincide with a list of books wanted by Mosher Books, we added a list of Wilde's works published by the original Mosher firm. In May 2003 we began a bibliography of The Importance of being Earnest, to which we hope readers will contribute.

June’s bibliography was of the writings on Wilde of H. Montgomery Hyde. As always, we welcomed additions and corrections, and thanked Alfred Armstrong (Frank Harris webmaster) for drawing our attention to H. Montgomery Hyde's introduction to Frank Harris: Mr and Mrs Daventry (Richards Press, 1956), which contains a brief history of how it came to be written.

In July 2003, Linda Wong (Hong Kong Baptist University) provided a list of recent articles in Chinese journals, to which we added a few other titles linking Wilde and the Middle Kingdom.

Dr Wong's own 'The Initial Reception of Oscar Wilde in Modern China: With Special Reference to Salome' (Comparative Literature and Culture 3, Hong Kong September 1998, pp.52-73) is republished by kind permission in THE OSCHOLARS Library.

The August 2003 bibliography was of the publications of the Eighteen Nineties Society, which from its inception promulgated a significant publications programme of books and pamphlets. In September 2003, we published a bibliography of Arabic translations of Wilde, generously compiled for us by Christopher S. Nassaar (American University, Beirut). No such bibliography has been compiled before now. In October 2003, we decided to mark the production by Adrian Noble of A Woman of No Importance at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, with a bibliography of articles, but found only two devoted to this play. We are certain that there must be more! We padded this out with six articles on An Ideal Husband.

Our first issue of THE OSCHOLARS revived (October 2006) saw a bibliography (also lamentably short) for A Woman of No Importance. The November/December issue for 2006 was a bibliography of the writings on Wilde and his period by Professor Nassaar, together with an opening list of medical writings. In January 2007 we extended our range by publishing the first complete bibliography of the writings on late 19thc French art of Professor Gabriel P. Weisberg. This was in part to flag our increasing coverage of the fin-de-siècle as the context or background to Wilde’s contribution to literature and criticism, but chiefly of course to acknowledge the contribution of Professor Weisberg to the lesser explored areas of the period. This was published with the full and generous co-operation of Professor Weisberg himself, and will be kept up-to-date. Last month we published a first list of articles on The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

This month we are very pleased to be able to publish a bibliography of the works of J.P. Wearing, kindly provided for us by Peter Wearing himself. Although Wilde has not been Professor Wearing’s chief interest, his work on late 19th / early 20th century theatre will be familiar to all Wilde scholars and is essential reading on the subject.

Books

    The Collected Letters of Sir Arthur Pinero. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: London: Oxford University Press, 1974. xi, 302pp.
    The London Stage 1890-1899: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1976. xiii, 1229pp.
    English Drama and Theatre, 1800-1900. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978. xx, 508pp. [with L.W. Conolly].
    American and British Theatrical Biography: A Directory. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1979. vi, 1007pp.
    The London Stage 1900-1909: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1981. xvi, 1186pp.
    The London Stage 1910-1919: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1982. xvi, 1369pp.
    The London Stage 1920-1929: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 3 vols. Metuchen. NJ, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984. xvi, 1787pp.
    G.B. Shaw: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him: Volume I: 1871-1930. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986. xxiv, 562pp.
    The London Stage 1930-1939: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 3 vols. Metuchen, NJ, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1990. xviii, 1977pp.
    The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1991. xviii, 1264pp.
    The London Stage 1950-1959: A Calendar of Plays and Players. 2 vols. Metuchen, NJ, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1993. xviii, 1789pp.
    Bernard Shaw and Nancy Astor: Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Xi, 235pp.
    The Shakespeare Diaries: A Fictional Autobiography. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, 2007. 455pp.
    Arthur Wing Pinero: ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.’ Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press [in press].
Bernard Shaw: ‘Arms and the Man.’ London: A. & C. Black [forthcoming].

Articles

‘A Pinero Revival?’ Drama, no. 94 (Autumn 1969), 40-42.
    ‘Pinero's Letters in the Brotherton Collection of the University of Leeds,’ Theatre Notebook, 24 (1969-70), 74-79.
    ‘Pinero the Actor,’ and ‘Pinero's Professional Dramatic Roles, 1874-1884,’ Theatre Notebook, 26 (1972), 133-44.
    ‘Nineteenth-Century Theatre Research: A Bibliography for 1972 [and sub-sequent years],’ Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, 1 (1973), 109-23; 2 (1974), 93-111; 3 (1975), 97-126; 4 (1976), 89-111; 5 (1977), 93-ll4; 6 (1978), 95-118; 7 (1979), 99-121; 8 (1980), 91-106; 9 (1981), 107-131; 10 (1982), 93-109. [first five bibliographies with L.W. Conolly.]
‘Two Early Absurd Plays in England,’ Modern Drama, 16 (1973), 259-64.
‘John Neville in Canada,’ Drama, no. 113 (Summer 1974), 37-38.
‘Pinero: The Money Spinner,’ Notes and Queries, 21 (1974), 218.
    ‘The London West End Theatre in the 1890s,’ Educational Theatre Journal, 29 (1977), 320-32.
    ‘Henry Arthur Jones: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him,’ English Literature in Transition, 22 (1979), 160-228.
    ‘Arthur Wing Pinero,’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 10: Modern British Dramatists, 1900-1945: Part 2: M-Z, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Detroit: Gale Research/Bruccoli Clark, 1982), pp. 98-110.
    ‘Additions and Corrections to Allardyce Nicoll's “Handlist of Plays, 1900-1930”,’ Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, 14 (1986), 51-96.
    ‘Edwardian London West End Christmas Entertainments, 1900-1914,’ in When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre, ed. Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 230-240.
    ‘Night Must Fall,’ in Masterplots II: Drama Series, ed. Frank N. Magill (Pasadena: Salem Press, 1990), pp. 1138-1142.
    ‘Mrs Patrick Campbell,’ ‘Nell Gwyn,’ ‘Lillie Langtry,’ ‘William Charles Macready,’ and ‘Dame Ellen Terry’ in The World Book Encyclopedia (Chicago: World Book Publishing, 1991), vol. 3, pp.90-91; vol. 8, p. 471; vol. 12, p. 63; vol. 13, p. 27; vol. 19, p. 179 respectively.
    ‘Richard D'Oyly Carte’, ‘Eleanore Duse,’ and ‘Beatrice Lillie’ in The World Book Encyclopedia (Chicago: World Book Publishing, 1992), vol. 5, p. 319; vol. 5, p. 390; vol. 12, p. 303 respectively.
    ‘George Alexander,’ ‘Arthur Bourchier,’ and ‘J.T. Grein’ in The Eighteen Nineties: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art and Culture, ed. G.A. Cevasco (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 10-11, 73-74, 247-248 respectively.
    ‘Nancy Price and the People's National Theatre,’ Theatre History Studies, 16 (1996), 71-89.
    ‘Henry Arthur Jones,’ and ‘Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’ in Joanne Shattock, ed., The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 3rd edition, volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), cols 2046-50, 2054-58,
    ‘Sir George Alexander,’ ‘William Archer,’ ‘Sir Francis Robert Benson,’ ‘Mary Emma Ebsworth,’ ‘Jacob Thomas Grein,’ ‘Sir John Hare,’ ‘Sir Augustus Henry Glossop Harris,’ ‘Samuel Phelps,’ ‘Stephen Phillips,’ ‘Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’and ‘William Poel’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

17. AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?

This section, which has its own page, was originated for pieces too long for the Notes & Queries section but perhaps not quite substantial enough for articles in the print journals; or for ripostes. It may serve also as a notice board of early drafts, with comments invited; for papers given to conferences; for work that has been cut from articles elsewhere by unfeeling and purblind editors; or simply for work that we want to publish. Increasingly, we are giving space to articles submitted by our readers.

This section will also contain occasional vanity publishing by the Editor.

In 'And I? May I Say Nothing?' last month we published ‘Des Profondeurs’, an original work by Danielle Guérin, who is not only one of our Associate Editors on THE OSCHOLARS but also editor of rue des beaux arts, the journal of the Société Oscar Wilde in France, of which she is one of the four founder members. This month, we publish

i. The response by Talia Schaffer to Grace Brockington’s review of her Literature and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle;

ii. by kind permission, the abstract of a paper by Ellen Scheible, given at the 2007 American Conference for Irish Studies ‘The Gothic Sublime in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

To go to this month’s ‘And I? May I Say Nothing?’ click

See also the LIBRARY for articles republished from elsewhere.

We remind readers that original work may be submitted to The Wildean and to Impressions, the journals of the Oscar Wilde Society and the Oscar Wilde Society of America (see next item).

18. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY

THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

v v We welcome news from any Oscar Wilde group.

1. The Oscar Wilde Society

THE OSCHOLARS happily continues its cousinly association with the Oscar Wilde Society. A membership form which can be copied and printed is below. The Society now has its own website, www.oscarwildesociety.co.uk.

Donald Mead, Chairman of the Society, writes:

The Oscar Wilde Society is a literary society devoted to the congenial appreciation of Oscar Wilde. It is a non profit-making organisation which aims to promote knowledge, appreciation and study of Wilde's life, personality and works. It organises lectures, readings and discussions, including author's lunches and dinners, and visits to places in Great Britain and overseas associated with Wilde. The Society's Annual General Meeting is held in London, and the annual Birthday Dinner takes place at Simpsons-in-the-Strand, London. The Society's most recent events are reported in Intentions, the Society's newsletter.

The Society issues to its members a valuable print journal, The Wildean, and a Newsletter, Intentions, the costs of which are covered solely by membership subscriptions.

New members are very welcome. The current annual individual subscription (UK) is £20 and household membership £25. The rates for overseas membership are £23 (European postal area) and £28 (Rest of the World). Subscribers receive two issues of The Wildean and about six issues of Intentions each year.

Contacts for the Society are given below.

The Wildean

The Society's Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies–The Wildean–is published twice a year (in January and July). It is edited by Donald Mead, and the Reviews Editor is Dr Anya Clayworth. It contains features on a variety of subjects relating to Wilde, including articles, reviews and correspondence.

Over the years, a number of previously unpublished Wilde letters have been reproduced in facsimile, with commentaries, and the support received from Merlin Holland in doing this is gratefully acknowledged. The Wildean also publishes articles giving the results of research into a number of aspects of Wilde's life, particularly his lecture tour in the British Isles. Books of Wildean interest are reviewed as soon as possible after issue.

The Wildean is a publication of permanent interest (MLA listed and indexed) and copies of all back issues are available. Details from the Editor (see below). Librarians and collectors interested in acquiring sets are invited to contact the Editor for details of contents and prices.

Contributions to future issues of The Wildean are invited, both articles and shorter items— reviews, notes and correspondence. Guidelines for submissions are here given by Mr Mead, and articles should be sent to him at the address given below.

Editorial policy

The editorial policy of The Wildean is to publish studies of the life, works and times of Oscar Wilde and his circle. The aim is to print material which will interest Wilde specialists and also be accessible to general readers. Full-length articles, reviews, short items and correspondence are all welcome.

In addition to the publication of articles of scholarly interest, including those incorporating the results of new research, works about Wilde published in English are reviewed as soon after publication as possible.

Guidelines for contributors

The language accepted for publication is English. Any passages in other languages that may be quoted must be accompanied by an English translation.

It is the contributor's responsibility to seek any necessary permission to use copyright material.

Style guide: British norm. The Oxford Manual of Style (Oxford University Press, 2002) is very useful. Adjustments may be made editorially.

Footnotes are an interruption to the reader and should generally be avoided.

Endnotes should be used for documentation and citation of sources, not for extra expository material which is better incorporated in the text.

Suggested length:

Articles: 400 words upwards. 6,000 words, including notes, is the maximum.

Reviews: 300-1,000 words

Notes: 100-300 words.

Concision and clarity are sought. Articles of between 2,000 and 4,000 words are particularly favoured. Jargon should be avoided, and academic tone and analytical style moderated. Articles should hold the attention of the general reader.

Submission: Preferably, text in Word either on disc or by e-mail. Please do not incorporate footnote or endnote formatting. Alternatively, one typescript copy. Fax submissions cannot be accepted.

No submission fees or page charges are required.

Copyright ownership: individual contributors.

Rejected manuscripts returned if author requests (with s.a.e.)

Contributors

Contributors to recent issues have included many distinguished writers on Wilde, among them Anne Clark Amor, Simon Callow, Anya Clayworth (the Reviews Editor), Terry Eagleton, Nicholas Frankel, Jonathan Fryer, Sir David Hare, Anthony Holden, Merlin Holland, Joy Melville, Sir John Mortimer, Douglas Murray, Christopher Nassaar, Horst Schroeder, Matthew Sturgis and Thomas Wright.

The Wildean warmly welcomes contributions both from established writers and from new writers.

Intentions:

The Society's newsletter–Intentions–is published about six times a year. Edited by Michael Seeney, it gives information about the Society's forthcoming events, and details of public performances of Wildëan interest. New publications are noted–these may also be the subject of full reviews in The Wildean. Intentions also regularly prints illustrated reports of Oscar Wilde Society events and snippets of out of the way Oscariana.

The Wildean Tables of Contents.

THE OSCHOLARS has since we began published the Table of Contents for each new issue of The Wildean, and will continue to do so; in the months when there was no new issue, we published the Table from one or more of the earlier numbers. Thirty editions of The Wildean have now been published. Contents of the whole set is published by us as a combined list of Tables of Contents on its own webpage. The order is alphabetical: author, then of article; articles contributed pseudonymously by the late Bindon Russell have been identifed. Each new issue of THE OSCHOLARS carries a link to this Table by way of clicking on The Wildean logo, below. It can also be reached by a link from http://www.oscarwildesociety.co.uk/publications.html. On The Wildean’s ToC page can also be found a link to the ToC of the Wild about Wilde newsletter, now regrettably no longer published, compiled for THE OSCHOLARS by its editor and publisher Carmel Mc Caffrey.

A short descriptive piece by Donald Mead about each issue of The Wildean was published with the ToCs in THE OSCHOLARS and a table indicating in which issue these are to be found is given with The Wildean’s combined Table of Contents. We resumed this practice when we returned to publication after our exile from cyberspace, and the last of the missing descriptions is here published

The Wildean No. 28. Issued in January 2006

Articles about Harry Marillier and Kate Field, by Jonathan Fryer and Gary Scharnhorst respectively, tell the stories of two of Oscar Wilde’s friendships. Both articles draw on unpublished or unfamiliar sources and add to our understanding of one of Oscar’s loves (Marillier) and of his friendship with Kate Field in New York, one of the best-known women in America, at the time of his 1882 lecture tour.

Peter Chadwick whose article on Oscar Wilde ‘The Artist as Psychologist’ attracted much interest, contributes another study, ‘The Playwright as Psychologist.’ The articles persuade us that Wilde was the true father of psychology as an art as opposed to psychology as a science.

Nils Clausson unveils Lady Alroy’s secret in a persuasive study of ‘Surface and Symbol’ in Wilde’s ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’.

Rebecca Lane studies ‘Oscar Wilde and the Epigram’ discussing how Wilde defies convention not only in individual epigrams but also in the epigrammatic working of his plays.

Peter Rowland writes a fascinating account of Charles Augustus Howell for whose cleverness (according to Robert Sherard) Oscar had some admiration, but who was ‘the very personification of the Victorian villain, tall, charming and totally unscrupulous.’

Max Siegel, in ‘On Losing Both One’s Parents: Carelessness or Tampering?’ gives us a close glimpse of Wilde (and Robbie Ross) at work on the final version of an iconic line in The Importance of Being Earnest

In the book reviews section, Danielle Guérin discusses Isaure de Saint-Pierre’s Bosie and Wilde. The title of her article signals its content: ‘Posing as a Biographer’.

Robert Ross, in what he described as a ‘superfluous note of explanation’ introducing his 1912 edition of The Soul of Man Under Socialism said:

‘Oscar Wilde’s writings require, I have often observed elsewhere, no introductions. Even De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol the two more personal works from his pen, explain themselves and thereby defeat the ingenuity of editors or commentators.’

In relation to De Profundis Ross was being somewhat disingenuous, but he could hardly have imagined just how ingenious twenty-first century editors and commentators would be. De Profundis is now published in the Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. ‘De Profundis: Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’, edited by Ian Small, is reviewed and commented upon in detail by Nicholas Frankel, Horst Schroeder and Merlin Holland. As Merlin Holland remarks, the history of De Profundis has been a stormy one. It is hardly surprising that Ian Small’s edition, whilst respected for its thoroughness and erudition, should also be the subject of considerable disagreement. These forthright reviews are fascinating reading.

The Wildean No. 30 was issued in January 2007 and we gave its contents in the February issue; the next issue is due in July.

Membership form (copy, paste and print)

Please print out this form and return it to
The Oscar Wilde Society, 19 Southill Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 1LA, England, with a cheque drawn on a British bank, payable to The Oscar Wilde Society.

Individual subscription (UK) is £20 and household membership £25.

The rates for overseas membership are £23 (European postal area) and £28(Rest of the World).

We can also accept (in cash, not by cheque) €35 Euros (for Europe) or $45 US dollars. (for USA). We welcome payment by standing order; for details, please send an s.a.e.

Your details: (please use BLOCK CAPITALS)

Name..................................................................................................... Address................................................................................................
Postcode ................…….................................
E-mail …………………………………………...
Telephone ..........................................................

Date …………………..............

TO 03/07

More information about the Oscar Wilde Society and details of membership may be obtained from Vanessa Harris, the Hon. Secretary (see below).

For more information about (and for) The Wildean (including availability of previous issues) and Intentions, please contact Donald Mead (see below).

The Oscar Wilde Society may be contacted by writing to

Vanessa Harris

Hon. Secretary, The Oscar Wilde Society

19 Southill Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 1LA, England

e-mail: vanessasalome@blueyonder.co.uk

The Wildean and Intentions maybe contacted by writing to

Donald Mead

Chairman, The Oscar Wilde Society

Editor, The Wildean & Intentions

63 Lambton Road, London, SW20 0LW, England

e-mail: donmead@wildean.demon.co.uk

2. La Société Oscar Wilde

This was founded in Paris in January 2006 by Emmanuel Vernadakis, D.C. Rose, Danielle Guérin and Lou Ferreira as the French branch of The Oscar Wilde Society, which all are urged to join. Its activities so far have included arranging group visits to Wilde productions and the creation of a bimestrial bulletin, called rue des beaux arts, of news, reviews and articles concerning Wilde and his French associates. This is edited by Danielle Guérin and six issues have been published, the last in December, the next due in February. At the moment its coverage is chiefly confined to metropolitan France, Wallonie and French Switzerland, but it is aimed at French speakers everywhere, and it is hoped that readers of THE OSCHOLARS will draw this to the attention of colleagues in Departments of French who teach the literature of the fin-de-siècle. Membership is free from melmoth@aliceadsl.fr and information about rue des beaux arts (which accepts articles in English as long as they have a bearing on Wilde in France or Wilde’s French circles, influence etc) can be obtained from danielle.guerin@radiofrance.com. Its archives are housed with those of THE OSCHOLARS at www.irishdiaspora.net, but will be transferred to www.oscholars.com. From time to time articles from rue des beaux arts will be translated into English and published in THE OSCHOLARS.

The April/May issue is now on line and can be reached by clicking .

The Société Oscar Wilde is not to be confused with the Association des Amis d’Oscar Wilde, which also exists in France. We can say virtually nothing about its activities (save that it awards a literary prize more or less annually) as it discloses very little information about itself. Our application to join was not accepted.

3. The Oscar Wilde Society of America

<< The Oscar Wilde Society of America is an academic and literary society founded in 2002 to promote the study, understanding, and dissemination of research about Oscar Wilde and his times from the American perspective.

We are especially engaged in fostering a wider awareness of Oscar Wilde's 1882 American lecture tour, and the artists, educators, and other people he met on his tour across the continent. >>

Anyone interested in the OWSoA can make contact via the elegantly-designed web page http://www.owsoa.org/ or even http.owsoa.org (thus: without the www). This has replaced the former
http://www.indstate.edu/humanities/owsoa.htm. Other contact addresses are below.

The officers of the Society are now given as

Marilyn Bisch, President, e-mail: marilyn@owsoa.org.

Dr. Donald Jennermann, Corresponding Secretary, OWSOA, University Honors Program, 424 North 7th Street, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809 USA.

The webmaster is John Cooper.

While the Society is not at the moment undertaking activities, its website remains a valuable resource. An important feature is a well-designed and accurate Calendar of Wilde's engagements in America, edited by Marilyn Bisch.

This can be found at http://owsoa.org/library/libraryhome.htm, replacing its earlier site at http://www.indstate.edu/humanities/owsoacalendar.htm.

We look forward to the Society’s return to activity.

4. Project Oscar Wilde

This is the organisation, chaired by Heather White, that arranged the annual Oscar Wilde Weekend in Enniskillen, held each year in June. A report of the 2003 event was published in our July issue that year, but the website and e-mail addresses no longer function and although a festival was held in 2004 we have not been able to find recent news. We hope this situation will change, and will report any news that we are sent.

5. The Oscar Wilde Society of Japan

We have an e-mail address for this Society, but no reply has been made to our enquiry and we have been unable to learn anything about it from other sources.

Return to Table of Contents |Return to hub page |Return to THE OSCHOLARS home page

[1] http://www.marylhurst.edu/aboutmarylhurst/mission.php

[2] John McRae, "Introduction" to Teleny by Oscar Wilde and Others (London: GMP Publishers Ltd., 1986), 7.

[3] Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), 137.

1. THE EDITORIAL TEAM

Associate Editor, Shavings

2. News from the Editor

3. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS & CORRESPONDENCE

4. FREQUENTING THE SOCIETY OF THE AGED AND WELL-INFORMED: NEWS FROM READERS

1. Ellmann and After: A proposal

2. Lord Alfred Douglas

3. Ferdinand Khnopff

4. George Moore in Lille and Hull

5. Literary London

6. The London Adventure

5. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

6. PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

7. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE

1. Wilde at Harvard

2. The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture Research Project

3. Reading and Discussion Groups

4. Exhibitions

5. Society News

6. Conferences, Seminars, Lectures

Table of Contents

7. The Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.

8. The Theatre Museum, London; the British Library; the William Morris Gallery; the Wellcome Library

9. The British Cemetery in Florence

10. The Victorian Newsletter

11. Work in Progress

12. Awards

8. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS

9. NOTES AND QUERIES

1. Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan

2. Oscar Wilde at Oxford

3. Finding publication data for Victorian novels

4. Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph

5. Wilde on the Curriculum

6. Oscar Wilde, shaken and perhaps stirred.

7. Whistler

8. A Wilde Collection

Administrative/Biographical History

Scope and Content

System of Arrangement

Administrative Information

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Access Conditions

Further Information

Finding Aids

9. Oscar Wilde and Thomas Moore

10. A Source for the Canterville Ghost?

11. Oscar in Popular Culture

10. 'MAD, SCARLET MUSIC'

11. GOING WILDE

12. SHAVINGS

13. WEB FOOT NOTES

14. SOME SELL AND OTHERS BUY

15. THE WILDE CALENDAR & CHRONOLOGY

16. BIBLIOGRAPHy

17. AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?

18. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY

THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

1. The Oscar Wilde Society

Please print out this form and return it to The Oscar Wilde Society, 19 Southill Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 1LA, England, with a cheque drawn on a British bank, payable to The Oscar Wilde Society.

2. La Société Oscar Wilde

3. The Oscar Wilde Society of America

4. Project Oscar Wilde

5. The Oscar Wilde Society of Japan

Please print out this form and return it to
The Oscar Wilde Society, 19 Southill Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 1LA, England, with a cheque drawn on a British bank, payable to The Oscar Wilde Society.