Stefano Evangelista
When Oscar Wilde died in 1900, his literary estate was in a mess. He had been declared bankrupt as a result of the trials, his library had been sold and he had lost the copyright of his published works. His reputation had been badly damaged by the scandalous revelations about his homosexuality and the smear campaign that followed. Eight years after his death, though, Wilde’s literary executor Robert (Robbie) Ross brought out a complete edition of his works – a labour of friendship and restitution in fourteen volumes that was intended to relaunch Wilde’s name for the new century. Ross, who had also managed to recover Wilde’s copyright for his sons, wanted to make sure that the writings would be preserved as great literature. As he found out, though, the task of collecting Wilde was far from straightforward. For, aside from the plays, fictions, fairy tales and critical essays, Wilde had also written an extensive amount of journalism. Most of these reviews and essays were published anonymously, as was standard practice at the time, and were therefore difficult to attribute with certainty. Since no manuscripts existed for these works – they would have been routinely thrown in the bin by newspaper and magazine editors – Ross had to rely on biographical information, personal knowledge or, more problematically, intuition. In some cases, it was a matter of determining what sounded like Wilde out of the great mass of printed matter generated by the blooming late Victorian periodical press.
Since the days of Robbie Ross, no one has attempted to put together a complete, authoritative edition of Wilde’s journalism. Now, John Stokes and Mark W. Turner have done so in two thick, heavily annotated volumes that are a landmark in Wilde studies and in the study of late Victorian journalism more broadly. Stokes and Turner revise and update Ross’s edition by going back to the original newspapers and magazines for which Wilde wrote, reconsidering the attribution of every unsigned piece included by Ross and adding new ones omitted by him. We now have 168 items of Wilde’s journalism, including thirty for which the editors were reluctant, perhaps erring on the side of caution, to make a definitive claim for Wilde’s authorship. In a very readable introduction, Stokes and Turner help the reader navigate the complex world of Victorian journalism; in their annotations, they provide detailed contextual information for each review, cross-referencing it with Wilde’s better-known works.
These volumes are the latest instalment in the ongoing Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Published by Oxford University Press and overseen by an international team of scholars, the edition is the twenty-first century’s answer to Ross. Nowadays, it is no longer a case of rehabilitating Wilde or of keeping his works in print, all long achieved. Rather, the aim of the Oxford edition is to establish him as an author of major intellectual and scholarly significance. The Complete Works is, in other words, the decisive step in a process of canonization that got under way some time in the second half of the last century and picked up momentum in the 1980s, when Wilde began to be celebrated widely both within the academy and outside it.
In this sense, the publication of the journalism is one of the most notable achievements of the Oxford edition so far. This is because the articles collected here – most of which will not be familiar even to experienced Wilde readers – tell us a lot about the Wilde of the 1880s, a period of which we know relatively little, and give us a fuller picture than ever of what Wilde was reading, seeing, doing and writing in the years before the major works we associate with him today: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Intentions, Salomé, the society comedies. If the Wilde of the 1890s – the man we know best – is a successful playwright and man of letters, the Wilde of the 1880s is first and foremost a paid journalist. The decade started with a lecture tour of America in which Wilde, long-haired and wearing knee breeches, addressed audiences across the continent on topics such as aestheticism and home decoration. Around this time, his first collection of poems and his first play, Vera, both flopped terribly. Back in London, Wilde styled himself as “professor of aesthetics”. As we can see from the many caricatures in the satirical press that started appearing at this point, he was already famous; but it would still be several years before his fame rested on a literary reputation. In the meantime, Wilde worked as a journalist for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the daily evening paper Pall Mall Gazette, the weeklies Court and Society Review and the Speaker, and the monthly magazine Woman’s World. The experience of working for such varied publications taught him how to manipulate the media in order to construct and manage his celebrity status. He became very good at this, but by the end of the decade he needed a change of scene. As he prepared to write his major works, he decided to move away from the world of journalism, perhaps tired of the frenetic work rhythms and editorial control, and hopeful that a literary career would enable him to treat ambitious topics with greater freedom.
Taken as a whole, the reviews and review articles here show that Wilde the journalist fed on a pretty omnivorous diet, a large portion of which would of course have been set by his editors. In the space of a few months, they go from distinctly meaty pieces such as one on the Letters of George Sand to lighter fare that includes reviews of the handbooks How To Be Happy though Married (“the Baedeker of bliss”, as Wilde dubs it) and Dinners and Dishes, in which Wilde recommends risotto as “a delightful dish too rarely seen in England” and praises the book’s lack of illustrations because “there is always something depressing about the coloured lithograph of a leg of mutton”.
Wilde took clothing very seriously – if seriousness is a register that made any sense to him at all
Some interests stand out clearly, though. First of all, fashion. Together with his wife Constance, Wilde was a promoter of what the Victorians called “rational dress”: he campaigned for a looser and more comfortable style of clothing that would liberate women from corseting and tight-lacing. He thought that, instead of shoes, women should wear clogs (perhaps inlaid with ivory and pearls) and adopt an updated version of ancient Greek dress over a “substratum” of sensible modern German underwear, which would help to ward off the chills of the English climate. Wilde took clothing very seriously – if seriousness is a register that made any sense to him at all. He thought that dress should be regarded as a form of applied art, which brought the realm of the aesthetic out of museums and galleries and into everyday life.
The writings on fashion are typical of Wilde’s effort to translate aesthetics into popular culture. As a critic, he followed in the tradition of classically educated, highly intellectual, provocative writers such as Matthew Arnold, A. C. Swinburne and Walter Pater. Like them, he worked to promote aestheticism and art for art’s sake among the broad middle-class readership of the Victorian periodical press. Unlike Arnold, Swinburne and Pater, though, Wilde was writing for newspapers and commercial titles which required a quick turnaround and a more approachable style. He therefore had to find ways of appealing to a larger public, contributing by this means to the spread of a new and extremely successful brand of popular aestheticism whose followers were as likely to be interested in fabrics, cookery and interior decoration as in Renaissance painting and ancient Greek drama.
Women were the main audience for this new aestheticism. And it is revealing to see just how many of Wilde’s journalistic writings are for and about women. This activity peaks when Wilde takes over the editorship of the Lady’s World, an illustrated monthly that advertised itself as a “high-class magazine for ladies”. Famously, the first thing Wilde did when he took charge of the journal was to change its title: Lady’s World became Woman’s World – a shift that signals a different target audience and different political ambitions. The revamped journal was to provide high-quality journalism aimed at modern middle-class female readers who did not think of themselves as “ladies”. These women were keen to read about culture, education and employment, and Wilde catered for their advanced tastes. Wilde’s editorship of Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889 was a crucial step not only in his career as a journalist but in his development as a writer in a broader sense. It was the only period in his life in which Wilde received a regular salary. More importantly, though, he was now in charge of commissioning essays and reviews, which he did by recruiting an impressive array of women contributors ranging from successful novelists to graduates of the new women’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford.
Wilde’s interest in women was not confined to Woman’s World. Many of his articles for other titles also discuss works by contemporary women authors, particularly poetry. Wilde shows a real awareness of the latest developments in women’s biography and women’s cultural history. He also did a lot of theatre reviewing, especially of Shakespeare and ancient Greek drama. But what stands out most of all are the many reviews of foreign fiction, mainly French, both in the original and in English translation. Wilde always paid close attention to the quality of the translation, often in order to praise but, more frequently, in order to expose the incompetence of the translator. Among nineteenth-century French novelists, he was especially fond of Balzac and Flaubert, while he hated Zola, whom he thought grim and unimaginative.
These were the years when Zola was at the height of his international fame but Wilde pans the fashionable Naturalist school by contrasting it with another phenomenon that was then sweeping through Europe: Russian fiction. One of the small gems of these volumes is a cluster of very interesting and little-known articles on modern Russian novels. Wilde rated Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky far above “the obscene brood of pseudo-realists which roosts in the Cloaca maxima of France” and welcomed their influence on modern literature. He was certainly among the first critics to review the English translations of Crime and Punishment and Injury and Insult, praising Dostoevsky’s command of detail and ability to probe into “the most hidden springs of life”. And he may also have been the author of early articles on Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina (these reviews are listed under “Dubia” here, perhaps somewhat over-cautiously, as they present strong evidence of Wilde’s authorship in the form of cross-referencing).
Again and again, Wilde writes amusingly but passionately against small-mindedness and chauvinism, and is supremely irritated by dullness
Again and again, Wilde writes amusingly but passionately against small-mindedness and chauvinism, and is supremely irritated by dullness. He is a gifted polemicist, as his spats with the American painter Whistler demonstrate, and he is skilled at using polemics as a means of self-promotion. He has a positive passion for picking out banal statements, which he enjoys quoting with minimal commentary, hanging his victims out to dry. Even more crucially for a reviewer who worked largely on commissions, Wilde can always be trusted to make something interesting out of unpromising subject matter. So, of a collection by the American poet and artist Atherton Furlong, he writes that it is “a form of poetry which cannot possibly harm anybody, even if translated into French”; while J. Sale Lloyd’s Scamp is dismissed as one of those novels that “are possibly more easy to write than they are to read”. When Wilde was given boring books to review, he did something daring and brilliant with them: he turned them into Oscar Wilde.
One of the most rewarding ways of reading Wilde’s journalism is therefore as a giant workshop for the making of the Wilde that readers know better from his more famous writings of the 1890s. It is in the journalism that Wilde comes up for the first time with many of the ideas and phrases that he would reuse in critical essays such as “The Decay of Lying” or “The Critic as Artist”. The traffic between his journalism and criticism makes us realize that to draw a sharp divide between these two fields in the Victorian age is a rather arbitrary affair. It is also in the journalism that Wilde learns to play with the epigram – a literary device that he would perfect in his society comedies. He learns to cultivate an effortless style, which mixes critical acumen with silliness, balances learning with superficiality, and tempers natural donnishness by means of studied flippancy. He learns to master that characteristic blend of praise and ridicule. He learns, in other words, to establish that easy, direct contact with the audience that made him a successful dramatist in his own time and that still makes him, on the stage and in print, so appealing to many today.
Stefano Evangelista is Fellow and Tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford. He is the editor of The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, 2010, and, most recently, the co-editor, with Catherine Maxwell, of Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial laureate, which was reviewed in the TLS of January 10
Source: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/wildes-world-of-journalism/
