Making Oscar Wilde: Michèle Mendelssohn (1882)
We have a very strong image of Oscar Wilde today. He is remembered as the master of wit and style, and champion of the beautiful. But how was this identity constructed? How was he viewed by his contemporaries? In this vibrant episode of Travels Through Time the author and academic Michèle Mendelssohn takes us back to 1882 and his lecture tour of the United States of America to find out.
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When he was 23 years-old Oscar Wilde was given a questionnaire that asked the question, ‘What is your aim in life?’ Wilde’s response, ‘in lazy, looping handwriting’, was a stark wish: ‘for success, fame or even notoriety.’
A clever student who graduated from Magdalen College Oxford in 1878 with a double first in Greats, Wilde’s first years as a graduate were underwhelming. In London he often appeared as a lost soul. His play Vera was unsuccessful. While his book of poems generated some publicity – including a revin enthusiastic review in the New York Times – in other quarters he was satirised as a hanger-on without any clear or meaningful purpose.
It was at the end of 1881, as Michèle Mendelssohn explains, that an opportunity presented itself to Wilde. Britain had recently been wrapped up in a cultural moment called the ‘Aesthetic Craze’ and Wilde had been portayed by magazines like Punch as one of the movements guiding spirits. As a result he was invited to visit the United States of America to present a series of lectures on aesthetic culture. These promised to rescue him from social obscurity and to make him a real star.
Thereafter, 1882 was the year the Wilde ‘fairy tale’ began. He arrived in New York Harbour in early January – whether he announced his arrival with the quote ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius’ is questionable – and soon after he launched himself into an ambitious and playful publicity tour. He was captured in stylised poses by the society photographer Napoleon Sarony. Tickets for his opening lecture on Fifth Avenue were sold for $1 each.
In three scenes, Mendelssohn guides us through the action that followed. For Wilde, 1882 was a year of possibility, scandal and myth-making. It marked, she explains, ‘the beginning of Wilde’s ascent into the great character that we now know.’
The material covered in this episode of Travels Through Time comes from Michèle Mendelssohn’s latest book, Making Oscar Wilde, which was a book of the year in the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement and a semi-finalist for the 2019 PEN America Biography Prize.
"Mendelssohn's remarkable book … uncovers material missed by lengthier biographies, even Richard Ellmann's, and conveys the excitement of real research and discovery."
(John Carey in The Sunday Times)
Michele Mendelssohn is Professor of English and American Literature and a Tutorial Fellow of Mansfield College at the University of Oxford.
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Click here to order Michele Mendelssohn’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: 9 January 1882, Wilde’s first lecture, The Chickering Hall, New York
Scene Two: 18 January 1882, Camden, New Jersey: Wilde visits the poet Walt Whitman
Scene Three: 27 June, Biloxi, Mississippi. Wilde visits the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis
Memento: Oscar Wilde’s fur-lined coat
People
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Michèle Mendelssohn
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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See where 1882 fits on our Timeline
Jordan Lloyd’s colourised image of Oscar Wilde in 1882
About this photograph
Taken 1882, New York City, United States
(Library of Congress)
"The imposing Irish poet Oscar Wilde began a lecture tour of the United States in 1882, captured by celebrity photographer of the day, Napoleon Sarony, at his studio at 37 Union Square. Of the thirty two known portraits of Wilde by Sarony, most were taken in January 1882.
Read more from Jordan J Lloyd here
The location of the three scenes, USA, 1882
Image Credit: Library of Congress
More about the scenes discussed in this episode
Scene One
9 January, New York City: Wilde’s first American lecture
9 January 1882, New York. The Chickering Hall box office put up a placard announcing the lecture was “standing room only.” At 8 o’clock, ticketless hopefuls were turned away. Located in the entertainment district around Union Square, Chickering Hall was going to be filled to the rafters. In the hour before the curtain rose on Wilde’s first lecture, private coaches drove through the frosty streets towards the theatre’s entrance on 5th Avenue and deposited Manhattan’s smart set, those who could easily afford the pricey $1 ticket. Inside the elegant red brick and marble Hall, they joined a throng of more than 1200 ticketholders, including the “representatives of families conspicuous in the fashionable world,” Wilde is a disappointment.
Scene Two:
18 January 1882, Camden, New Jersey: Wilde visits the poet Walt Whitman
Wilde meets the poet Walt Whitman in a much-hyped event. Rumours that they kiss bolster growing concern over Wilde’s effeminacy. Homosexual panic will hover around Wilde throughout his American lecture tour and reverberate up to the height of his career and beyond into his legacy and eventual rise to the status of gay icon This encounter contains the essence of the sexual and gender confusion that will become associated with Wilde throughout his career from his greatest successes in 1892-1895 (for example, at the Lady Windermere’s Fan premiere, with its male coterie of green carnation wearers, his wife and his male lover all sitting together in the audience!) to his tragic downfall and 1895 imprisonment for gross indecency.
Scene Three
27 June, Biloxi, Mississippi: Wilde’s visit with Jefferson Davis
Attacked for his effeminacy and subjected to anti-Irish racist attacks, Wilde fights back by spending time with ‘real men’ like the miners of Leadville, Colorado and by making another celebrity visit – this time to Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederate South during the American Civil War.
On 27 June, Wilde makes a pilgrimage to Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’s white-porticoed residence in Biloxi, Mississippi. “That’s a long way to go to meet anyone,” he said, “but not too far to go to see such a man as Jefferson Davis.” He told a New Orleans journalist that he “had an intense admiration for the chief of the Southern Confederacy.”
That wasn’t idle talk. He explained that Davis’s “fall, after such an able and gallant pleading of his own cause, must necessarily arouse sympathy.” Although he was talking about Davis, he could have been describing his own troubled mission. The Confederate’s idealistic, aristocratic disposition and nobility in the face disappointment may have him reminded him of his own temperament.
Even in defeat, Davis seemed heroic to Wilde. Besides, it was more interesting to examine someone else’s failures than to dwell on his own humbling. At the end of the war, Davis had been savagely lampooned because of his infamous attempt to escape captured in an unmanly disguise – his wife’s coat and shawl. Davis’s defeat held a gruesome fascination to Wilde, who said he had tracked the leader’s “career with much attention.”
Featured images of Oscar Wilde in 1882, Library of Congress
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