SEMINAR SCHEDULE

In order for participants to understand the scope of the Wilde archive, the first day will feature two introductory sessions. On the morning of Monday, June 25, 2007, the Project Director will explain how each of the thirteen subsequent meetings will proceed. He will clarify what is expected of class members in relation to the two short research-based presentations each participant shall make, the extent to which seminar members are expected to engage with the recommended readings, and the kinds of written work that some of the participants might like to develop with his help in light of the five-seminar. The two short research-based short presentations, which will last for no more than fifteen to twenty minutes, will relate the recommended readings to additional materials that he or she has found in the archive. The presenter will provide an assessment of the archival sources, and he or she will be encouraged to formulate some questions about the light these materials throw on the readings that everyone has prepared. By the end of the morning meeting on June 25, the Project Director will ask for volunteers to address the readings set for the sessions “Wilde at Oxford,” “Wilde in London, 1879-1881,” and “Wilde’s American Tour, 1882.” Professor Bristow will be available to meet with all participants on an individual basis on Mondays, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons from 2.00pm to 4.30pm. In principle, each participant will have the chance to discuss their research-led presentations with the Project Director for up to half an hour each week. Early in the second week, the Project Director will establish which participants will take responsibility for making fifteen- to twenty-minute presentations during the meetings held in weeks three, four, and five.

After this first Monday morning session, participants will adjourn to a luncheon provided by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Here they will be introduced to the Director of Center, Professor Peter Reill, the Assistant Director, Elizabeth Landaw, and several members of the Clark Library staff: Bruce Whiteman (Head Librarian), Jennifer Schaffner (Librarian), and Scott Jacobs (Reader Services).

During the afternoon of Monday, June 25, class members will receive instruction from Jennifer Schaffner and Scott Jacobs on how to make the most efficient use of various online and printed catalogs. In particular, the librarians will show participants the most productive ways of searching with the comprehensive finding-tool to the Wilde archive. Since it still remains the case that not all of the materials in the archive are searchable by means of the finding-tool, it will be necessary for class members to understand how the original card index, dating from the 1920s, is structured. (The card index has some special features which can prove extremely useful to scholars. In this regard, the chronological listing of all documents which were deposited in the archive up to and including 1980 offers a very helpful way of conducting “slice history” searches that connect diverse materials originating from the same historical moment.) Moreover, participants will become acquainted with UCLA’s online catalog, together with its very rich array of e-resources that have relevance to the study of late-nineteenth-century English literature.

Since the Clark Library is some thirty minutes’ driving time from the main campus, and since it can take a while to master the expansive UCLA library system, the Summer Seminar will employ two Graduate Student Assistants (GSAs) whose main task will be to deliver items held in the main campus libraries to the participants. For the most part, the GSAs will be most likely fulfilling requests for copies of journal articles held in the Young Research Library (YRL), as well as secondary works on broad historical topics not included in the Clark Library’s main collections. (The GSAs might also be persuaded to take our orders for sandwiches from local delis.) After the initial library session on Monday, June 25, the class members will meet with the GSAs, who will give out their email addresses and contact numbers. Each of the GSAs will be employed for fifteen hours per week (three hours of which will be devoted to making the journey between the Clark Library and the main campus), and they will be available to meet with the participants for an hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesday, June 26, any class member who would like to use the main-campus libraries on an independent basis will be welcome to accompany the Project Director for a visit to the Young Research Library, which ranks among the finest university libraries in the United States. Professor Bristow will arrange a one-hour tour of the YRL with one of the reference librarians.

On the mornings of Wednesday, June 27 and Friday, June 29, participants will gather to address a number of basic methodological challenges that arise specifically from the detailed study of Wilde’s twenty-five year career. The focus will be on the ways in which certain critical and related resources can elucidate Wilde’s four-year period as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford—a time when Wilde not only began to fashion himself as a stylish aesthete but also strove to establish himself as an art critic, intellectual, and poet. During the Wednesday morning session, class members will concentrate on the decisive role that Richard Ellmann’s imposing 1987 biography, Oscar Wilde, has played in our understanding of the author’s Oxford days, in particular, and his later career, more generally. Participants will have the opportunity to consider the manner in which Ellmann’s highly influential life-writing shapes Wilde’s personal and professional achievements according to a pattern that involves a gradual rise to fame and a rapid fall from grace. (Ellmann divides his biography into five parts whose titles disclose the overall pattern he wishes to impose on Wilde’s life: “Beginnings,” “Advances,” “Exaltations,” “Disgrace,” and “Exile.”) Class members will see how Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde—which was drawn to completion in difficult personal circumstances—is, like most biographies, a somewhat partial account. They will also learn that Ellmann’s remarkable scholarship is at times inaccurate, as Horst Schroeder has shown. The Project Director will alert seminar participants to the need to check supposed facts about Wilde’s Oxford career not only against Schroeder’s lengthy list of larger and smaller errors in Ellmann’s research but also against Karl Beckson’s useful 1997 Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. The Project Director will circulate a folder containing reprints of critical responses to Ellmann’s biography, including an important essay by Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland on how and why Ellmann audaciously asserted that Wilde died of syphilis. (Ellmann took many of his cues from a highly disreputable biography which Wilde’s associate, Frank Harris, published to great commercial success in 1916.)

In order to grasp alternative approaches to interpreting Wilde’s Oxford days, we will examine a number of images—photographs, sketches, and caricatures—contained in both Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album (1997) and several uncataloged boxes (which have contents lists) held in the archive. We will also consider a number of the most significant social contacts that Wilde made during his Oxford days, including his friendships with William Ward, Ronald Sutherland-Gower, Rennell Rodd, and David Hunter-Blair. All of these contacts have a significant bearing on an urgent matter that scholars have tended to neglect in studies of Wilde’s time at Oxford—namely, his interest in converting to the Church of Rome. Class members will have access to unpublished correspondence from Rev. Sebastian Bowden (a leading figure at the Catholic Oratory in London), as well as documents that illuminate how and why Hunter-Blair arranged for Wilde to have an audience with Pope Pius IX in 1877. Meanwhile, we will make note of Sutherland-Gower’s appalled response to Wilde’s Catholic pretensions. Sutherland-Gower is a representative of the homosexual subculture with which Wilde would become increasingly acquainted from this time on. Participants will be made aware of Wilde’s acquaintance with Oxford don, Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) had a lasting impact of Wilde’s critical appreciation of and contribution to literary aestheticism and Decadence.

On Friday, June 29, class members will continue their focus on Wilde’s Oxford experience by looking at two sets of his writings. To begin with, we will explore nine of his shorter lyrics dating from the 1875-78 period, together with accomplished long poem, Ravenna, which won the University’s prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1878. Many of these poems concentrate on Wilde’s two visits to Italy, first in June-July 1875, and then in March-April 1877. On both occasions, he enjoyed the company of his former tutor from Dublin, J.P. Mahaffy, who proved hostile to Wilde’s Catholic interests. Later in seminar, our attention will turn to one of Wilde’s early concerted attempts to produce an erudite critical essay. “The Rise of Historical Criticism,” which was published posthumously in 1905, was Wilde’s ambitious entry for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize at Oxford in 1879. This essay draws extensively on Wilde’s knowledge of Herodotus and Thucydides, whose works he studied in depth for his degree in Literæ Humaniores (or “Greats), in which he graduated with a glowing Double First. The Clark Library holds two manuscript notebooks containing the drafts of two parts of this four-part essay. Participants will be able to compare these notebooks with a number of unpublished documents that Wilde composed as an undergraduate, especially the 350-page “Philosophy” notebook which the Clark Library acquired at Christie’s, London, in February 2004. These materials reveal that Wilde was right to think he could forge a career as a University Tutor in Classics. (Wilde submitted an application for such a post at Trinity College, Oxford, in November 1878. His candidacy was not successful.)

At the end of our meeting on Friday, June 29, the Project Director will circulate an evaluation form that participants can complete over the weekend and submit the following Monday. This form will provide individuals to comment on such matters as seminar discussion, housing, library facilities, and the syllabus.

The opening meeting of the second week of seminar will turn to Wilde’s move from Oxford to London, where, it seems, the young Irishman at first shared rooms with painter Frank Miles off The Strand before the two of them relocated in bohemian Chelsea. It was during this busy period that Wilde’s efforts to establish himself as an up-and-coming poet flourished; it was also the time when he strove to secure the production of his political drama, Vera, or, the Nihilists, on the London stage. The holdings in the archive will reveal to participants the kinds of periodicals, such as Time and the World, in which Wilde’s florid poetic tributes to actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry appeared. Meanwhile, the uncataloged boxes of visual materials will show the extent to which Wilde’s increasingly visible image as a critically outspoken fashionable man-about-town was caricatured in the press. Relevant volumes of Punch that contain some of George Du Maurier’s caricatures which attack “aesthetic” types, including Wilde, will be available for consultation. Wilde’s major publication at this time was Poems (1881), which most critics claimed was derivative and pretentious. Seminar members will explore how and why his play about Russian anarchism, Vera, failed to make it into production at the Adelphi Theatre in December 1881. The archive houses an unpublished notebook which contains an early draft of this play, which eventually opened in New York City, in 1883, to poor reviews. The Clark Library holds a number of letters from Frank Miles’s father to Wilde; the later items of correspondence show that the Rev. Miles saw Wilde as a bad influence on his son, from whom Wilde parted in 1881.

On Friday, July 6, participants will examine how Wilde’s increasing fame led theatre manager Richard D’Oyly Carte to offer Wilde a remunerative contract to conduct a lecture tour of North America. Wilde’s lectures were supposed to complement the American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta about the so-called Aesthetic Movement, Patience. The assigned readings comprise the transcripts of four of Wilde’s lectures, including “The English Renaissance of Art.” Seminar members will also read Wilde’s “L’Envoi”: the introduction that Wilde furnished for the American edition of his Oxford friend Rennell Rodd’s collection of poems. The recommended readings show the extent to which Wilde remained, at this early stage, a somewhat derivative thinker on topics central to the Aesthetic Movement. “L’Envoi” parrots sections of Pater’s famous “Conclusion” to the 1873 edition of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Meanwhile, many of Wilde’s observations about home decoration owe much to Mary Eliza Haweis’ popular handbooks. The archive contains a wealth of printed sources—including advertising posters, lecture programs, and newspaper clippings—relating to Wilde’s lecture tour. The Clark Library holds an almost complete set of the well-known publicity photographs of Wilde in “aesthetic” dress that were taken at Napoleon Sarony’s studio in New York City (and then sold in three different sizes).

The third week of seminar will begin with a session that investigates how and why Wilde chose to earn his living as a jobbing journalist for much of the 1880s (though his reviews for periodicals began as early as 1877). Since his journalism comprises his largest mass of writings, it makes sense to confine seminar discussion to a crucial aspect of Wilde’s critical thinking—his development as a serious-minded critic whose ideas no longer repeated but revised Pater’s aestheticism. The assigned readings comprise five of Wilde’s articles that engage with aspects of the Aesthetic Movement: the opening of the fashionable Grosvenor Gallery; debates about dress reform; and Selwyn Image’s interest in connecting the verbal and visual arts. In addition, participants will look at the increasing hostility that experimental American painter James Whistler eventually expressed toward Wilde. There is no doubt that Wilde, in later works such as “The Decay of Lying,” remodeled aspects of Whistler’s well-known “Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885). At this stage of the seminar, it is useful to explore Wilde’s conflict with Whistler—which involved Whistler leveling the charge that Wilde plagiarized from him—because it helps to identify a significant aspect of how Wilde would appropriate and refashion ideas devised by some of his most notable cotemporaries. The recommended reading provides background information on Wilde’s career as a journalist, his editing of a largely feminist periodical, The Woman’s World (which covered many “aesthetic” topics), and the scope of the Aesthetic Movement more generally.

Wilde’s emergence as a serious cultural critic provides the focus of the meeting scheduled for Wednesday, July 11. The assigned reading comprises both parts of Wilde’s longest, and most demanding, essay, “The Critic as Artist,” together with “The Decay of Lying.” In order for class members to understand the intellectual genealogy into which Wilde self-consciously places his bold discussion, they will be strongly encouraged to read closely Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), with which Wilde emphatically disagrees. Further, participants will be urged to read the “Preface” to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, since it contains several formulations about the spectator’s relationship with art that Wilde seeks to extend and rethink. Seminar members will have the opportunity to consider how Wilde’s contention that the critic is an artist relates to aspects of mid and late twentieth-century criticism, such as Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1973).

Wilde emerged as a talented writer of fiction in the late 1880s, when a number of his short stories began to appear in journals such as Court and Society Review. His gifts were acknowledged when the prestigious Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” the 1889 novella that explores the supposed identity of the young man whose initials features in the love-triangle which Shakespeare charts in his sonnets. This intriguing story is the assigned reading for this discussion. The recommended reading guides participants toward viewing Wilde’s “Portrait” as part of an ongoing debate in Blackwood’s about the circumstances surrounding the composition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Appropriate volumes of Blackwood’s will be available for consultation.) Schroeder’s research will alert class members to the manuscript held at the Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, as well as to Wilde’s failed attempt to publish a single-volume edition of the novella with John Lane in the early 1890s.

Our discussion of Wilde’s “Portrait” will have set the scene for reading, in a very informed manner, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which made its first controversial appearance in the July 1890 number of the American Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. In many respects, Wilde’s novel, which he extended and revised for publication as a single-volume in 1891, is a repository of many of the ideas he had been developing since the mid-1880s, if not earlier. Moreover, this fascinating story draws on sources—such as Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, handbooks to the South Kensington Museum, and the historical inquiries of John Addington Symonds—that date back to earlier phases of Wilde’s career. By consulting the Project Director’s 2005 variorum edition of Wilde’s novel, participants will be able to appreciate how at least one of the wittiest lines can be traced to Vera. The recommended reading informs seminar members of how and why The Picture of Dorian Gray met with such hostility in some quarters of the British press (leading to W.H. Smith’s removal of the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine from its shelves). Secondary sources will also alert participants to the homosexual scandal known as the Cleveland Street Affair, which broke in the London press just before Wilde started composing his story. Participants will be encouraged to engage with some of the diverse critical approaches that scholars have recently taken toward this popular work.

The next two meetings—on Wednesday, July 18 and Friday, July 20—advance to what is arguably the highest point of Wilde’s career: his three years of success as a leading dramatist who had four Society Comedies performed at fashionable theatres in the West End of London. The assigned reading for Wednesday’s seminar is Lady Windermere’s Fan, which opened to great applause when actor-manager George Alexander presented it at the St. James’s in February 1892. The recommended reading focuses attention on the thoughtful, and not always approving, reviews that Wilde received. Late-Victorian critics readily understood the sources on which Wilde drew, one of which was Alexandre Dumas fils’ Francillon. There will be the opportunity to examine some of the conventions of Society Comedy, Wilde’s adherence to and deviation from those conventions, the influence on Henrik Ibsen’s drama on Lady Windermere’s Fan, and details about George Alexander’s career. The Clark Library holds a manuscript and two typescripts of this play. By comparison, the Friday meeting will turn attention to Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which opened at the Haymarket Theatre in early January 1895. The archive contains the manuscript and corrected typescript of the 1895 production, together with the corrected proofs of the 1899 edition of the drama. Moreover, the archive houses a comprehensive press file of the 1895 production. Participants will be encouraged to trace the evolution of the play from manuscript to printed copy.

In the final week of the Summer Seminar participants will concentrate on the closing phases of Wilde’s career. On Monday, July 23, we will look at the difficulties Wilde encountered in Reading Gaol when he approached Governor Isaacson for reading and writing materials. It was only with the installation of Isaacson’s successor, the liberal-minded Governor Nelson, that Wilde obtained access to the prison notepaper on which he drafted the document he titled “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis.” This 30,000-word document is ostensibly a letter to Wilde’s intimate companion Alfred Douglas. But it has also been characterized as a work of spiritual autobiography, as well as a compassionate plea for prison reform. The assigned reading is De Profundis—the somewhat religious title that Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, gave to this document in 1905 (when a carefully abridged version of it came before the British public). Besides presenting Wilde as a brilliant autobiographer, this document is of great interest because of its very complicated textual history. It took until 1962 before a reliable, stable edition of the complete text of De Profundis came into print. Recently, Ian Small’s 2005 variorum edition has been criticized for the principles upon which he has based his copytext. The recommended reading includes Small’s important recent edition, together with critiques of it by Nicholas Frankel and Horst Schroeder. The Clark Library contains a typescript of De Profundis, as well as a copy of the holograph edition of the manuscript issued by the British Library in 2000.

The penultimate meeting turns to the last major work that Wilde completed: the long, polemical poem titled The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which, among other things, presents a powerful protest against capital punishment. The recommended reading enables participants to see how and why Leonard Smithers proved willing to issue an inexpensive edition of Wilde’s poem, which became a runaway success. Wilde’s letters to Smithers explain why the volume was first issued, not under Wilde’s name, but under the number of Wilde’s prison cell (“C.3.3.”). Seminar members can explore some of the well-known and lesser-known sources on which Wilde’s poem draws—including Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, A.E. Housman’s lyrics in A Shropshire Lad (1896), and Thomas Hood’s The Dream of Eugene Aram (1829). The archive holds the corrected typescript of Wilde’s Ballad.

On Friday, July 27, participants will devote the meeting to reviewing what has been achieved in the course of the preceding five weeks of study. Once the evaluations will be collected, we will adjourn for luncheon provided by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. The staffs of the Center and the Clark Library, together with the Project Director, will bid their formal farewells.