OSCAR WILDE
To Robert Browning
[June 1881] Keats House, Tite Street
Dear Mr Browning, Will you accept from me the first copy of my poems – the only tribute I can offer you in return for the delight and the wonder which the strength and splendour of your work has given me from my boyhood.
Believe me, in all affectionate admiration, very truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
To Matthew Arnold
[June-July 1881] Keats House, Tite Street
Dear Mr Arnold, Will you accept from me my first volume of poems…of the constant source of joy and wonder that your beautiful work was to all of us at Oxford…for I have only now, too late perhaps, found out how all art requires solitude as its companion, only now indeed know the splendid difficulty of this great art in which you are a master illustrious and supreme. Still, such as it is, let me offer it to you, and believe me in all affectionate admiration, truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
To Violet Hunt
[Postmark 22 July 1881] Keats House, Tite Street
Dear Miss Violet Hunt, I thank you very much for your kind letter, and am infinitely delighted that you have thought my poems beautiful. In an age like this when Slander, and Ridicule, and Envy walk quite unashamed among us, and when any attempt to produce serious beautiful work is greeted with a very tornado of lies and evil-speaking, it is a wonderful joy, a wonderful spur for ambition and work, to receive any such encouragement and appreciation as your letter brought me, and I thank you for it again and again.
The poem I like best is ‘The Burden of Itys’ and next to that ‘The Garden of Eros’. They are the most lyrical, and I would sooner have any power or quality of ‘song’ writing than be the greatest sonnet writer since Petrarch.
I go to the Thames this afternoon with Mr Burne-Jones but will hope to see you when I return.
You have made me very happy. Believe me ever sincerely yours
OSCAR WILDE
When both her sons moved to London in 1879, Lady Wilde came to join them and was living in somewhat reduced circumstances, her London tea parties being a pale imitation of her famous Saturday conversazioni in Dublin. Although not yet able to help her financially, Oscar seemed to realise that his mother’s mantle had fallen on his shoulders and attempted to puff her to the editor of the Nineteenth Century.
To James Knowles
[October 1881] Keats House, Tite Street
Dear Mr Knowles, I send you a – rather soiled – copy of my mother’s pamphlet on the reflux wave of practical republicanism which the return of the Irish emigrants has brought on Ireland. It was written three years ago nearly, and is extremely interesting as a political prophecy. You probably know my mother’s name as the ‘Speranza’ of the Nation newspaper in 1848. I don’t think that age has dimmed the fire and enthusiasm of that pen which set the young Irelanders in a blaze.
I should like so much to have the privilege of introducing you to my mother – all brilliant people should cross each other’s cycles, like some of the nicest planets. In any case I am glad to be able to send you the article. It is part of the thought of the nineteenth century, and will I hope interest you. Believe me, truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
To the Hon. George Curzon
[November 1881] 9 Charles Street, Grosvenor Square, London
My dear Curzon, You are a brick! and I thank you very much for your chivalrous defence of me in the Union. So much of what is best in England passes through Oxford that I should have been sorry to think that discourtesy so gross and narrow-mindedness so evil could have been suffered to exist without some voice of scorn being raised against them.
Our sweet city with its dreaming towers must not be given entirely over to the Philistines. They have Gath and Ekron and Ashdod and many other cities of dirt and dread and despair, and we must not yield them the quiet cloister of Magdalen to brawl in, or the windows of Merton to peer from.
I hope you will come and see me in town. I have left my house at Chelsea but will be always delighted to see you, for, in spite of the story of Aristides, I have not got tired yet of hearing Rennell Rodd call you perfect.
I send you a bill of my first attack on Tyranny. I wish you could get it posted in the ‘High’, but perhaps I bother you? Very truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
‘Great success here; nothing like it since Dickens, they tell me. I am torn in bits by Society. Immense receptions, wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer.’
The great break for which Wilde had been waiting came in about October 1881. Earlier that year, in April, Richard D’Oyly Carte had produced Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience at the Opera Comique, London. The opera satirised the contemporary ‘aesthetic’ movement, and the character of Bunthorne, the Fleshly Poet, though perhaps intended for Rossetti, was generally taken as a caricature of Wilde. Patience opened in New York on 22 September and Colonel W. F. Morse, Carte’s American representative, thought that a tour by Wilde himself lecturing on aesthetics, might provide useful publicity, since the American public had not experienced the butt of the satire first-hand. After some last-minute negotiations in London it was agreed that he would receive one-third of the net receipts from the tour once expenses had been deducted. He was accordingly booked to give a series of lectures, sailed on the Arizona on 24 December 1881 and landed at New York on 2 January 1882, where he was reported to have said to the examining customs official (though there is sadly no hard evidence for the anecdote), ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius.’
His first lecture, at the Chickering Hall, New York on 9 January, was on ‘The English Renaissance’ but it was too lengthy and theoretical for many in his audience and the press was critical of his lacklustre delivery. He immediately set about shortening it and within a month it had become ‘The Decorative Arts’ with a much wider popular appeal. He added a second lecture to his repertoire, “The House Beautiful’, for cities in which he had more than one engagement. He also prepared a lecture on ‘Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century’, which he gave in April in San Francisco, accepting with good grace the introductory label of ‘Speranza’s Boy’, bestowed on him by the expatriate Irish, whose memories of Jane’s role in the famine years were still warm.
To Norman Forbes-Robertson
[15 January 1882] New York
My dear Norman, I have been to call on Ian and his wife. She is so pretty and sweet and simple, like a little fair-haired Madonna, with a baby who already shows a great dramatic power and behaved during my visit (I stayed about an hour, breaking fifty-four engagements) like Macbeth, Hamlet, King John, and all the remarkable characters in Shakespeare. They seem very happy, and she is very loving to Ian, and unaffected.
I go to Philadelphia tomorrow. Great success here; nothing like it since Dickens,