*** DEBUG START ***
*** DEBUG END ***

Oscar: A life, by Matthew Sturgis

30 November 2018

Michael Wheeler on the price and the value of a new Wilde biography

THIS new biography is eagerly expected by scholars of the decadence of the 1890s and by the many Oscar Wilde fan clubs around the world. Richard Ellmann’s life, published 30 years ago in its familiar green wrapper, graces many a bookshelf. But Ellmann is not always accurate (the book was finished in haste at the end of his life), and much has been discovered since. More significantly, Matthew Sturgis is a biographer and a historian rather than a literary critic.

Sturgis exercises reserve and steely self-control in the earlier sections of the book, on Wilde’s Anglo-Irish formation, as he studiously ignores the carefully constructed figure of “Oscar” who awaits later in the story. In due course, his account of that figure — so famous that his given name was enough to identify him — is compelling. And latterly, of course, the broken Wilde was so infamous that a hypocritical age could wallow in self-righteous condemnation of the “Somdomite” (sic) whom the Marquess of Queensberry had set out to destroy.

Wilde was at once a genius and a poseur, a brilliant classical scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, who would play a part or assume a belief for a while and then drop it for something new and exciting.

At Oxford, he much admired Professor Ruskin, but was later to befriend his master’s enemies and describe the Professor’s beloved Switzerland as “that dreadful place, so vulgar with its ugly big mountains, all black and white, like an enormous photograph”. After playing the part of the wavering Roman Catholic convert as an undergraduate, he found it useful to play a new part as the spurned and lovelorn poet when Bram Stoker become engaged to Florence Balcombe, to whom he had been, at best, a half-hearted suitor.

Oscar Wilde on the front page of The Illustrated Police News (20 April 1895). From the book

We think of Wilde as primarily a dramatist, and many of the poses that he struck in London drawing-rooms prepared him for later triumphs on the London stage. But that success followed years of toil as a critic of art and literature, as a poet, and as a short-story writer. Similarly, his seduction by Robbie Ross occurred only after he had fathered a second beloved son, plunging him into a double life of secrecy and danger, which he courted.

This enigmatic and ambiguous figure is full of surprises and contradictions. In 1891, we find him holding up the example of Jesus as the great apostle of individualism, in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism”. With Ernest Renan hovering in the background, the message of Wilde’s Jesus is “Be thyself. . . You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. . . Your perfection is inside yourself.”

Little wonder, then, that his flirtation with Roman Catholicism, punctuated by earnest conversations with the admirable Fr Sebastian Bowden, of Brompton Oratory, proved to be an on-off affair, consummated only on his deathbed in Paris, when Fr Cuthbert Dunne interpreted his “signs” and “attempted words” as consent to conversion.

Engaging, very well written, and running to 722 pages, this book is a bargain.

Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton and chairman of Gladstone’s Library.


Head of Zeus £25
(978-1-78854-597-6)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50

Browse Church and Charity jobs on the Church Times jobsite

Church Times Bookshop

Save money on books reviewed or featured in the Church Times. To get your reader discount:

> Click on the “Church Times Bookshop” link at the end of the review.

> Call 0845 017 6965 (Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm).

The reader discount is valid for two months after the review publication date. E&OE

Forthcoming Events

Women Mystics: Female Theologians through Christian History

13 January - 19 May 2025

An online evening lecture series, run jointly by Sarum College and The Church Times

tickets available

 

Festival of Faith and Literature

28 February - 2 March 2025

tickets available

 

Visit our Events page for upcoming and past events 

The Church Times Archive

Read reports from issues stretching back to 1863, search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention.

FREE for Church Times subscribers.

Explore the archive

Welcome to the Church Times

 

To explore the Church Times website fully, please sign in or subscribe.

Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month. (You will need to register.)