An Ideal Husband (Dover Thrift Editions)

Book Description

Wilde's scintillating drawing-room comedy revolves around a blackmail scheme that forces a married couple to reexamine their moral standards. A supporting cast of young lovers, society matrons, and a formidable femme fatale exchange sparkling repartee, keeping the action of the play at a lively pace.

Customer Reviews:

Moral Clarity and Hedonic Flippancy.......2006-01-08

As a dish for Oscar Wilde's inimitable and devilishly sweet locution, "An Ideal Husband" accentuates adequately. Like Roger Moore's 70's Bond flicks (before they became cartoons in the 80's), the play is saturated with the style, but very little of the substance from previous genius.

The excuse for, more than the theme of, the play is the unforgiving and insincere moral code among the social elite of fin de siècle London. Sir Robert Chiltern's otherwise ivory political career grew from selling a Cabinet secret to Stock Exchange speculator, Baron Arnheim, and Mrs. Cheveley, the since-deceased Baron's intimate, possesses the letter of documentation. All she asks for the letter's destruction is Sir Robert's official support of the Argentine Canal Company, in which she has invested and he knows to be a swindle. More than an end to his political career, he fears publication of the letter will end his marriage to his admirable, but morally unrelenting wife, Lady Chiltern. As if to release his audience from any pretension of seriousness, Wilde presents Society's dandy, in the form of Lord Goring, as both his foundation of moral clarity and hedonic flippancy. A string of one-liners and contrived plot twists later and we delight in what Wilde considers the proper end to any play or romantic relationship, a pleasing settlement.

"An Ideal Husband" is the Daily Star, not the Financial Times. Wilde is truly genius when seriousness is woven through his works, and particularly when his seriousness is personal; but, here he is entertaining nonetheless. If you're just introducing yourself to Oscar Wilde, I recommend including this work after a more flattering introduction, lest you mistake Wilde as merely entertaining.

Chiltern: "You prefer to be natural?".......2005-12-02

Chevely: "Sometimes. But it is such a difficult pose to keep up."

Perhaps not so well known as "The Importance of Being Earnest," this has all the same banter, manners, and sharp-eyed look at the crumbling edge of the upper crust in Vistorian England. It pleases the attentive listener at many levels. Considered only as a stream of one-liners and clever quips, it delivers all you could ask for.

But because it's Wilde, it's also a wild tirade against the mannered (sometimes ill-mannered) gentry. Behind that, it has a good deal to say about tolerance for the flaws of any fallible human - and Wilde could speak on human flaws with rare authority. And, like any truly great work, its examination of honesty (and dis-) reveals a good bit about today's world, a century later.

I'm not normally a reader of plays. I don't have that inner ear that brings words on the page to life. Wilde gives me some idea what that experience must be like, and I'm grateful for it.

//wiredweird

One of the great masterpieces of English Drama.......2005-03-20

My very favourite of Oscar Wilde's plays. Choc-a-bloc with wit, and humorous repartee, it also is an intriguing story, and fascinating to see how it plays out. No wonder it is still popular 112 years after is first produced with recent productions on video/DVD doing very well.
Member of Parliament Lord Robert Chiltern is blackmailed by the wicked Mrs. Cheverly, with a secret from his youth, leading to a crisis in his life, and in his marriage to the virtuous Lady Chiltern. It is up to his friend, the delightfully foppish Lord Goring to help extricate him. All is well that ends well, but not after much interplay and intrigue.
Every word in this play is well measured out for one of the great masterpieces of English Drama.

Love, politics and forgiveness.......2003-05-26

Oscar Wilde gives us here one of his best plays. He explores the political world in London and how a young ambitious but poor man can commit a crime, which is a mistake, to start his good fortune. But he builds his political career on ethical principles. Sooner or later someone will come into the picture to blackmail him into supporting an unacceptable scheme, by producing a document that could ruin his career if revealed. His past mistake may come back heavily onto him. But he resists and sticks to his moral reputation. He prefers doing what is right to yielding to some menace. He may lose though his political ambition and career and his wife's love. But love is saved by forgiveness and the man's career is also saved by the work of a real friend who recaptures the dubious document and destroys it. In other words love and an ethical career are saved by the burrying of the old mistake into oblivion. In other words love and friendship are stronger than the scheming action of a blackmailer. This is a terrible criticism of victorian society which is based more on appearances than principles and yet able to destroy a man's absolutely ethical present life with a mistake from his youth, throwing the baby along with the water of the bath. It is also a criticism of the victorian political world where you cannot have a career if you are not rich, money appearing as the only way to succeed, at least to succeed fast. But it is a hopeful play because love and friendship are beyond such considerations and only consider the best interest of men and women, in the long run and in the name of absolute purity. Better be a sinner and be forgiven when you have reformed than see a reformed sinner destroyed by the lack of forgiveness. Oscar Wilde advocates here a vision of humanity that necessitates forgiveness as the essential fuel of any rational approach. Real morality is not the everlasting guilt of a sinner without any possible reform. Real morality is the recognition that forgiveness is necessary when reform has taken place. Otherwise society would be unlivable and based on hypocrisy and the death or rejection of the best people in the name of (reformed) mistakes. One must not be that sectarian, because man can learn from his mistakes and improve along the road : one can learn how to avoid mistakes and repair those oen has committed. If condemnation is absolute, no progress is possible. A very fascinating play, a very modern play. And yet when can one be considered as reformed, when can we consider one has really corrected one's mistakes and improved ? And who can deem such elements ? The very core of political and ethical rectitude is concerned here and Oscar Wilde embraces a generous approach.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

An Ideal Husband.......2001-06-23

Politicians hiding secrets? Sound familiar? This tale brings historical pieces to present times magnificently.

The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Transcript of The Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas (Marquess of Queensberry), 1895

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Life Was A Trial For Oscar Wilde.
A Book to Avoid
An amazing reading experience
A Genuine Tragedy

The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Transcript of The Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas (Marquess of Queensberry), 1895
Merlin Holland
Manufacturer: Fourth Estate
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0007156642
Release Date: 2003-11-04

Book Description

London's Central Criminal Court Sessions Papers for April 1895 were blunt, declaring that "the details of this case are unfit for publication." The case was Oscar Wilde's first trial, a libel action brought against the Marquess of Queensberry for publicly calling him a homosexual. What unfolded in the court was one of Victorian London's most infamous scandals: the great, doomed love affair between Wilde and Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the Marquess's son. When it became public, it cost Wilde everything.

Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson and a noted researcher and archivist, has discovered the original transcript of the trial that led to his grandfather's tragedy. Here for the first time is the true, uncensored record, free of the distortions and censorship of previous accounts.

On 18 February 1895, Bosie's father delivered a note to the Albemarle Club addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic]." With Bosie's encouragement, Wilde decided to sue the Marquess for libel. As soon as the trial opened, London's literary darling was at the center of the greatest scandal of his time.

Wilde's fall from grace was swift: having lost this case, he was in turn prosecuted and later imprisoned. Bankrupted, he fled to Paris never to see his family again. Within five years he was dead, his health never having recovered from the years in Reading gaol.

This remarkable book reveals Wilde on trial for his life, though he did not know it -- his confidence ebbing under the relentless cross-questioning, the wit for which he was so celebrated gradually deserting him under the remorseless scrutiny. The tragic climax falls when Wilde is betrayed by his own cleverness, unconsciously playing into the prosecutor's hands. With that his cause is lost.

Customer Reviews:

Life Was A Trial For Oscar Wilde........2004-07-02

Oscar Wilde was a handsome man in 1892, as the photo of him in this books clearly indicates. He was a brilliant playwright and daubled in poetry. However, as the drawing of his arrest at the Cadogan Hotel on April 13, 1895, he was an arrogant, dandified "gentleman." He had been accused of a horrible charge and should have accepted his fate. To crave justice from libel, he laid himself and his reputation open to scrutiny and disaster.
Why his grandson would want all of this sordidness known now is impossible to comprehend. Some things are better left forgotten or not said. Wilde felt that the charge (however right it might be) called for a defense of justification. It turned out to be the opposite as the self-destructive genius only continued to lie with charm, entertaining the audience but not the court.

Those who start libel actions often emerge with their reputations and lives in tatters. Libel actions are meant to be cases for re-establishing reputations, confounding gossip and allowing the litigant to emerge in a state of unblemished purity (John Mortimer). The most famous libel case of all led Oscar Wilde directly to jail. He left behind a devoted wife and two sons. The grandson who released this detailed account of the trial to try to figure out "Why on earth did you do it?"

There are photographs of some of the persons involved and of the evidence used against him. It is proposed that perhaps he really didn't think he had done anything wrong. After all, many important people of that time got away with the same thing of which he was accussed. To learn what it is, you must read this book.

I'd heard rumors about his sexual persuasion previously, but this stuff went a little too far to please my sensibilities. The Judge maintained that men who could do as he did were 'dead to all sense of shame' and declared that this offence was 'the worst I have ever tried.'

Poor Oscar, his ego got in the way; his pride was too great to accept the fact that he had been 'found out.' In going to court, he laid open his past and destroyed his future. He hurt not only himself but his family as well. Why can't people just let the sordid past lay dormant?

A Book to Avoid.......2004-04-27

This is a wonderful book if you are only interested in reading the actual transcript from Oscar's trial. Indeed, the book is excellent in that respect. However, I would say it is a book to avoid if you are a fan of Lord Alfred Douglas. It seems to me that this book, like so many before it, is trying to make Alfred Douglas the scapegoat. There was a reason Bosie wanted Oscar to take his father to trial, they WOULD have won. It was a carefully laid out plan and Oscar, not Bosie, is the one who went astray from it. Lord Alfred was to take the witness box and testify against his father. When he was finished telling all that his father had done, what sort of man he was, they felt sure no jury would side with him. However, just before Bosie was about to take the witness box, Oscar refused to allow him. He knew what it would mean by his refusing to allow Bosie to take the stand, he understood very well what it would mean, but he said Bosie should never have to do such a thing. Lord Alfred himself spent a great deal of time lamenting Oscar's decision, and wondering why on earth he changed his mind. He seems to think that Oscar had been talking to Robert Ross and he and Ross had come up with another plan. Ross however, is a compulsive liar, and was probably the worst person Oscar could have trusted.

Oscar's sons, and his grandsons, lived with a false impression of Robert Ross, and therefore with a false impression of Lord Alfred Douglas. I am sickened that these misconceptions live on even now, so long after their deaths. I am sick of Lord Alfred being made out to be a monster, some evil, wicked boy who destroyed Oscar Wilde. Oscar was a very intelligent man, was he not? Don't you think he knew what he was doing? "I must say to myself that I ruined myself and that no man great or small can be ruined but by his own hand."-Oscar Wilde. I'm just tired of the blame being shoveled solely onto Lord Alfred. He wasn't a monster, and I wish people would stop trying to portray him as if he was one.

An amazing reading experience.......2004-04-14

What's amazing is that, we have heard for many years about the unparalleled wit and charm of Wilde in conversation, yet until now we of course have been denied this experience. Reading these verbatim transcripts, hundreds of pages long and recently unearthed, we are given the opportunity to do this almost virtually, for the Wildean voice comes through loud and clear, with perfect crispness and distinction. This libel trial, the first of three of the Oscar Wilde trials, is almost a conversation between two persons, and the defence counsel, Carson, though incredibly scornful and insolent, is almost as intelligent and quite as good at debate as Wilde, so it's a splendid match of brains. The outcome is disheartening, though, and throughout you can't help pounding the desk and murmuring out loud, oh, Oscar, how could you have been so stupid! Or -- don't go there! So he becomes real in a way he hasn't previously, not even in the best biographies available. Queensberry and Alfred Douglas come off, in hindsight, as monsters of privilege in only quasi-human form. And poor Edward Shelley, it is plain, deserves a book of his own.

A Genuine Tragedy.......2003-12-09

It wasn't a capital trial, but the 1895 libel proceedings of Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry were in their way tragic and terrible. Entering the trial, Wilde was a celebrity and a playwright with the magnificently silly _The Importance of Being Ernest_ in successful performance in London and New York. Afterwards, he was pursued, tried, convicted, and imprisoned at hard labor for the then crime of homosexuality. It is a story that has been told many times and turned into dramas. Those of us who love Wilde's writing and outrageous wit will always wonder what would have happened if he had been able to write and live as he wished, instead of being ruined and sent to an early death. Amazingly, the trial record has until now been unavailable. There were summaries, and publication of extracts, but only with _The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Transcript of the Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas (Marquess of Queensberry)_, 1895 (Fourth Estate) do we have a full record. In 2000, an anonymous source donated a transcript of the trial to the British Library. It was authenticated, and has now been edited by Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson. Anyone interested in Wilde's life and writing will be fascinated by this verbatim record which puts judge, prosecutor, defender, and of course Wilde himself on the stage of the Old Bailey to play out their roles verbatim.

Holland has a useful introduction to recall the details of how Wilde was snared into legal doom, spurred by his young man Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") to bother Bosie's abominable father Queensberry. When, after several skirmishes, Queensberry left his calling card at Wilde's club, with the words "To Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite" (spelling was one of the Marquess's shortcomings), Wilde should have thrown it into the fire. Instead, egged on by Bosie, he took Queensberry to court for libel. It was the mistake of his life.; as Holland writes, "If I could ask my grandfather a single question, it would have to be, 'Why on earth did you do it?'" Wilde did not take advice that he leave the country, and so sealed his own doom. Most of the pages of this book are the words from the trial, and most of those words come from the bouts with Wilde in the witness box. Initially he seemed to enjoy his role in the events, and gave as good as he got. For much of the repartee reported here, the transcriber notes: "(_laughter_.)" and "(_more laughter_.)" But an eventual flippant answer overthrew Wilde on the stand, although his case could not have been won. When Carson asked about a companion, "Did you ever kiss him?" Wilde replied, "Oh, no, never in my life; he was a peculiarly plain boy." It was not long after that Wilde and his lawyers withdrew the charges, and Queensberry was declared not guilty.

If Queensbury was not guilty of libel, it was reasonable to think that his accusations were truthful, and with the evidence already gathered, Queensberry assisted in a speedy arrest of Wilde, who once again had refused advice that he leave the country. The subsequent trials, one with a hung jury and one finding him guilty of gross indecency, are not covered in this volume. Wilde had two years of hard labor, and three sad years of exile before his death in Paris in 1900. He produced the mordant "Ballad of Reading Gaol" but little else during these years, and while there are plenty of examples that his wit remained in conversation, we were robbed of subsequent examples of the delicious laughter that had come from each of his successively improving plays. This is a useful book as full documentation of the first trial, and Holland has given helpful notes throughout. Those who admire Wilde, however, will find it more than useful. Wilde was brilliant at Greek and admired Greek drama and life, and it is no exaggeration that the transcript of the trial, reading as it does like a piece of period theater, has all the marks of a classic tragedy.

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Everything you wanted to know....

A controversial walk on the Wilde side.

New Depths of Oscar Wilde's Life

A magical read

Dubious book

The Secret Life Of Oscar Wilde
Neil McKenna
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Oscar Wilde

Biography - Oscar Wilde (A&E DVD Archives)

Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

Wilde (Special Edition)

ASIN: 0465044387
Release Date: 2005-05-10

Book Description

Drawing on long-lost or overlooked material, this is a major new biography of Wilde's emotional and sexual life-praised by the Manchester Evening News as "Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful"

Oscar Wilde said of himself, "I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my work." Now, for the first time, Neil McKenna focuses on the tormented genius of Wilde's personal life, reproducing remarkable love letters and detailing Wilde's until-now unknown relationships with other men.

McKenna has spent years researching Wilde's life, drawing on extensive new material, including never-before published poems as well as recently discovered trial statements made by male prostitutes and blackmailers about Wilde. McKenna provides explosive evidence of the political machinations behind Wilde's trials for sodomy, as well as his central role in the burgeoning gay world of Victorian London. Dazzlingly written and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde fully charts Wilde's astonishing odyssey through London's sexual underworld and paints a frank and vivid psychological portrait of a troubled genius.

Customer Reviews:

Everything you wanted to know...........2007-09-03

McKenna has carved his own niche among the Wilde biographies by concentrating on Oscar's homosexuality (too often marginalized or avoided by other writers), with emphasis on his long relationship with Bosie; McKenna considers theirs a great love affair, but it appears to have been something along the lines of codependency. It's quite remarkable how much detail is known about Oscar's antics through letters, journals and books, maybe too much, since this long read is at times a bit tedious as we move through one young man after another. McKenna has a couple of annoying habits as a writer -- all the young men couldn't have been quite as "breathtakingly" attractive as described, he makes a lot of suppositions about what someone must have thought, or might have done, and he's a bit melodramatic with the "but he would find out all too soon" chapter endings.

But these are quibbles. The book is important is several ways. Above all, it portrays Wilde as one of a group of early advocates of gay rights, a fervent believer that society and the law should treat homosexuals with equality and respect. It also provides a fascinating "decoding" of Wilde's most famous works by explaining the double, ie. homosexual, meaning of words, phrases and behavior on the part of his characters, who were often based on real people. The book paints a vivid picture of the seamy side of London's "Uranian" underground of rent boys, petty thieves and blackmailers and the "respectable" men who took their pleasure there. And it delves into his marriage, the ill-fated consequence of having to protect his reputation from the circling vultures.

Wilde is a fascinating, maddening subject, so sure of his own superiority that he considered himself above the law and the strictures of society, making him ultimately the instrument of his own self-destruction. This book will be of interest primarily to Wilde junkies and people interested in the sexual aspect of his life, but it should be read in conjunction with other bios, lest one get the impression that the great man did little but go at it like a rabbit.

A controversial walk on the Wilde side........2007-06-12

"I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china," Oscar Wilde confessed while he was a student at Oxford (p. 14).

For anyone who has visited his lipstick-kissed tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Wilde's "secret life" is really no secret. Wilde (1854-1900) was primarily an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet, known for his brazen wit ("Little boys should be obscene and not heard," p. 257), which made him one of the greatest celebrities of late Victorian London. Following Wilde's death, his friend, Frank Harris, wrote a biography, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, which was followed by H. Montgomery Hyde's 1975 biography, Oscar Wilde: A Biography, and more recently Richard Ellmann's 1987 meticulous work, Oscar Wilde. Whereas these earlier, excellent biographies focused primarily on Wilde's literary achievements and dealt with his sexuality only in passing, Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde examines Wilde's sexuality and sexual behavior in detail--and at times, in graphic detail.

Most biographers concur that Wilde was introduced to homosexuality in 1885, but McKenna speculates--in charting Wilde's "journey" to find his true sexual self (p. xi)--Wilde was first aware of his homosexuality much earlier when he kissed another boy at age 16. After his arrival at Oxford in 1874, Wilde experienced passionate, romantic feelings for Greek beauty (i.e., cultivated, youthful, "fair," "slim" choirboys) (pp. 6-7), but was drawn sexually towards rougher boys. Following his visit to America in 1882, Wilde boasted, "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips." In his struggle against his sexual feelings for young men, Wilde attempted to "cure" his sexuality in 1884 by marrying Constance Lloyd (the daughter of Queen's Counsel Horace Lloyd) and by fathering two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). But he continued to have regular sexual relationships with Robert Baldwin Ross, Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), and random teenage boys, whom he would meet in bars or brothels, culminating in his May, 1895 conviction and two-year imprisonment for "gross indecency." Later, after remarking, "my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go" (p. 463), Wilde died in Paris, knowing that "he was a martyr in an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men" (p. 465).

Drawn from interviews, letters, memoirs, journals, and Wilde's own writings--although McKenna's controversial but highly readable biography has been criticised for being too speculative, it nevertheless succeeds in bringing Wilde to life as a literary genius, a dandy, a pagan, an "extreme aesthete" who attempted to live his life by burning hard like a gemlike flame (p. 13), and as a gay Victorian outcast.

G. Merritt

New Depths of Oscar Wilde's Life.......2007-05-21

See the other side of famous author Oscar Wilde with this biography. You'll gain new insight and perspective on his life.

A magical read.......2007-01-25

I bought this book after reading a rave reviews in The Washington Post.
It is everything that it promised to be: brave, fresh, exciting, and
scrupulously researched. I have read most other biographies of Oscar
over the years and really thought that there was little left to say.
McKenna's biography has proved me wrong by proving not a wealth of new
and exciting material, but also a wealth of new insights and
interpretations. I cannot recommend this book too highly - it is a
beautiful and magical read. At the best part of 600 pages, it's a long
book, but for me it wasn't long enough. Incidentally, I don't
understand the comments of the latest reviewer about footnotes. In my
US hardback edition there are nearly 60 pages of notes which
scrupulously source every quote.

Dubious book.......2007-01-13

I have little doubt that Oscar Wilde and Bosie had extraordinary sexual adventures, but one little thing keeps coming back to me: early in this book, the author identifies Ganymede as the Trojan boy whom Zeus abducted and "anally raped."

What was that? Was there a source for that? I flipped to the back of the book, and of course there was no source. It was apparently "just something the author heard on good authority."

I have been involved in gay scholarship for decades and have read dozens of books about Ancient Greece, and this book is absolutely the first place that I have read about Zeus' alleged anal rape of Ganymede.

I will say one thing with absolute certainty: there is no Ancient Greek source which supports the author. Centuries later, getting into Medieval and Renaissance Europe, there may well have been all sorts of tales about Ganymede. He had passed into the popular language: men referred to a handsome boy as some other man's "Ganymede," and from this we ultimately get the word "catamite."

But the actions of the Great God Zeus? He changed himself into an eagle and abducted Ganymede to Mount Olympus to serve as his wine-pourer. Period.

Now, this one little thing may seem to be just that: one little thing. But this book about Oscar Wilde is full of details. And if the author is not trustworthy on the details, then one must wonder about the value of this book.

Not recommended.

The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society

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The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society
Michael S. Foldy
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0300071124

Book Description

Following Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials for committing "acts of gross indecency with men," he lost his freedom, his family, his reputation, his will to create, and even his will to live. This book sets out to examine what it was about late-Victorian society that allowed this to happen, indeed needed it to happen, and what the trials tell us about the taste and morals of late-Victorian England.

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The "Fourth" Oscar Wilde Trial.
Rule, Britannia

Oscar Wilde's Last Stand
Philip Hoare
Manufacturer: Arcade Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society

ASIN: 1559704233

Amazon.com

As in his earlier work, Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward: A Biography, Hoare proves himself to be an incisive social critic and a vigorous historian who illuminates the paradoxes of the recent past with insight and passion. But the real power of Oscar Wilde's Last Stand (that Hoare makes clear again and again) is its understanding that Wilde--social rebel and martyr to artistic and sexual freedom--remains, in so many ways, under attack by conservative social forces even today. --Michael Bronski END

Book Description

Even though Oscar Wilde--playwright, wit, critic, and convicted sodomite--died exiled and disgraced in 1900, his memory and influence remain central to British culture. In 1918 the specter of Wilde manifested itself in what social historian Philip Hoare calls "the trial of the century." This shocking libel case was brought by American actress Maud Allan, who had just appeared in a production of Wilde's Salome, against Noel Pemberton Billing, an arch-conservative M.P., who accused her of being a member of "the cult of the clitoris": his catch phase for a sexual and social degeneracy that he saw as destroying England. Billing also claimed that the German government (with whom, you will recall, England was at war) had "a black book" containing the names of 47,000 prominent members of the British society who were "in the cult of Wilde"--a euphemism for quot;degenerate" homosexuals--and who were potential blackmailees, subversives, and traitors. As in the Wilde trials 23 years earlier, the real issue here was an attack by conservatives and moralists against social and sexual freedom. As in his earlier work, Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward: A Biography, Hoare proves himself to be an incisive social critic and a vigorous historian who illuminates the paradoxes of the recent past with insight and passion. But the real power of Oscar Wilde's Last Stand (that Hoare makes clear again and again) is its understanding that Wilde--social rebel and martyr to artistic and sexual freedom--remains, in so many ways, under attack by conservative social forces even today. --Michael Bronski END

Customer Reviews:

The "Fourth" Oscar Wilde Trial........1999-08-20

There are a number of ways to count the trials of Oscar Wilde, but what's becoming widely known as the "fourth" Oscar Wilde trial is a fascinating incident which occurred after his death. It is certainly must reading for anyone wanting to be acquainted with the Wilde story; especially if you're American. Maud Allen, the Canadian-American who brought about the libel action which initiated the trial, is familar to Canadians and some Americans since Felix Cherniavsky's 1991 book "The Salome Dancer" was published and mentioned this incident. And now Philip Hoare, a Briton, provides us with a fuller treatment of the trial's flow. Hoare's book is nicely written and has some stunning photographs of Maud Allan performing on stage. My only criticism is that Mr. Hoare says Ms. Allan's opponent, Noel Pemberton Billing, was "Mosley Before His Time." He refers to Sir Oswald Mosley, a later leader of the British fascists. If Mr. Hoare really knew his fascists, rather than his sterotypes, he would know that Mosley affiliated with the left wing tradition as a moderate member of parliment. Mosley continued to advocate those economic remedies as a fascist, continued his interest and associations with Britains's cultural vanguard, and was remarkably tolerant about homosexuals. In fact, it's no secret that Mosley's son by a first marriage, Nicolas, was homosexual, and to that son Mosley left the papers detailing his long, extraordinary, and tragic career. Today Nickolas is a prominent and respected liberal novelist, and his books about his father, Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale, indicate that respect was mutual.

Rule, Britannia.......1998-08-31

This is how history should be written: exhaustively researched, well organized, good command of the language. This book goes way beyond what the title promises, giving us an encompassing social history of the "upper classes" of Britain from 1900 to 1918. Many surprises here, all of them believable. The only request: to give us, in an appendix, a more thorough vitae of the players.

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production, St. James Theatre, London, 1895 (Princess Grace Irish Library Series, 10)

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Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production, St. James Theatre, London, 1895 (Princess Grace Irish Library Series, 10)
Oscar Wilde , and Ruth Berggren
Manufacturer: A Colin Smythe Publication
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

This unique volume reconstructs the original 1895 production of Wilde's timeless classic. Based upon a new, reconstructive method for the study of theatrical performance that aims to set the play securely in its historical and cultural moment, the edition offers a wealth of detail about the staging and acting and numerous first production and early revival photographs. The reconstructed text itself, differing in important ways from the 1899 first edition, recaptures the essential comic vitality of the play.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Great Illustrated Classics)

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The American Psycho of a bygone era?
Free SF Reader
A Classic Victorian Gothic
Great Book!
Not all that I expected...

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Great Illustrated Classics)
Oscar Wilde , and Fern Siegel
Manufacturer: Abdo Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

ASIN: 1577658213

Amazon.com

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

Book Description

Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps."

Download Description

Dorian Gray has just had his portrait painted. It is a perfect likeness of the quite extraordinary beautiful young man, and it prompts him to make a mad wish for eternal youth. In the years to come, he devotes his public life to and aestheticism-and his private one to decadence and debauchery.

Customer Reviews:

The American Psycho of a bygone era?.......2007-09-26

Having only recently read American Psycho, I couldn't help but think back to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Placed within the context of its time, I feel certain that this book would have been the American Psycho of its day. What a great pity that Oscar Wilde only wrote this one novel! This compelling story has haunted me since I first saw it on film as a young man (the book is better of course). I've given copies of the novel to many friends, and I can heartily recommend it as a great read to anyone.

Free SF Reader.......2007-09-03

I would imagine that there is not a very large chance you would find
this book in the waiting room of any plastic surgeon's office. An
example of a story that suggests be careful of what you wish for. A
young man makes a deal to keep himself young and youthful looking.
Unfortunately there is a secret associated with this that is hard to
hide.

A Classic Victorian Gothic.......2007-08-29

What can capture the soul of a man?
Is there a devil's deal to be made at the crossroad?
Dorian Gray shows that great physical beauty can be a lie. Oscar Wilde in
his introductory poetry says: Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated."
One can't say that this novel is beautiful,
but there is an element of eternal truth that even in ugliness has great virtue.

Great Book!.......2007-08-23

This story is amazing, Dorian Gray keeps you in the book.
I read this book in high school and now I decided to buy it and read it again.

Not all that I expected..........2007-07-30

This novel is one which everyone has heard of and many are compelled to read it as part of school curriculum. I never did, but thought I would give it a try as I really enjoy dry British wit and intelligent prose. Beyond that, I wasn't sure what else I was expecting, but for my tastes, I didn't end up entirely satisfied.

The opening 10 or 20 pages insinuated themselves into my imagination and I felt that I would be entertained by the main characters throughout the rest of the novel. The detailed descriptions of the lovely country setting and extravagant flowers gives one an impression of decadence and a high society jadedness that I somehow expected from Oscar Wilde, having read none of his previous work. Unfortunately, the remainder of the novel didn't hold as much pleasure for me.

Dorian Grey is a relatively uninteresting central character who is but a blank canvas for Lord Henry to experiment upon; Dorian's own thoughts and musings are not so compelling in and of themselves and yet we are treated to quite a few pages of them throughout. Lord Henry himself is an interesting character whose mean-spiritedness, which approaches evil in some instances, is obscured by his verbose bantering on half-baked, jaundiced observations on Victorian life. These also consume considerable paper stock, and as witty as his musings start out (his thoughts on marriage were particularly humorous to me), they start to run together and become somewhat of a misshapen lump through which I felt I was slogging at times.

Anyway, the story is relatively well known to most at this point, regardless of whether you have read the book in question or not. It progresses more or less as one might assume, which is not entirely a bad thing (I would not classify this tale as a mystery or as a horror novel, a genre to which I see it is sometimes curiously attributed). Oscar Wilde is definitely saying something here, and there seem to be many elements of allegory contained within the story. I have read that he saw parts of himself within all three of the main characters, and they do seem to represent different facets of a single personality. Unfortunately these same characters are hamstrung by this very fact, as they each seem only part of a personality, part of a character, and not well rounded or believable in their motivations or actions.

This is the first Oscar Wilde I have attempted to read, and I won't say it is my last, but there are classics of English literature which are as well written, more engrossing, and, in the end, more memorable, at least to this reader ("Silas Marner" comes to mind as a fine book I only just recently read for the first time as well).

So, overall, about 3 stars from me. In my opinion it poses some interesting questions, sparkles in a few spots, and held my attention for a few hours, but it's not something I would return to or recommend for pleasurable reading.

As a side note, I am somewhat surprised by the criticisms of the homoerotic nature of the relationships portrayed within the novel. Wilde portrayed the passionate nature of what amounts to a love triangle in a very effective (if slightly florid) way, and, as has been noted before, the relationships between the men seem more genuine and believable than those involving the fairer sex. Maybe this type of undertone would be out of place in a Hemingway novel but good grief it's Oscar Wilde! Scratch beneath the surface and read about where this man was coming from and the times in which he lived and worked.

Great Illustrated Classics Series; 6books; Treasure Island; the Call of the Wild; the Merry Adventures of Robin Hood; the Picture of Dorian Gray; a Tale of Two Cities; Kidnapped

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Great Illustrated Classics Series; 6books; Treasure Island; the Call of the Wild; the Merry Adventures of Robin Hood; the Picture of Dorian Gray; a Tale of Two Cities; Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson , Jack London , HowardPyle , Oscar Wilde , and Charles Dickenson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Product Description

Great Illustrated Classic; 6 book set.

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delightful
Overkill

Green Carnation (Bison Book)
Robert Hichens
Manufacturer: University of Nebraska Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0803257031

Customer Reviews:

delightful.......2005-04-29

I found the story and subtle yet obvious revelations of the green carnation to be a tantalising glimpse into the subtlety of sexuality in the eighteen hundreds. I recommend it as indolent, decadent and a complete delight for any one interested in an insight into the lives of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas.

Overkill.......2002-06-07

As a satire on the spirit of Oscar Wilde, "The Green Carnation" is definite overkill. Hichens' own epigrammatism lacks the grace and subtlety of Wilde's wit and wisdom, and he drags wall-to-wall his assays into cleverness whether or not they are appropriate to develpment of the context. Disappointing.

The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Novel for Serious People

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Hope you can laugh at yourself!

The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Novel for Serious People
Charles Osborne , and Oscar Wilde
Manufacturer: St Martins Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Customer Reviews:

Hope you can laugh at yourself!.......1997-05-12

This play is the second I read in my life, but I am sure it is one of the best ever written!
It is witty and funny, a social satire everybody should read.
Wilde played with words and stereotypes in a wonderful manner.
Two thumbs up!

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