The Worst Man in London

The Case of Sherlock Holmes ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474431293.003.0011 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 103-111

Author(s):

Andrew Glazzard

Keyword(s):

Death Certificate ◽

Oscar Wilde ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽

Life And Death ◽

Public House ◽

James Mcneill Whistler ◽

Real Person

Charles Augustus Milverton, blackmailer of society women in the 1904 story that bears his name, is assumed by critics to be based on a real person – but which real person is open to doubt. The favourite is Charles Augustus Howell, a larger-than-life associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose members knew him as ‘Owl’), friend to James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and one-time secretary to John Ruskin. However, it is by no means established that Howell was, in Lancelyn Green’s words, a ‘scoundrel and blackmailer’. He certainly seems to have fallen out with a lot of people, but the more outlandish stories about his life and death – Oscar Wilde may be the source for the claim that Howell was found dying outside a Chelsea public house ‘with his throat cut and a ten shilling piece between his clenched teeth’ – may be urban myths rather than actual facts: his death certificate, for instance, records that he died of pneumonia.

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Art and the Literary

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199593736.013.19 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 636-656 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hilary Fraser

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Oscar Wilde ◽

Literary Form ◽

Walter Pater ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Periodical Press ◽

Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽

Illustrated Books ◽

Word And Image ◽

Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

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Bright Sunshine, Dark Shadows

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2021.75.4.495 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 75 (4) ◽

pp. 495-526

Author(s):

Lindsay Wilhelm

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Fairy Tale ◽

Oscar Wilde ◽

Literary Representations ◽

Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽

Hawaiian Archipelago ◽

Short Overview ◽

Art For Art's Sake

Lindsay Wilhelm, “Bright Sunshine, Dark Shadows: Decadent Beauty and Victorian Views of Hawai‘i” (pp. 495–526) Inspired by the recent global turn in aestheticism and decadence studies, this essay considers how late-Victorian discourses surrounding beauty, pleasure, and morality inform contemporary literary representations of Hawai‘i as both supremely inviting and dangerously languorous. The essay begins with a short overview of the broader geopolitical and historical circumstances that helped shape nineteenth-century understandings of Hawai‘i—a place renowned abroad for its beauty and hospitality, but nonetheless still notorious as the site of James Cook’s death in 1779. Next, the essay traces the peculiar ambivalence with which travel memoirs such as Isabella Bird’s The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) and Constance Gordon-Cumming’s Fire Fountains (1883) describe their authors’ experiences in the islands. In these memoirs, Hawai‘i evidences the same convergence between beauty and decay that undergirds the controversial aesthetics of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and other adherents of the creed of “art for art’s sake.” Focusing particularly on Robert Louis Stevenson’s fairy tale “The Bottle Imp” (1891), the essay then examines the ways in which Victorian writers utilize Hawai‘i’s leprosy epidemic as an occasion for exploring the perils of aesthetic hedonism. The essay concludes by briefly turning to the work of nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau, whose own depictions of the decaying Hawaiian village reveal, by contrast, how these British accounts enlist the language of decadence in the service of empire.

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Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem974-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Fraser Riddell

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Middle Class ◽

Trinity College ◽

Oscar Wilde ◽

Walter Pater ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Modernist Literature ◽

Social Conventions ◽

Trinity College Dublin ◽

Picture Of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, essayist, author and poet, and one of Victorian England’s chief proponents of Aestheticism. His works are often characterised by the use of humorous paradox, which questions Victorian certainties of truth, value and morality. Wilde is best known today for his play The Importance of Being Earnest (1894), his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and his imprisonment in 1895 on grounds of ‘gross indecency’ after a series of scandalous trials. Individualism is central to Wilde’s philosophy, and many of his works challenge or ironise social conventions that seek to limit autonomy of personal expression. Wilde prefigures the concerns of much twentieth-century Modernist literature in his critique of Realism, his scepticism regarding authentic selfhood and his often absurd dramatic mode. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854, the son of upper-middle class Anglo-Irish intellectuals. His earliest education was at the staunchly Protestant Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, before he progressed to Trinity College, Dublin in 1871. Wilde excelled as a student of Greek, and in 1874 was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Here he was influenced by aesthetic theorists Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Having graduated with a double first, Wilde settled in London in 1879, where he soon set about cultivating an image as an aesthete and dandy.

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The paradoxical self: duality and ambiguity in the works and lives of Oscar Wilde and Morrissey

Scripta Neophilologica Posnaniensia ◽

10.14746/snp.2021.21.12 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 ◽

pp. 285-302

Author(s):

Karolina Adamskich

Keyword(s):

Personal Experience ◽

Oscar Wilde ◽

The State ◽

Human Existence ◽

Life And Death ◽

Self Duality ◽

Social Standards ◽

Limited Perspective ◽

Traditional Lifestyle ◽

Body And Soul

Oscar Wilde’s and Morrissey’s lives seem to be full of contradictions. Their art constitutes a reaction against materialism, traditional lifestyle and social standards, as well as defence of individualism and freedom of thought. So far, their works have been analysed only from a very limited perspective of the tension between aesthetics and ethics. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that what prevails in their art is the state of ambivalence and ambiguity in relation to the issues connected with religion and morality, innocence and experience, life and death. This article aims at demonstrating multiplicity of personalities of the artists mentioned and ethical ambivalences of their works. Taken together, Wilde and Morrissey’s creative outputs present a clash between different spheres of life, the divided consciousness and the split between body and soul. Thus, the oscillation between opposite standpoints and values excluding each other is not only the result of the artists’ personal experience but it may symbolise the paradox and absurdity of the human existence as well.

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