Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture - Ohio University Press & Swallow ...

fairly comprehensive bibliography of Wilde’s works, which showed for the first
time the striking extent and diversity of the Irish writer’s oeuvre.
In other ways, too, Millard’s efforts provided a scholarly alternative to the
emerging body of biographical writing on Wilde, which began with Robert Harborough
Sherard’s unreliable 1902 memoir. Sherard, who had become closely
acquainted with Wilde in Paris in 1883, remained loyal to his friend throughout
the two-year prison sentence. Sherard recalls, however, that their long-standing
association deteriorated when Wilde made “a great and unfortunate mistake” by
reuniting with Douglas at Posilippo, near Naples.₅₅ After Sherard voiced stern disapproval,
Wilde responded with a searing letter denouncing him as a “Tartuffe”:
the kind of petty-minded moralist whose prissiness is clear at the start of Sherard’s
high-minded biography (259).₅₆ “Of his aberration which brought this fine life
to shipwreck so pitiful,” Sherard intones, “I have nothing to say” (10). Such “cruel
and devilish madness,” he declares, belongs to “the domains of pathology” (10).
Instead, he depicts a man whose “supreme delicacy of tongue” always enchanted
him (12). Regardless of his straitlaced attitude, Sherard—who did his utmost to
become the leading authority on Wilde—was an important contact for Millard.₅⁷
Together, in the summer of 1904, the two men visited the Hôtel d’Alsace, where
Dupoirier showed them the room in which Wilde had died, which had become,
in Millard’s words, “a place of pilgrimage from all parts of the world for those
who admire his genius or pity his sorrows” (in Gide, Oscar Wilde, 10).
By the time Gide’s essay appeared in English, Millard had been in touch with
Ross, though their initial meeting was stymied by Millard’s arrest on the charge
of “gross indecency” at Iffley, near Oxford. Ross, who was probably Wilde’s earliest
male lover, remained only too aware of the hazards facing homosexual men;
upon receiving Millard’s wire for help, he rushed to Oxford to see whether this
thirty-four-year-old Wilde scholar would be sent down for “10 years’ penal servitude.”₅⁸
Millard was jailed for three months with hard labor. On his release, he
followed in Wilde’s footsteps by exiling himself in Dieppe. The following year,
however, he returned to London, found employment at a bookstore, and soon
began researching the publication history of The Picture of Dorian Gray for
Ross’s Collected Works. The upshot of his inquiries was the noteworthy volume
Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality—A Defence of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1908).
In this remarkable book, which was issued again in 1912, Millard brings together
the handful of hostile reviews that encouraged newsagent W. H. Smith to remove
the 1890 edition of Wilde’s story from its shelves. Moreover, Millard reprints the
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