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

Millard, among others, was asked to defend. It must have been somewhat eerie
for Millard to find himself in a courtroom situation similar to the one in April
1895, when Wilde was asked to explain whether sections of The Picture of Dorian
Gray were “sodomitical.”⁸⁸ The fact that the jury acquitted Crosland came as a
terrible shock to Ross and his supporters.
Toward the end of the year, however, a noteworthy event gave Ross cause for
celebration. Millard’s magnificent bibliography, which he had compiled over the
years with Ledger’s help, appeared from independent publisher T. Werner Laurie.⁸⁹
The Library Association Record extolled it as “the most comprehensive bibliography
that exists in English.”⁹⁰ Meanwhile, in the scholarly world, Ernst Bendz—
who produced some of the most informed early research on Wilde’s oeuvre
—celebrated the manner in which this great work gives “one anew a sense of
Wilde’s amazing versatility and the wide scope of his talents, of his increasing
importance as an intellectual and literary power, and of the immense vogue his
works have had during the past decade,” which led in turn to individuals being
willing “to pay large sums for signed copies of first editions.”⁹₁ It thus comes as
no surprise to learn that for Ross, as he remarks in his introductory note to that
fine bibliography, Millard’s labors afforded him “peculiar pleasure”: “They emphasise
the truth of what I prophesied when Wilde died in 1900—that his writings
would in a few years’ time excite wider interest than those of almost any of
his contemporaries. Indeed, with the possible exception of Dickens and Byron,
I doubt if any British author of the nineteenth century is better known over a
more extensive geographical area.”⁹² Ross does not overstate matters when he
says that by 1914 Wilde’s reputation had few rivals on a global scale. Were it not
for Ross’s extraordinary efforts together with those of Millard, which occurred
in the face of attacks against their sexual preference, Wilde’s literary standing
could not have resurged so triumphantly.
Just at the point when World War I would wreak havoc across Europe (the
subsequent bloodbath would take the life of Cyril Holland), one further event
completed Ross’s important efforts to commemorate Wilde. After months of
wrangling with French authorities (first, customs officers wished to levy a heavy
customs duty, then cemetery officials objected to the sexual aspects of the design),
Ross witnessed at long last the unveiling of Jacob Epstein’s imposing memorial
to Wilde. At Père Lachaise, Epstein’s distinctly modernist sphinx—an
icon derived from Wilde’s 1894 poem—finally paid a monumental tribute to
Wilde’s legendary reputation.
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