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

company at the Hôtel d’Alsace in 1898, when he glimpsed the manuscript of The
Ballad of Reading Gaol on a table. To prove his intimacy with this much-loved
friend, Stuart-Young included facsimile plates that supposedly reproduce Wilde’s
handwritten letters to him.
To anyone closely acquainted with Wilde, some of this account would look
absurd. The first run of Wilde’s play finished at the Haymarket in August 1893,
and his fine Greek hand scarcely resembles the scrawl that Stuart-Young attributes
to him. Yet as Stephanie Newell observes, through Osrac Stuart-Young—who
was thirteen in 1894—managed to hoodwink Hesketh Pearson, whose respected
biography of Wilde appeared in 1946.⁹₆ Pearson, who believed these fabrications,
draws harsh conclusions about Wilde’s decision, as we are told in Osrac, to escort
Stuart-Young to the rooms of male prostitute Alfred Taylor (with whom Wilde
was tried in May 1895). “Wilde,” Pearson observes, “must be regarded . . . as . . . one
whose innocence approaches imbecility.”⁹⁷ To be sure, Pearson assumed that
Stuart-Young, whose poetry on “Osrac” accompanies his memoir, must have been
middle class. Little did he understand, as Newell reveals, that Stuart-Young—a
working-class youth from Manchester—began his extraordinary career as a lowly
clerk and exiled himself from England in 1901 after a period in jail. The local
magistrate had found him guilty of theft by forgery; he had used the monies to
buy luxurious books and furnishings for his modest rooms. Once settled in West
Africa, Stuart-Young elaborated fantasies about the aesthetic life in the imperial
homeland that he had already tried, through criminal activity, to make real.
The eccentric story of Stuart-Young, who by 1919 had reinvented himself as the
wealthiest palm producer in Nigeria, presents an extreme but telling example
of the lengths to which individuals could go to make Wilde the object of their
obsessive wish fulfillments.
Stuart-Young’s strenuous tale telling, however, pales by comparison with the
legends that two of Wilde’s closest acquaintances enlarged upon. Harris’s Oscar
Wilde: His Life and Confessions, a truly unreliable work, became a best seller in
1916. When Douglas heard that Harris planned to publish a biography of Wilde
that drew on materials held by Ross, he sought to prevent it. For this reason,
Harris’s Oscar Wilde appeared in New York instead of London, and—if we are
to believe Harris—it sold 40,000 copies (Douglas and Harris, New Preface, 6).
As Wintermans reminds us, there is plenty of “bad taste . . . unreliability, and
venom” in Harris’s sensational two volumes, and “most of the nonsense written
about Bosie over the years” can be traced back to this influential source (Alfred
Introduction 27