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

Figure 1. Press clipping on Mrs. Mabel Wodehouse Pearse, from Daily Sketch, 6 January 1926.
Courtesy of William Clark Andrews Memorial Library, M645Z W6286 [1908–26], Boxed.
a libel suit. The company won in November 1926, with damages of £100. Since
Millard was not a wealthy man, several supporters—including Figgis, Symons,
Turner, and Wells—set up a fund for him. Meanwhile, Methuen’s victory took
place ten months after Wodehouse Pearse had been charged with stealing £240
from underneath the mattress of her neighbor, Mrs. Bridget Wood, at Aldwych
Buildings, London (fig. 1). Millard plainly suffered rough justice, and after 1927,
when he died of heart failure, “Mrs. Chan Toon” was released from jail and traveled
around England under several aliases, including the fanciful “Princess
Arakan.” George Sims, in his study of this controversy, remarks that the only
contact that “Mrs. Chan Toon” had with Wilde came when his spirit was channeled
by Hester Travers Smith, whose “psychic messages” from the long-deceased
writer were pieced together from scraps of information about him that had
come into circulation.₁₁₁ “Tell us about Mrs. Chan Toon,” the medium was asked.
“I want you,” Wilde is supposed to have said, “to make enquiries about that
lady.”₁₁² But on the basis of these psychic encounters, by 1922 Wilde’s ghost seems
to have become exhausted by a hereafter that had begun to look much more
Introduction 35