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London. As I mention below, at the celebratory dinner in honor of Ross’s editing of The Collected
Works of Oscar Wilde, held at the Ritz Hotel in London on 1 December 1908, he would announce
Epstein’s commission to design Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise.
53. Ricketts designed the title page and binding of the single-volume edition of The Picture
of Dorian Gray (London: Ward, Lock, 1891), Poems (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane,
1892), and The Sphinx (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894), as well as the binding of
Intentions (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891) and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories
(London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891). Later, Ricketts designed the sets for the 1906 productions of
A Florentine Tragedy and Salome. He published (with his pseudonymous alter ego John Paul
Raymond) Oscar Wilde: Recollections (London: Nonesuch Press, 1932).
54. André Gide, Oscar Wilde: A Study, trans. Stuart Mason [Christopher Sclater Millard] (Oxford:
Holywell Press, 1905), 16; further page references appear in parentheses. Gide subsequently
discussed his memories of Wilde in Oscar Wilde: In memoriam (souvenirs) (Paris: Mercure de
France, 1910) and in the final chapter of his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (Paris: Éditions
de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1924). The relations between Gide and Wilde are explored in
Jonathan Fryer, André and Oscar: Gide, Wilde, and the Gay Art of Living (London: Constable,
1997).
55. Robert Harborough Sherard, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship (London:
Hermes, 1902), 258; further page references appear in parentheses.
56. Wilde came across Sherard some months after Constance Holland forced her husband to
part from Douglas in late 1897; in May 1898, Sherard indulged in an anti-Semitic outburst at
Campbell’s Bar, Paris, in the company of both Wilde and Douglas (who reunited once more a
month after Constance Holland’s death). See Wilde, Complete Letters, 1076.
57. There is not space here to address in detail Sherard’s numerous forays into debates about
the record of Wilde’s life. Sherard’s contributions to these disputes include The Life of Oscar
Wilde (1906); The Real Oscar Wilde: To Be Used as a Supplement to, and in Illustration of “The Life
of Oscar Wilde” (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916); André Gide’s Wicked Lies about the Late Oscar
Wilde in Algiers in January 1895 (Corsica: Vindex, 1933); and Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, and
Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1937). Sherard’s mission, which culminated in his 1937
volume, was to condemn Harris, defend Douglas, and uphold Wilde’s reputation. In the last of
these works, Sherard exposes many of Harris’s fabrications while also, quite unfairly, taking Bell
to task for publishing a memoir of Wilde’s last days that was “pure fake” (306).
58. Robert Ross to Walter Ledger, 29 April 1906, quoted in Maureen Borland, Wilde’s Devoted
Friend: A Life of Robert Ross, 1869–1918 (Oxford: Lennard, 1990), 105.
59. Unsigned notice, Scots Observer, 5 July 1890, 181, in Beckson, Oscar Wilde, 75. This notice
was likely written by Henley’s deputy, Charles Whibley.
60. For a reliable and detailed account of the Cleveland Street Affair, which encouraged Lord
Arthur Somerset to flee the country, see Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom by the Thames: Sex, Love, and
Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 186–213.
61. St. John Hankin, “The Collected Plays of Oscar Wilde,” Fortnightly Review, n.s. 83 (1908):
791–802, in Beckson, Oscar Wilde, 284.
62. [Arthur Symons,] review of Collected Works, by Oscar Wilde, Athenæum, 16 May 1908,
598–600, in Beckson, Oscar Wilde, 294. Symons’s thoughtful reviews of Intentions (1891) and The
Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) are reprinted in Beckson’s volume (94–96 and 218–21).
63. [Harold Child,] review of Collected Works, by Oscar Wilde, Times Literary Supplement, 18
June 1908, 193, in Beckson, Oscar Wilde, 304.
Introduction 41