The wilder shores of Wilde

In 1946, as a Princeton graduate, J. Robert Maguire was attached to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. He befriended an elderly survivor of the Dreyfus Affair, from whom he acquired important unpublished documents, and ever since has been a quiet, discriminating buyer of archival material relating to sensational trials and miscarriages of justice — particularly the Wilde and Dreyfus cases.

After nearly 70 years he has published the sum of his researches into Carlos Blacker, Wilde’s friend and Dreyfus’s champion, and the ways in which those sensational cases interlocked and rebounded on Blacker. Ceremonies of Bravery is a recondite book, written with lawyerly precision and patrician understatement, but it also has rare charm. The loving care with which Maguire has assembled his odd, out-of-the-way story is palpable.

Carlos Blacker was born in Peru in 1857 to an English father and Peruvian mother. As a young man he was handsome, spruce, a fine linguist and shared chambers on the corner of St James’s Street and Piccadilly with a duke’s son. Wilde’s wife averred that Blacker had ‘the greatest distinction of manner’ of any man she ever met. He was compassionate, with an almost religious belief in kindness, particularly to the vulnerable. Investments freed him from the need to work: he gave his energies to attentive friendships rather than writing the renowned books that were expected of him. He kept voluminous diaries in Pitman shorthand, which remained unread until 1989, when two experts began the seven-year task of their translation into English. These transcripts, which were presumably funded by Maguire (although he is too modest to say), provide the scaffolding for Ceremonies of Bravery.