Richard Davenporthines

The wilder shores of Wilde

issue 26 January 2013

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 He befriended an elderly survivor of the Dreyfus Affair, from whom he acquired important unpublished documents, and ever since has been a quiet, discriminating buyer of archival material relating to sensational trials and miscarriages of justice — particularly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.

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