Wilde about the boy

The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The facts have been rehashed in numerous biographies, and dramatised by such actors as Robert Morley, Peter Finch, Rupert Everett and Stephen Fry. The only way to attack the subject with any hope of surprise is by an oblique sideways move from an unexpected angle. This was Robert Maguire’s method in Ceremonies of Bravery (2013), an intriguing account of Wilde’s friendship with the man-about-town Carlos Blacker and their connection with the Dreyfus affair in France. Another enjoyably tangential contribution is Linda Stratmann’s recent The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde’s Nemesis.

Two English literature dons, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca Mitchell, have also devised a novel approach to Wilde. Using a notebook held in a copious Wilde archive in California, they demonstrate his creative fixation with Thomas Chatterton, ‘the marvellous boy’ as Wordsworth had called him, a garret poet and impoverished forger who died aged 17 in 1770 of arsenical poisoning.