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. His death was treated as suicide by people intent on romanticising him, although another plausible explanation is that Chatterton took an accidental overdose of arsenical water to cope with the vomiting caused by his self-medication with mercury as a remedy for syphilis.

The notebook has hitherto been degraded by literary historians because Wilde excised pages from the two best known Victorian books on Chatterton and glued them into his cahiers. On this basis, hoity-toity prigs who don’t understand the ways that authors amass their working notes or collect clippings have accused him of plagiarism and literary larceny. It is astounding how grumpy some academics have been about this innocuous notebook, which served Wilde both as an aide-memoire and testing laboratory for ideas and phrases.