The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1999 by Richard Whitington-Egan

Karl Beckson. AMS Press, New York. $125.00. 455 pages. ISBN 0-404-61498-1.

To describe any book as indispensable is a rash act, but to say that anyone who is concerned with or interested in the life and works of Oscar Wilde who does not beg, borrow, or buy this encyclopaedia will become henceforth a severely disadvantaged person, is to assert nothing less than a simple truth.

Professor Beckson's international reputation is in itself a guarantee of the presumptive value of this work, which is designed alike for the student, the scholar, and that so frequently underestimated - but not by Professor Beckson - dedicated peruser, the general reader.

Karl Beckson has made the 1890s and their strange literary population his very special province. His London in the 1890s: A Cultural History, which I reviewed in these pages under the heading 'A Wilde Landscape', his quartet of Arthur Symons' studies - The Mcmoirs, A Life, Selected Letters (with John M. Munro), and Bibliography (with Ian Fletcher, Lawrence W. Market, and John Stokes), his monograph on Henry Harland and his fin de-siecle orientated essays and explications contained in his A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms: A Dictionary (with Arthur Ganz), all testify to this.

As might, therefore, be expected, his treatment of Oscar and his works, pomps and romps is magnificently all-embracing. No necessary stone, it seems, has been left unturned - no matter what, perforce, be exposed beneath it. We may seek and find here resume and history of every work by Wilde, both published and unpublished, ln the case of the former, the work's publishing pedigree is copiously presented, as well as bibliographical data, critical reception, and a listing of reviews and studies relating to the work, in addition to, wherever possible, the present locus of the manuscript. In the case of the unpublished works, the known locations of manuscripts are cited, and the subjects of the manuscripts themselves illuminatingly descanted upon. At the end of each entry, where appropriate, a list of further required reading is appended.

Biographical information, the details of Wilde's forty-six-year pilgrimage is scattered throughout the volume under appurtenant headings - such as Portora Royal School, The Trials, The Prison Years - which richly supplement and clothe the initially supplied bare chronology. In the process we are introduced to Wilde's wide acquaintanceship of fellow-travellers, green-carnation-sporters and distinctly otherwise.

In his Foreword, Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde's only grandson, enthusiastically scribes his approbatory endorsement of this massive, totally swamping successor to Stuart Mason's more slenderly fact-decorated magnum opus, describing his contributed pages as 'an expression of delight that a scholar of Karl Beckson's stature should share a lifetime's study of Wilde and his circle and in a form which will make it the most useful reference work to appear on Wilde since Christopher Millard's Bibliography over eighty years ago.'

Professor Beckson has here been able to correct, as Merlin Holland notes, those errors which, inevitably, crept into even Richard Ellman's magisterial biography. For this we should indeed be grateful.

Looking up The Importance of Being Earnest, I was sorry to find that Professor Beckson had not included in this entry the reasonably authenticated anecdote as regards Wilde's selection of this title. However, I discovered that I had been premature. Tucked away under the heading 'The Uranians' was duly provided the intelligence that in the homosexual dominie, John Gambril Nicholson's volume of homoerotic poems, Love in Earnest, published in 1892, the pun on 'Earnest' referred to Ernest, a fourteen-year-old-boy, who was the love object. Wilde almost certainly adopted and adapted that pun for his play, written in 1894. Incidentally, for many years it was au courant in certain catamitic circles politely to inquire 'Are you earnest?'

Professor Beckson knows no more than my friend, Timothy d'Arch Smith, knew in his Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930, (1970), whether Wilde and Nicholson ever met outside their cheek-by-jowl appearance in the Chameleon, Wilde with his 'Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young' and Nicholson with his pseudo-Biblical prose poem, 'The Shadow of the End'. No matter, there was in their case a spiritual consensus ad idem.

Professor Beckson has indeed confected a rich plum-pudding of a volume from which no eagerly inserted thumb emerges without a pulled-out plum adherent. And the encyclopaedia is full of surprises.

RICHARD WHITTINGTON-EGAN