Wilde v. Queensbury: the full text of the trial - Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2003 by Richard Whittington-Egan

Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess. Merlin Holland, Fourth Estate. [pounds sterling]18.99. 340 pages. ISBN 0-00-715418-6.

The genius which Oscar Wilde claimed to put into his life most signally failed him that February day in 1895 when he picked up the card thrown down in challenge by his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas' scarlet screaming father, Lord Queensberry, and initiated the sequential trinity of trials which were to be followed, as surely as the night the day, by Reading Gaol and social eclipse.

The first trial was an action for libel, brought by Wilde against Queensberry. It failed, and Wilde was himself put on trial, charged with gross indecency. The jury disagreed. A second trial with Wilde in the dock was mounted. This time the jury agreed to a man, and Mr. Justice Wills, with indignation and disdain, sentenced Wilde to two years' hard labour, expressing dissatisfaction with the lightness of the severest sentence legally available to him, which was, in his judicial view, totally inadequate.

Clearly, the most dramatic of the trials had to be the first, upon which everything else hinged, but until now only partial accounts of the proceedings of all three trials have been available. In 1896, the Leipzig publisher, Verlag Max Spohr, issued Der Fall Wilde und das Problem der Homosexualitat. Privately printed in Paris in 1906, was The Trial of Oscar Wilde, From the Shorthand Reports, and in 1912, the Ferrestone Press, of Red Lion Court, published Christopher Millard's anonymous Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried, a hefty 480-page volume, in which 137 pages cobbled together from press and private papers were devoted to the first trial. There followed, in 1948, the Notable British Trials series volume, edited by H. Montgomery Hyde, containing a 71-page summary; hitherto the fullest account.

It was in the year 2000 that some person unknown--or at least nominally unrevealed--walked into the British Library bearing under his, or her, arm a full longhand transcript of Trial Number One. And, lo! here it is, 258 pages long, preceded by a record of the preliminary proceedings at Bow Street Magistrates' Court. So now, a hundred years later, we can at long last hear in full the Lord of Language, peacock-proud, duelling with his persecutor, Edwin Carson, in continual rapier flashes of silver words, and perceive Carson Q.C.'s strategy of deliberate vilification, using The Picture of Dorian Gray and Huysmans' A Rebours as signposts to the sinister wit and eloquence proved non-salvatory. The dice was cast against Wilde, found guilty of playing with sin in the secret house of shame, and there was Pooterish celebration at The Laurels.

The new text, amplifying but not radically changing the received image, corrects sundry time-ratified errors, and transforms the silk-faced, marionette figure of the dandified Wilde into a living, breathing, and tragic reality. In this uncurtailed version we are able for the first time to experience the full impact of his mode of speech.

The volume is splendidly edited by Wilde's grandson, who provides an illuminating scene-setting introduction, helpful notes, and interesting appendices. A photograph finally resolves the long-vexed question of what Queensberry did actually scrawl on his visiting-card. It was: 'For Oscar Wilde posing somdomite'.