The Portrait Of Mr W H: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

By Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin Ireland. The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Dublin, then at Oxford. With his education complete Wilde moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles. With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his day. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 and he then moved on to writing for the stage with Salome in 1891. His society comedies produced enormous hits and turned him into one of the most successful writers of late Victorian London. Whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. It was to break him. On release he left for France, There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six sipping champagne a friend had brought with the line ‘Alas I am dying beyond my means’. Here we publish a collection of short stories that once again capture much of his genius for story telling in his own unique and individual way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copyright Group
• Release date: Nov 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783946747

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was a Dublin-born poet and playwright who studied at the Portora Royal School, before attending Trinity College and Magdalen College, Oxford. The son of two writers, Wilde grew up in an intellectual environment. As a young man, his poetry appeared in various periodicals including Dublin University Magazine. In 1881, he published his first book Poems, an expansive collection of his earlier works. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was released in 1890 followed by the acclaimed plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

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The Portrait Of Mr W.H. & Other Stories by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin Ireland.  The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Dublin, then at Oxford. With his education complete Wilde moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles.  With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his day.

His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 and he then moved on to writing for the stage with Salome in 1891.  His society comedies produced enormous hits and turned him into one of the most successful writers of late Victorian London.

Whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel.  The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. It was to break him.

On release he left for France, There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898.  He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six sipping champagne a friend had brought with the line ‘Alas I am dying beyond my means’.

Here we publish a collection of short stories that once again capture much of his genius for story telling in his own unique and individual way.

Index Of Contents

THE PORTRAIT OF MR W.H.

THE SPHINX WITHOUT A SECRET AN ETCHING

THE MODEL MILLIONAIRE A NOTE OF ADMIRATION

Oscar Wilde – A Short Biography

THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.

CHAPTER I

I had been dining with Erskine in his pretty little house in Birdcage Walk, and we were sitting in the library over our coffee and cigarettes, when the question of literary forgeries happened to turn up in conversation.  I cannot at present remember how it was that we struck upon this somewhat curious topic, as it was at that time, but I know that we had a long discussion about Macpherson, Ireland, and Chatterton, and that with regard to the last I insisted that his so-called forgeries were merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation; that we had no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work; and that all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life, to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an æsthetical problem.

Erskine, who was a good deal older than I was, and had been listening to me with the amused deference of a man of forty, suddenly put his hand upon my shoulder and said to me, ‘What would you say about a young man who had a strange theory about a certain work of art, believed in his theory, and committed a forgery in order to prove it?’

‘Ah! that is quite a different matter,’ I answered.

Erskine remained silent for a few moments, looking at the thin grey threads of smoke that were rising from his cigarette.  ‘Yes,’ he said, after a pause, ‘quite different.’

There was something in the tone of his voice, a slight touch of bitterness perhaps, that excited my curiosity.  ‘Did you ever know anybody who did that?’ I cried.

‘Yes,’ he answered, throwing his cigarette into the fire, ‘a great friend of mine, Cyril Graham.  He was very fascinating, and very foolish, and very heartless.  However, he left me the only legacy I ever received in my life.’

‘What was that?’ I exclaimed.  Erskine rose from his seat, and going over to a tall inlaid cabinet that stood between the two windows, unlocked it, and came back to where I was sitting, holding in his hand a small panel picture set in an old and somewhat tarnished Elizabethan frame.

It was a full-length portrait of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume, standing by a table, with his right hand resting on an open book.  He seemed about seventeen years of age, and was of quite extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently somewhat effeminate. Indeed, had it not been for the dress and the closely cropped hair, one would have said that the face with its dreamy wistful eyes, and its delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl.  In manner, and especially in the treatment of the hands, the picture reminded one of François Clouet’s later work.  The black velvet doublet with its fantastically gilded points, and the peacock-blue background against which it showed up so pleasantly, and from which it gained such luminous value of colour, were quite in Clouet’s style; and the two masks of Tragedy and Comedy that hung somewhat formally from the marble pedestal had that hard severity of touch—so different from the facile grace of the Italians—which even at the Court of France the great Flemish master never completely

Reviews for The Portrait Of Mr W H

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A mini-book containing a short story and a poem by Oscar Wilde.The Portrait of Mr W.H.A story of three men's obsession with the identity of the man to whom Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated.The Ballad of Reading GaolThe famous poem about a guardsman under sentence of death, written while Wilde was himself in prison.I know not whether Laws be right,Or whether Laws be wrong;All we know who lie in gaolIs that the walls are strong;And that each day is like a yearA year whose days are long.

[rab1953-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Art … can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance,” Oscar Wilde’s narrator says in this book. As Wilde so often does, he captures intriguing insight in an epigram. What you see in art says more about you than about the subject.The subject of Wilde’s novella is simple (though the telling is convoluted). The narrator describes a talk with his friend Erskine, who explains a theory created by another young man that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for Mr W.H., an imagined “boy actor” from Shakespeare’s troupe at the Globe Theatre. Erskine says the story is a fraud, but the narrator becomes obsessed with the idea and analyzes many of the sonnets to show how they support the theory. This part is an interesting reading of the sonnets, giving a way of understanding them that was completely missing in my long-ago reading of the sonnets. In my own reading, the sonnets themselves are often difficult and obscure because the twisted syntax and allusions make many sentences hard to follow, but the story got me to go back and re-read some of them. I was interested to read the narrator’s (that is, Wilde’s) analysis because I like the idea of Shakespeare having what Wilde calls an intimate male friendship and writing impassioned poetry to his friend. (Although I wonder if the boy actor would understand the poems any better than I did.) And I read the novella as Wilde’s own interest in the notion of an artist falling for a beautiful young male lover, as he did later in his own life. This novella looks like a disguised way to bring homoerotic attraction to the late-Victorian society that later convicted Wilde for the crime of expressing that love physically. So this is me liking the idea of Wilde liking the idea of the narrator’s obsession about Shakespeare being drawn to an inspiring male muse.As the story advances, the narrator develops a fascination with the imagined boy actor, his life and the so-called “dark lady” of one group of sonnets. He proposes a re-ordering of the Sonnets to support his reading. He writes up his theory and shares it with his friend Erskine. Erskine reverses his own initial scepticism and declares he is convinced, but the narrator suddenly decides it was a foolish and nonsensical obsession. Erskine adopts the obsession and pursues it further to a tragic but ambiguous end.This is where Wilde’s epigram on art comes in. Wilde’s narrator reflects on it in after he rejects the boy-actor theory, suggesting that the narrator didn’t want to acknowledge what he saw in the theory. The narrator could not accept his own attraction to Shakespeare’s passion because he recognized that it revealed too much about himself. Erskine initially rejected that same recognition, but then followed it to a tragic result (presaging Wilde’s tragic result for the same obsession). The story has a further reflexive turn at the end, as readers then have to ask what their own response to the story says about themselves. While this self-recognition seems unproblematic for most modern readers, I wonder if Victorian readers were open to it. The story was published only in a shorter magazine form, but Wilde was unsuccessful in publishing the longer version that is available here.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How had I never heard of this book? No idea, but I was delighted to find it in a bookshop and give it a read. A fascinating study of forgery and literary interpretation.