Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories

By Oscar Wilde

Biting wit and lush descriptions combine in this striking new edition of Oscar Wilde's short story collection, which contains Wilde's most famous story, "The Canterville Ghost." Originally published in 1887 in the British literary magazine, The Court and Society Review. "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: A Study of Duty" headlines this anthology, first published in 1891. In addition to the title work, Wilde added "The Canterville Ghost," "The Model Millionaire," and "The Sphinx Without a Secret." Editions dated after 1900 (including this one) also contain "The Portrait of Mr. W. H."

In the 132 years since the publication of this collection, numerous actors, writers, and even musicians wrote adaptations of "The Canterville Ghost," the most popular of the stories in this volume. But those adaptations also made significant changes in the plot.

Now with a foreword by Hugo-award nominee Paul Di Filippo, go back to the original. Read "The Canterville Ghost," and the other stories as Oscar Wilde wrote them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordFire Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781680575408

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).

Book preview

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

AND OTHER STORIES

OSCAR WILDE

WordFire Press

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and other stories by Oscar Wilde

This new edition edited by Lois Bartholomew

This book is in the public domain

Foreword copyright © 2023 by Paul Di Filippo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-540-8

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-541-5

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-542-2

Cover design by Allyson Longueira and Lois Bartholomew. Cover artwork © copyright by nerify | Adobe Stock. Author photo: 1882 studio portrait by Napoleon Sarony from Shutterstock.

Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

Published by WordFire Press, LLC PO Box 1840 Monument CO 80132 Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press eBook Edition © copyright 2023

WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition © copyright 2023

WordFire Press Hardcover Edition © copyright 2023

Printed in the USA.

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For Darrell

Contents

Foreword

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

The Canterville Ghost

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

The Sphinx Without a Secret

Chapter 1

The Model Millionaire

Chapter 1

The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Endnotes

Publisher’s Note

About the Author

About the Editor

WordFire Classics

Foreword

TO DIE FOR LITERATURE

by

Paul Di Filippo

I vividly recall my introduction to the works of Oscar Wilde. That eye-opening acquaintance happened in a high-school English class, when we were assigned The Importance of Being Earnest. The verbal elegance, the sparkling wit and cosmopolitanism, the satire and the cool jaded attitude towards the follies of humanity were all that any disaffected teenager with literary proclivities could wish for. Love at first sight. (Similar reactions, I know, continued even unto generations after mine. Many years later, a much-younger friend was so enamored of the play that he discarded his birthname and started calling himself Algernon, after one of the male leads in Importance.)

For many years afterwards, having delved extracurricularly into Wilde’s other plays, I thought of the writer solely as a dramatist. It was only in college that I discovered Wilde’s other literary output. He had started (and continued) as a poet, and then produced prose fiction, reviews, essays and journalism. Always intent on supporting himself by his pen, he had even gone over to the other side of the publication fence and been an editor for a short time, playing for the other team. Yes, scandalous! Wilde was a bi-curious freelancer! And although he had produced two minor plays in the 1880s, his eclipsing dramaturgical fame occurred only towards the end of his life and career.

It is, of course, with his short stories that this book and this introduction are concerned. Lord Arthur Saviles Crime emerged from a highly productive period in Wilde’s life. As Wikipedia summarizes: 1891 turned out to be Wildes annus mirabilis; apart from his three collections he also produced his only novel.

But of course, the release of the collection titled Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime was not smooth sailing for Wilde. Like so many of his activities, on the page or off, it was met with misunderstanding and even disdain. Here are snippets from two contemporary reviews.

From London’s Daily News for July 23, 1891:

The prolific Mr. Oscar Wilde obliges the town with his Lord Arthur Saviles Crime (Osgood and M’Ilvaine), which need not detain us long, as indeed it does not long detain the reader... His first story, the Crime of Lord Arthur Savile, is a Bab Ballad, in prose, and writ large. It is an exercise in the topsy turvy, the humour of murder is the topic, and that might be left to De Quincey. Then there is a ghost of the broadly waggish kind, reminding us of other comic ghosts, but not to be favourably compared with the specters of Mr. Anstey. The ghost story ends, unexpectedly, with a little sentiment. There are also two brief anecdotes; one of them was capable of being made more interesting. That is all, and the whole, though nicely printed, is not very filling at the price of one florin."

Please note that our current edition features five stories, unlike the first edition with only four on its table of contents.

A week later, The Manchester Guardian for July 28, 1891 weighed in:

The straiter sect of Oscarians may perhaps shake their heads over Mr. Oscar Wildes latest book or reprint, Lord Arthur Saviles Crime, and Other Stories… Except in the description of Lord Arthur Saviles bathroom and bath, the usual wildings of the authors fancy are for the most part absent; there are few derangements of epitaphs, and the whole, even when it is paradoxical, is paradoxical in a simple and straightforward kind of way.

Ouch!

The press was kinder, later that year, to his other short-story volume, perhaps because it was less challenging. London’s Guardian for December 9, 1891, opined, with a slight terminal dig:

A House of Pomegranates, by Oscar Wilde, with designs and decorations by C. Ricketts and C. H. Sharman. (Osgood and MIlvaine.) Mr. Oscar Wilde has a vocation. A more charming set of fairy stories will not easily be found than his four stories called A House of Pomegranates. It is full of Mr. Oscar Wildes most happy imagery, and over all is cast the pathos and real kindliness which can be traced even in some books of Mr. Oscar Wilde which are less to our taste.

From our vantage point of some one-hundred-and-thirty years later, I think we can appreciate these tales for their imperishable inherent skill of composition, amusement value, unique worldview and esthetic charm, without being encumbered or influenced by Wilde’s infamous public reputation—which, in the light of twenty-first-century celebrity biographical excesses, looks positively wholesome.

The first story, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, rivals the mordant wit of Saki or Roald Dahl. Our hero, Arthur, is something of a mimbo, good-natured, carefree, the very beau ideal of the upperclass gentleman. But what an unsteady foundation his life rests on. All his complacency and grace and guaranteed future happiness are undone by a chance encounter with the merest superstition. He strives to counteract the evil fate with more human evil—a murder. The comedy of errors that ensues is entertaining and enlightening, with an unexpected climax. We are also treated to classic Wildean apothegms from Lady Windermere. If a woman can’t make her mistakes charming, she is only a female. And so forth.

Wilde’s facility with descriptive passages, and their ability to conjure up emotional states is seen here, as when Arthur has his maddened night perambulating through London.

Where he went, he hardly knew. He had a dim memory of wandering through a labyrinth of sordid houses, of being lost in a giant web of sombre streets, and it was bright dawn when he found himself at last in Piccadilly Circus. As he strolled home towards Belgrave Square, he met the great wagons on their way to Covent Garden. The white-smocked carters, with their pleasant sunburnt faces and coarse curly hair, strode sturdily on, cracking their whips, and calling out now and then to each other; on the back of a huge grey horse, the leader of a jangling team, sat a chubby boy, with a bunch of primroses in his battered hat, keeping tight hold of the mane with his little hands, and laughing; and the great piles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose.

This tale formed part of a 1943 film, but surely it would have been the perfect vehicle for Peter Sellers, playing several roles at once.

The next story, The Canterville Ghost, was also filmed, more famously, in 1944. The text surely lends itself to cinematic treatment, with a kind of Home Alone Meets Ghostbusters vibe. It’s some very Disney-ready material—save for one truly eerie and disturbing bit.

Wilde’s travels in the USA allowed him to perfectly capture the American protagonists of his tale. The Otis family takes up residence in a haunted English house and they begin to discommode the family ghost, rather than vice versa. Wilde’s hapless specter exhibits a unique blend of carnal and ectoplasmic modes, being able to vanish down the Fourth Dimension, but also susceptible to being tripped by strings strung across the hallway by mischievous twin boys.

The truly affecting, morally complex and sensually outré element occurs when daughter Virginia— a little girl of fifteen, lithe and lovely as a fawn, and with a fine freedom in her large blue eyes.—has to accompany the ghost into another realm to redeem his damnation. Wilde never shows us what actually happens in that occult sphere, but when Virginia returns, she is shaken and transformed, possessed of more gravitas, wisdom and pain, as if she has passed some initiatory carnal right of passage into adulthood (think Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market); and indeed, she is soon thereafter legitimately and symbolically married off to her equally young suitor. The story closes with a reference to Virginia’s upcoming role as new mother, and one wonders exactly who the father is: The Canterville Ghost himself, perhaps?

I must concur with the anonymous reviewer who found the next two items to be brief anecdotes. But this is not to say they are unworthy, or do not reward the reader’s time. The Sphinx Without a Secret presents us with the portrait of a woman who is either all innocent daydreamer or else steeped a mile-deep in enigmas. The choice is yours. In The Model Millionaire, a stymied romance is facilitated by a benevolent rich man, in something of the manner of an O. Henry or Horatio Alger tale. Wilde unleashes some great lines in this simple account. Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Finally we come to The Portrait of Mr. W. H. This offering is something of a metafiction. One could imagine it issuing from the pen of Borges or Lem, Nabokov or Barthelme. Any reader fond of Pynchonesque conspiracies will geek out here.

The plot is almost nonexistent. Instead, the reader is taken on a secret-history outing, whereby the identity of the historically unknown dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—Mr. W. H.—is teased out through literary exegesis and discovered to be a young actor named, prosaically, Willie Hughes. Wilde’s own personal investment in the powers of literature and the fonts from which inspiration springs receives its objective correlative in the imagined sensuality of Willie.

Every day I seemed to be discovering something new, and Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual presence, an ever-dominant personality. I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands. His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare’s passion, the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage, the delicate minion of pleasure, the rose of the whole world, the herald of the spring, decked in the proud livery of youth, the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear, and whose beauty was the very raiment

Reviews for Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories

[quondame · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The wry distanced tone in which these stories are composed and the consistent observations on the characters are mostly at odds with other tonal elements in these stories and the last is largely a frame around shards of Shakespeare's sonnets supporting the argument that they were addressed to a young actor who left Shakespeare's troupe but later returned. This is not rewarding for someone seeking a consistent mood from Oscar Wilde.

[tronella_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very amusing.

[meandmybooks-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Delicious fun! This is along the lines of “The Importance of Being Earnest” or “An Ideal Husband,” only in short story format rather than a play. Ridiculous, witty, and charming, this story adds a dire prediction and murder to the mix in the courtship of our frivolous and affectionate young couple. Oddly, it kept reminding me of that old Alec Guinness movie, “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” although that story ends rather differently. This is Number 59 in Penguin's Little Black Classics series, and is certainly one of my favorites in that collection!

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this collection a mixed bag. Probably the best story is the only one I have read before: The Canterville Ghost (and my Project Gutenberg edition has illustrations!). I liked the title story, The Sphinx Without a Secret and A Model Millionaire all right but found the last story, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. dull and too long.I started listening to the Librivox recording (and did listen to it for The Sphinx Without a Secret) but discovered I had access to a recording narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi via Hoopla. I love Jacobi & he is a marvelous narrator but the Blackstone Audio edition has different contents! It had all of the stories in this Kindle edition except The Sphinx Without a Secret but also 5 additional stories.

[tmiddleton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It seems to me that some here are not taking into account the potential for wider echoes, for deeper metaphors, contained within some of these stories, beyond the cute and clever word-play and emotional moral parables. There is, it seems to me for example, a rather blatant hint towards the end of “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” that, as wonderful as the plot's fabrication is, it is itself a particular shadow on a certain cave wall...

But perhaps its just my cataracts...

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality. She had more than once changed her husband; indeed, Debrett credits her with three marriages; but as she had never changed her lover, the world had long ago ceased to talk scandal about her.This book contains five short stories from the late 1880s. I read it a long time ago,and recently downloaded it from Project Gutenberg to re-read.My favourite is Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, whose protagonist is unbelievably gullible when he has his fortune read at a society party. The Canterville Ghost is the story of a mediaeval English ghost's encounter with a modern American family who torment him and do not respect him at all. It's fun, but seems more like a children's story than the other stories in the book.The Sphinx Without a Secret was my least favourite, being both dull and and forgettable.The Model Millionaire was enjoyable, but is another story that I had completely forgotten from the previous time I read it.In The Portrait of Mr. W. H., the characters discuss the evidence for Shakespeare's sonnets being dedicated to a young actor called Willie Hughes, and keep changing their minds about whether the theory is true or not. I found it amusing how their minds were swayed, as if it were impossible for more than one of them to believe in the Willie Hughes theory at any one time.