Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle

By John Charles Finzi

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520350557

Book preview

OSCAR WILDE AND HIS LITERARY CIRCLE

A CATALOG OF MANUSCRIPTS AND LETTERS IN THE WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Oscar Wilde

AND HIS LITERARY CIRCLE

COMPILED BY John Charles Finzi

Published for the Library by the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1957

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Cambridge University Press London, England

© 1957, by

The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-7591 Manufactured in the United States of America

Foreword

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library is a uniquely American institution in the tradition of such other great libraries as Huntington, Morgan, Folger, Brown, and Clements. The personal wealth of the founders of these libraries made possible the gathering together of priceless material that was originally scattered throughout the world but is now permanently accessible to all men in these institutions.

The Clark Library itself has unrivaled collections of the works of John Dryden and of books and manuscripts by and pertaining to Oscar Wilde. The first volume of the newly edited works of John Dryden, based on the Clark collection, has already appeared. The present catalog of Oscar Wilde manuscripts and Wildeiana appropriately represents another collecting interest of William Andrews Clark, Jr.

In its continuing program of publications, seminars, and fellowships, the Clark Library has sought, in the two decades of its existence, to serve the cause of scholarship, not only in California and the West, but throughout the world. The present catalog should prove a useful guide for future users of the library’s Wilde materials.

Lawrence Clark Powell

Director

Preface

William Andrews Clark, Jr., began to collect Wilde and Wildeiana manuscripts in the 1920‘s as an important complement to the great printed collection. Since then the body of manuscripts has grown extensively, and today no other collection of similar material, either private or institutional, rivals the Clark’s in either quantity or quality. The intimate letters Wilde wrote to his friends Robert Ross and More Adey, from the time of his imprisonment to the day of his death, and the drafts of poems and plays, many of them unpublished, would alone give the collection a position of prééminence.

The collection comprises some three thousand items, of which approximately four hundred are by Oscar Wilde. Several hundred letters by Lord Alfred Douglas are also included, covering a period from the early ’nineties to shortly before his death in 1945. The remainder are by members of Wilde’s circle, or by persons who have written about him in years since. Also included are numerous letters by members of Wilde’s family, by literary friends, and by contemporaries, as well as many manuscript drafts and typescripts of poems and plays.

Mr. Clark acquired the nucleus of the collection from Dulau & Company of London in 1928, at the time their Catalogue 161 was issued. Most of the Dulau material had been in the possession of Robert B. Ross (Oscar Wilde’s literary executor), Christopher S. Millard (the Wilde bibliographer), and Vyvyan B. Holland