Twelve years of quarrels, corrections and epigrams
Letters to the Press
"The flower is a work of art. The book is not."
The story in brief
SummaryWilde writes to editors, and once to a friend, between 1882 and 1894, usually to correct a statement made about him. He thanks Joaquin Miller for defending him during his American lecture tour, trades barbs with Whistler, denies calling Anglo-Indians vulgar, sets right a paper that confused the illustrators of A House of Pomegranates, explains a change to Lady Windermere's Fan, and insists that Salome was not written for Sarah Bernhardt.
The letters are short, and most are built the same way: a polite request to correct an error, a sharp account of the facts, and a closing epigram. Through them runs a steady argument that newspaper critics lack artistic instinct, that an artist works to no standard but his own temperament, and that art owes nothing to resemblance or to Nature. The last letters disown a doggerel poem and a novel that were both put out under his name.
Key themes
"To be great is to be misunderstood."
Context
Robert Ross collected these letters in Miscellanies, a volume of the Methuen collected edition of 1908; the source line under each title gives the paper and date of first publication. The letter to Joaquin Miller was written during Wilde's lecture tour of the United States and Canada in 1882, and was first printed in Decorative Art in America (New York, 1906), as the note above it says. Lady Windermere's Fan opened at the St James's Theatre on 20 February 1892, a week before Wilde's letter about it, and Salome, the play he defends in the Times, had been refused a licence for the London stage by the Lord Chamberlain in 1892.
First published in London papers between 1883 and 1894; the earliest letter, to Joaquin Miller in 1882, was first printed in 1906.
About this edition
- Text: Miscellanies. Methuen & Co., 1908. Public domain. We change only the layout.
- Every quotation and glossary word in these notes is checked against the text.