Reviews

Reviews gathers the notices of books and plays Oscar Wilde wrote between 1885 and 1890, nearly a hundred pieces in all. Most appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette; others come from the Dramatic Review, the Saturday Review, the Speaker and The Woman's World, the monthly Wilde edited, where his 'Literary and Other Notes' ran as an editorial column. The subjects are whatever the post brought: Shakespeare at the Lyceum and at Oxford, batches of new novels and minor poets, translations of Homer, Virgil and Balzac, lives of Keats and Rossetti, a cookery book, a marriage manual and a Chinese philosopher.

Wilde values style above everything. He calls Pater 'our greatest artist in prose', praises Morris's Odyssey as a poet's version of a poet, and admires Balzac for turning facts into truths. He asks for imagination rather than reporting, treatment rather than subject, and form and self-restraint in verse, and he is generous to new talent, from the miner-poet Joseph Skipsey to the young W. B. Yeats.

What he attacks is carelessness and cant: slipshod prose, misprints and misquotation, bad translation, biographies built from anecdote, novels that preach, and poets with good intentions and nothing to say. The tone is quick and often mock-serious, and the verdicts, generous or cruel, come in sentences made to be remembered.

Key themes

• Style as the first test
• Imagination against reporting
• Personality and perfection
• Against good intentions
• Translators, editors and biographers
• Women, work and dress

Wilde wrote these pieces between March 1885 and May 1890. The source line under each title gives the paper and the date of first publication. Most come from the Pall Mall Gazette; the theatre notices of 1885 and 1886 come from the Dramatic Review, two reviews of novels from the Saturday Review in 1887, and the late notices of Chuang Tzu and Pater's Appreciations from the Speaker in 1890. Many of the reviews were unsigned, and most speak in the reviewer's 'we'.

From 1887 to 1889 Wilde edited The Woman's World, a monthly magazine published by Cassell, and the 'Literary and Other Notes', later headed 'Some Literary Notes', were his editorial columns there, running in this volume from November 1887 to June 1889. They are longer than the newspaper notices, written in the first person, and give room to books by and about women, to their education and work, and to dress. A few longer Woman's World pieces, such as A Fascinating Book on embroidery and lace, stand on their own.

Robert Ross collected the pieces as the volume Reviews in the Methuen collected edition of 1908. Read in order, they give a running record of what Wilde read, saw and thought about in five years of literary journalism, from Irving's Hamlet to a Chinese philosopher.

Written between 1885 and 1890 for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Dramatic Review, The Woman's World and other papers, and collected in 1908.

About this edition

• Text: Reviews. Methuen & Co., 1908. Public domain. We change only the layout.
• Every quotation and glossary word in these notes is checked against the text.