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Oscar's Books
By Thomas Wright
Chatto and Windus £16 99
370 pages
Dateline: 12th October, 2008
If you are a devotee of Oscar Wilde (or a Wildean as they call themselves),
an aesthete or a bibliophile, this beautifully produced and modestly
priced volume will prove a delight. If you do not fit into any of those
categories, then its attractions might be limited.
There have been so many biographies of Oscar Wilde that it must have
been hard for Oscar-freak Thomas Wright to come up with a different
angle. It would not be going out on too much of a limb to suggest that
by writing the life of this most colourful of 19th-century characters
through the medium of his library and reading interests, Mr Wright has
come up with something absolutely unique.
The book is broadly split into three sections with some helpful, if
rather esoteric, appendices. It starts with a portrait of his childhood
in Ireland with wonderful Anglo-Irish parents who fully identify with
the revolutionary spirit of the country in which they have found themselves.
Both Sir William and Speranza were real characters and their interests,
as well as their own book collections, strongly influence the life and
attitudes of their larger-than-life son.
His schooldays and time at Trinity College, Dublin, then Magdalen,
Oxford, are covered from both biographical and bibliographical perspectives,
although the latter is largely based on surmise. According to Wright,
as a young man and abiding genius of his time, Oscar would primarily
have spent his time on the classics, although he inherited from his
mother an abiding interest in Irish myth.
The core of the book is contained in the sections after its hero reached
adulthood, married Constance and in particular, moved to Tite Street
in Chelsea, where he was able to create a library taking up half of
the ground floor and comprising 2,000 books.
To say that Oscar Wilde's interests were eclectic is almost understating
the case. In addition to his first love the classics, he also built
large collections of poetry, another great passion, novels, assorted
esoterica and, as he got a little older and bolder, underground publications
about homosexuality.
As each episode of a life that grew from comfort to the highest of
pinnacles before a tragic fall develops, Wright attaches the books that
his subject was reading at the time and that shaped his opinions and
life. Throughout, realism and naturalism always took second place to
the colourful and artistic with poetry a regular fall-back and foreign
language rarely an impediment.
Oscar Wilde was a literary magpie who synthesised his reading into
his writing to the extent that, on occasions, he was accused of plagiarism.
In this context, a view of the man through his book collection is most
enlightening. He was also the fastest of speed readers who could reputedly
read a book in, at most, a few hours.
The most moving sections of Oscar's Books are undoubtedly those about
the period leading up to his imprisonment for the sin of being a homosexual
and the two years that he spent in Holloway, Pentonville and then Reading
Gaols.
It is heartening to read of the charity shown by the governor of this
last-named prison. Assisted by Wilde's friends, he might well have saved
the life or at the very least the sanity of his charge by permitting
him to not only read more books than the law allowed but also to import
much more nourishing fare than would otherwise have been available from
the under-stocked prison library.
This is a fascinating and most unusual read that has been thoroughly
researched as a true labour of love. Just when you thought that there
could never be anything original left to write about Oscar Wilde, Thomas
Wright has produced a tome that takes a completely fresh look at this
gifted but ultimately tragic figure and, as such, Oscar's Books
is greatly to be commended.
Philip Fisher
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