Its the birthday of the man who said, We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Thats Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin (1854). When he was 27, he taught in London and then left for a lecture tour of North America. Hed been invited by the producer of Gilbert and Sullivans new comic opera, Patience, a work that made fun of the Aesthetic Movement. The show had done well in New York City and was due to go on tour, but the producer wasnt sure if people around America would be familiar with the thing that the opera was satirizing. The producer hoped Wildes lectures would familiarize the nation with the Aesthetic Movement so that theyd all get the jokes in Patience. He arrived in New York in January 1882, then he went to Pennsylvania, where he drank elderberry wine with Walt Whitman. He lectured to coal miners in Leadville, Colorado, where he saw a sign on a saloon that said, Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best, and he called it the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. He made stops in Boston, Topeka, Des Moines, Houston, St. Paul, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities. He eventually went back to Europe and settled in London, and concentrated on his literary endeavors. He had two children with his wife, Constance Lloyd Wilde. In 1891, he met 22-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, a poet from Oxford 16 years his junior. In those few years after meeting Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde had the most productive period of his literary life. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), was published the year they met. He wrote his best and most popular plays: A Woman of No Importance (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), the first draft of which only took him 21 days to compose.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 06:56:56 +0000
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