What did it mean ‘to be truly aesthetic’? In 1882, J. N. Piercy’s of Binghamton, NY would have had us believe that ‘being aesthetic’ meant buying ice cream and confections at their store (Figure Intro.I, overleaf). If we look more closely at their advertisement, we might also conclude that in the nineteenth century ‘being aesthetic’ entailed wearing velvet knee breeches, having a predilection for lilies and sun-flowers and, most importantly, being Oscar Wilde. What would the citizens of Binghamton have found appealing about Wilde, a young man with exactly one volume of poetry and one play to his name? And...

At a Whistler exhibition, the mischievous painter brought the Punch caricaturist George Du Maurier face to face with the twenty-six-year-old Oscar Wilde, who was widely assumed to be the model for Du Maurier’s enormously popular aesthetes, Postlethwaite and Maudle. ‘Which one of you two invented the other, eh?’¹ Whistler asked, relishing the incisiveness of his facetious inquiry. Whistler’s chicken-and-egg question encapsulated the public’s curiosity about the enigmatic origins of Punch’s popular images of aesthetes by implying that Wilde and Du Maurier had created each other. Whistler was probably right to think that Du Maurier’s caricatures of aesthetes had contributed as...

Widely perceived to be an aesthete-for-hire or, in Max Beerbohm’s words, ‘a sandwich board for Patience’,² Wilde’s purpose in the late 1880s and early 1890s was to shed this image and develop his own aesthetic ideals. One of the ways he did this was quite literally by putting things between boards. During these prolific years, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Intentions (1891), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891), and A House of Pomegranates (1891). He lectured on dress, interior decoration and his ‘Personal Impressions of America’; he became...

As we saw in Chapter 1, James’s 1882 visit to the United States had been marked by the death of his mother. A year later, James was called back to wintry Cambridge, Massachusetts to bury his father. After the funeral, he stayed on as his father’s executor and tried to keep busy. In the spring of 1883, he went to Washington, where he had met Wilde the year before. He visited Henry and Marian Adams again, but this time there was no worry, as there had been on James’s previous visit, that he would ‘bring his friend Oscar Wilde’¹ since...

On 2 February 1895, Henry James wrote his brother William to describe the opening night of his play, Guy Domville. Too nervous to attend the performance, James had instead gone to the Haymarket to see Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. He described his dramatic confrontation with Wilde as an awakening that had come too late:

I sat through [An Ideal Husband] and saw it played with every appearance (so far as the crowded house was an appearance) of complete success, and that gave me the most fearful apprehension. The thing seemed to me so helpless, so crude, so bad, so...

‘Oscar Wilde is the fashion. His catch and whimsicality of dialogue tickle the public. Just now the whole of society is engaged in inventing Oscar Wildeisms,’¹ the Illustrated London News reported in January 1895. A month later, the same newspaper announced that James’s unfashionable, ‘unhappily obscure comedy’² had failed. By March, it was Wilde’s turn to be counted among the deeply unfashionable. His arrest, trials and imprisonment ensured the rapid decline of his popularity, even among the connoisseurs who had been his social allies and friends. James, who was neither an ally nor a friend, sought to wipe Wilde from...

In the preceding chapters, I have argued that artistically and professionally, James’s and Wilde’s careers resemble each other far more than has been thought. In the early 1880s, James made the transatlantic aesthete his own despite the figure’s increasing association with Wilde. Though James privately dissociated himself from Wilde’s artistic, sexual and identity politics, vestigial markers remain apparent in James’s fiction and were remarked on by his critics. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Wilde situated his art theory in reaction to that of James and Whistler, defining an oppositional aesthetic through a process of imaginative review-as-revision that aimed...