Wilde & His Intentions

BOOK REVIEWS and especially Amelia Bernard Heimann's life). The text contains some typographical errors (disconcerting when not acknowledged as original to Christina Rossetti), but it is well indexed, well referenced, and highly readable. One eagerly anticipates the next which, according to Harrison, will double this volume's number of letters. Bonnie J. Robinson North Georgia College & State University Wilde & His Intentions Lawrence Danson. Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. χ + 198 pp. $49.95 LAWRENCE DANSON'S STUDY of Wilde's criticism appears at first glance to be organised on predictable lines: a short introduction is followed by a chapter on the Intentions volume as a whole and separate chapters on each of the six major critical essays. The impression of dryness is, however, misleading, for this is a witty, subtle and perceptive book that ranges widely over the Wildean oeuvre and confronts some of the central issues raised by Wilde's life and work. It turns out that even Danson's title involves suggestive wordplay: Wilde's countryman Joyce once said that the Holy Catholic Church was based on a pun, and Danson takes as his field of enquiry both Wilde's Intentions and Wilde's intentions . Speculating on the ancestry of Wilde's own title, he suggests a specific echo ofthat of Walter Pater's Appreciations, which Wilde had reviewed in the previous year. Intentions was published on 2 May 1891, in the year that Richard Ellmann has described as its author's annus mirabilis. The volume edition ofThe Picture of Dorian Gray had appeared in the previous month and two collections of stories came out before the end of a year that had opened with the New York production of The Duchess of Padua and, soon afterwards, the magazine publication of "The Soul of Man under Socialism " and was also to see the composition of Wilde's first successful play, Lady Windermere's Fan, as well as most of Salome. Danson argues that 1891 is in fact the year that "gives shape and meaning" to Wilde's career —not, as many have supposed, the year of his trials and imprisonment , 1895. This revisionism not only shifts the centre of gravity from the life to the work but gives prominence to the essays collected in Intentions , and it is true that in reading them one is constantly put in mind of other areas of his work. Wilde practiced a large number of genres, but there is a remarkable consistency in his writings—a quality most obvi467 ELT 41 : 4 1998 ously exemplified by his habit of self-quotation or self-plagiarism, so that, for instance, an epigram in one of the critical essays will turn up again in one of the stage comedies. Danson's methodology is sensibly and helpfully eclectic, and he approaches the volume and its contents by way of their bibliographical history and their reception, in the broadest sense of this latter term ("the book itself literally as an object, a commodity, an indicator of cultural positions and attitudes"). The textual history of the work is fairly complex, since most of the essays in question were revised between magazine and volume publication. These aspects are both interesting in themselves and constitute a necessary background to the more original, theoretical and far-reaching discussions of the individual essays. The essays themselves range widely and indeed invite a redefinition of the traditional generic label. Wilde, who was to become the subject of so much biographical activity, focuses on biography in two of them, "Pen, Pencil and Poison" and "The Portrait of Mr W H." (both of which, incidentally , have a significant relationship to his elusive masterpiece The Picture of Dorian Gray). The former purports to celebrate an anti-hero, the ruthless poisoner and not untalented artist and man of taste Thomas Griffiths Wainewright; the latter quietly sabotages the century's veneration for the Bard by interpreting Shakespeare's sonnets as confessions of love for a boy-actor. "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist" are both in dialogue form—Platonic dialogues transferred from the Academy to a Victorian country-house—and exploit the same talents for conversational argument and repartee, epigram...