Historicizing Wilde

John Sloan's and Anne Markey's volumes are part of a recent revival of interest in what has hitherto been a relatively neglected part of Wilde's oeuvre, his short stories. In this sense they invite comparisons with earlier work in the field: Sloan's with previous editions of Wilde's short stories and Markey's monograph with Jarlath Killeen's 2007 study, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, reviewed in ELT (52.1, 2009).

To take Sloan's edition first: it is clearly intended as a successor to OUP's earlier World's Classics edition of The Complete Short Fiction which was edited by Isobel Murray and dates from 1979; its most direct current competitor is my Penguin Complete Short Fiction, which was first published in 1994. These dates indicate that a new edition is indeed overdue: so what is "new" about Sloan's volume?

The format of popular editions imposes limitations on what an editor is able to do: given the constraints of space (and price) there is usually little scope for textual scholarship in the sense of an adequate description of significant textual variants. Nevertheless a wily editor can smuggle what is often critically relevant textual information into the commentary. Despite the fact that little has been written about the genesis of the short fiction, Sloan's real interest is not in textual matters. As we might expect, in his decisions about the choice of copy-text, he follows one of Murray's editorial principles, giving us what he (like her) terms "the last printed version which Wilde was able to supervise." Most readers will understand this to mean that Sloan is giving priority to Wilde's three collections of tales, published as books between 1888 and 1891, rather than the first appearances of some of the individual stories contained in periodicals (the details of which Sloan usefully lists in his "Note on the Text"). However, matters are more complicated than this. In the case of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, there is more than one book text: the David Nutt 1888 (first) and 1889 (second) British editions, as well as the two impressions of the work published in 1888 and 1890 in the United States by the Boston firm of Roberts Brothers. Stuart Mason's bibliography suggests that there are no substantive differences between these editions, but as Sloan only mentions the first Nutt edition, he gives a misleading impression, perhaps inadvertently, of the success of this volume relative to Wilde's other collections of stories (each of which sold poorly and ran to only one edition in Wilde's lifetime).

A more significant confusion is perpetuated by Sloan's ordering of the stories where, once again, he takes his cue from Murray. If book publication is to be given priority one might expect the contents to follow a chronological order, beginning with The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), followed by Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, and finally A House of Pomegranates (both 1891). Fitting in "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." is awkward because the planned book version of the story was not published in Wilde's lifetime; the "last" and indeed the only "printed version which Wilde was able to supervise" dates from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1889, and so chronologically it should be placed between The Happy Prince and Lord Arthur Savile. Alternatively, an editor could follow the advice of modern advocates of the importance of the periodical for Victorian society and choose to arrange the stories in terms of their first appearance in print—in this instance ignoring the order imposed by the book and respecting, where appropriate, the first periodical publication of each story. Here an editor would begin with all the stories in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (which appeared in 1887 in the Court and Society Review and the World), followed by...