In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

31:3 Book Reviews remains interesting enough to deserve as accomplished a study as Grylls has given us. Charles Burkhart Temple University OSCAR WILDE'S LONDON Wolf Von Eckardt, Sander L. Gilman, and J. Edward Chamberlin. Oscar Wilde's London: A Scrapbook of Vices and Virtues: 1880-1900. New York: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1987. $24.95 The introduction to this handsome volume begins with a very questionable statement : "This book is not about Oscar Wilde. It is about the city that made Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde." It would be more accurate, however, to say that Oscar Wilde made London London, for in the 1890s Wilde's presence helped to give that city its special character; indeed, it is difficult to imagine London in the 1890s without Wilde, but it is possible to imagine Wilde without London (he would have been brilliant anywhere). Perhaps the authors sensed this, for the opening chapter is almost entirely on Wilde. The text aside, Oscar Wilde's London is a picture book, suitable for any coffee table, but it is a very good picture book, for the authors have mined archives for many photographs that even specialists in the field may not have seen. Most of them are concerned with quotidian life, and there are very good fullpage studio photographs of well-known personalities, including leading literary figures of the period. Individual chapters present, sometimes in rather disjointed form, such topics as the theater, sports, prostitution, religion, music, the lower classes, poverty, literature, and art. To be sure, there is, even for the specialist reader, occasional material that is of interest or amusement. The story of Jumbo, the elephant at the Zoological Gardens that was sold to P. T. Bamum but refused to leave its quarters for America, is told at length, and on occasion even statistics have their charm, as in the alleged number of prostitutes (some 80,000) in the 1880s. The presentation is another matter: Chapter I plods along in a manner that seems to establish the authors' intent and model for the book: to present complicated matters painlessly. Paragraphs generally dwindle to one or two sentences, a journalistic device, as though designed to maintain the attention of a reader easily distracted and wearied by substance. At the same time, however, the authors include very lengthy quotations, sometimes running to more than two pages, from contemporary newspapers, periodicals, and books that are informative and revealing of the topic under discussion. 329 31:3 Book Reviews Though its appeal is obviously to a "general reader" who is likely to know little of the period, such a book, at the very least, should strive for accuracy . Unfortunately, there are more enors and confusing remarks than general readers deserve. A selected list follows: Beardsley is mentioned as dead at 25 in one place, 26 in another. Wilde, we are told, did not like Beardsley's illustrations for Salome. Perhaps not initially but Wilde wrote to Mrs. Patrick Campbell that Beardsley's illustrations for the play were "quite wonderful ." The Picture of Dorian Gray did not appear in "installments" in Lippincott 's Monthly Magazine but complete in one issue. The Cheshire Cheese, where the Rhymers' Club habitually met, is not in the Strand but off Fleet Street in Wine Office Court. We are told that Wilde's An Ideal Husband "is a work which relies on wit and subtlety, playing on the lively artifices of life, rather than on the natural tedium of melodramatic conventions." The play, however, like the previous two society comedies as well as The Importance of Being Earnest, bonows devices from the pièce bien faite, a popular form of melodrama in France and England. The Marquess of Queensberry Rules governing boxing were not drawn up by Queensberry and his friend John Graham Chambers but by the latter, who sought Queensberry's approval in order to give the rules respectability in a "profession" lacking it—the story is told in Brian Roberts's definitive biography of the Douglas family, The Mad Bad Line (1981). The card that the Marquess of Queensberry left at Wilde's club a few days after the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest was misspelled "somdomite," not...

pdf

Share