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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 "sodemite." An unfortunate typographical enor tells us that Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor on May 25, 1889 instead of 1895. Shaw's play was not titled Widower's House but Widowers' Houses, produced not in 1893 but in 1892. Unfortunately, such enors undermine confidence in other matters in the text. In short, Oscar Wilde's London, visually attractive, has willed itself into existence in order to entertain a wide audience. It has, at least, the capacity to do precisely that. Karl Beckson ____________________________________Brooklyn College, CUNY____________ FIFTY YEARS OF COMMENTARY ON CHESTERTON D. J. Conlon, ed. G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. $24.95 When should we take a writer at his or her word? When in his autobiography (1936) G. K. Chesterton remarks that he never took his "novels and short stories very seriously, or imagined that [he] had any particular status in anything so serious as a novel," should we believe him? Chesterton's comment sounds familiar when we recall similar words by H. G. Wells about his own fiction; and like Wells, Chesterton also specifically says that "among many more abject reasons for not being able to be a novelist, is the fact that I always have been and presumably always shall be a journalist." The fact that 330 31:3 Book Reviews today the intermixture of joumaUsm and fiction is a central characteristic of a certain kind of contemporary writing aside, just what value should we give these hesitations, qualifications, denials in Chesterton's case, as in Wells's instance? If Wells's critics have come more and more to ignore his disclaimers , Chesteron's critics have yet on the whole to free themselves from worry over the possibility that his self-deprecation should be taken at face value. This problem is very evident in D. J. Conlon's anthology of reprinted essays and excerpts from the last fifty years; and rather than re-review these writings specifically, I would like to use the occasion of their republication to treat them collectively. Writers such as Chesterton and Wells were, obviously, not very comfortable with any personal identification with the idea of the art of fiction as a high-flown form. This form meant, as certain late-Victorian authors like Henry James and Oscar Wilde had insisted, that art possessed its own intrinsic design, purpose, end. If James had any social message, it tended to be...

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