Fragments of Oscar Wilde in Colonial Nigeria: The Story of J. M. Stuart-Young

Fragments of Oscar Wilde in Colonial Nigeria: The Story of J. M. Stuart-Young Stephanie Newell University of Sussex IN THE YEAKS between 1909 and 1939 an exceptionally tall white man could be seen strolling around the streets of Onitsha town in Eastern Nigeria. Growing increasingly frail with the passing decades and leaning more heavily on his umbrella-cum-walking-stick, he wore neither a pith-helmet nor a necktie, as was the custom among colonial officials in West Africa.1 In an age in which hats and ties signified a man's "moral backbone," and dressing for dinner was the norm in the colonies, this was one of the few "uncovered" white bodies available to the African gaze. Local people had many opportunities for close-up views of this man. A shock of red hair, retreating with the years, could be seen where his hat should have been; he peered out through small round spectacles, the left eye slightly out of sorts with the right; and, when not wearing his khaki working clothes, he often wore a pink silk shirt and white linen trousers .2 Nigerians knew him as a poet, a palm-oil trader, a philanthropist who sponsored local youths, a "superman" and a defender of the African people.3 Europeans knew him as a peevish, reclusive businessman and writer who became immensely wealthy during and after the First World War, but who "did not know how to keep it" and lost his fortune with the onset of the Great Depression.4 John Moray Stuart-Young (1881-1939) settled in Onitsha in 1909 after spending more than a decade trying to gain acceptance by the English literary establishment. Between 1894 and the early 1900s from his home in Ardwick, a working-class district of Manchester, he busied himself composing newspaper articles on slum life and stories on local topics , many of which found publication in major British journals such as the Manchester Guardian. Encouraged by his initial success as a writer, ELT 47 : 1 2004 this precocious youth taught himself French, developed a taste for the writings of Baudelaire, rented a postal address in a "respectable" part of Manchester and bombarded his favourite authors with fan letters requesting meetings and signed photographs.5 He undertook regular train journeys to various parts of Britain, especially London, in search of literary personalities, including Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Charles Kains Jackson and John Gambril Nicholson.6 Each of the personalities sought out by Stuart-Young was linked together by one vital thread: his membership of a loosely knit community of homosexual writers in late-Victorian England. Alan Sinfield points out that the term "homosexual" is anachronistic when applied to this historical period, for it had yet to gain its monolithic status as the polar opposite of heterosexual: Sinfield prefers "same-sex passion" to describe the possibilities of queer writing and desire at this time.7 While there was no public, self-conscious community of homosexual writers in the late nineteenth century, the majority of Stuart-Young's mentors had playfully, or painfully, or secretively, or publicly "come out" as lovers of males. The majority of these men, in addition, were Uranian in their aesthetic and sexual tastes, celebrating the youthful male body of classical Greek sculpture and expressing, in their writings, an erotic preference for adolescents and boys, particularly of the lower social orders.8 In selecting his literary mentors and becoming their "fan," the youthful Stuart-Young positioned himself within a subcultural community of boy-loving writers. Some of these men certainly seem to have struck up at least a correspondence with Stuart-Young: Kains Jackson selected and introduced a collection of his poetry in 1919, and Stuart-Young's name appears as a correspondent in papers left by Nicholson and Carpenter .9 Not much more can be discovered, however, about when, and indeed whether, Stuart-Young met these men, nor for how long he stayed with them during his visits. Whether these meetings were imaginary or real, they form an integral part of the memoirs left behind by a very compelling individual, a man who wrote compulsively every night for a period of forty years, and who produced, as...