Popular Wilde: A Review Essay

Popular Wilde: A Review Essay Ian Small University of Birmingham The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Merlin Holland, ed. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994. χ + 1268 pp. £9.99 Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems Anthony Fothergill, ed. London: Everyman, 1996. xxx + 600 pp. £6.99 Oscar Wilde, Salomé and Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill James Havoc, ed. London: Creation Books, 1996. 123 pp. £7.95 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Peter Faulkner, ed. London: Everyman, 1996. xxiv + 208 pp. £1.99 THE TIME WAS WHEN the only cheap and accessible editions of Wilde were either a small number of single works published in paperback or the Collins hardback Works of Oscar Wilde. For many students the Collins Wilde was the only Wilde: certainly it was the only affordable edition of many of the works. The only real alternative was Ross's Methuen edition dating from 1908 or its photolithographic reprint by Dawsons in 1969; however both original and copy were prohibitively expensive. In fact, the Collins edition has an interesting history. It first appeared in 1948 edited by G. F. Maine; a second edition was produced in 1966 edited by Philip Drake and introduced by Vyvyan Holland. The 310 SMALL : POPULAR WILDE rationale of the 1966 edition seems to have been to provide the general reader with a fuller account of the oeuvre. Thus Holland (and Drake) included several poems (such as "Chorus of Cloud Maidens" and "Lotus Leaves") which were not to be found in Maine, as well as the four-act version of The Importance of Being Earnest. The most recent Collins edition (1994), introduced by Merlin Holland, with its various sections edited by Holland himself, Owen Dudley Edwards, Terence Brown and Declan Kiberd, is even more comprehensive. As the interest of the general public in Wilde has grown over the past thirty years, so too has a demand for all things Wildean, and it is this demand which the latest Collins answers, for it too prints further new material: fifteen "new" poems are included, together with a much expanded section on Wilde's journalism. Indeed Merlin Holland argues in his introduction to this last section that publishers and editors have tended to sell Wilde short by persisting in reproducing only the most popular works: "Wilde at his most thought-provoking," Holland claims, "has not been in demand" (907). By "thought-provoking" Holland is referring to the serious journalism and letters where he claims the reader can find the "unadorned Wilde." What is immediately striking about all the Collins editions is their growing ambition to get closer to a complete Wilde, when the notion of completeness is defined by current trends in criticism. As Holland makes clear, the latest additions to the Collins Wilde reflect an academic emphasis on his role as a serious professional writer rather than an entertainer. In this respect the Collins—in its latest form—is easily the best value for money for modern students of Wilde. Indeed it remains the nearest thing we have to date to a popular complete works of Wilde. In addition, the 1994 Collins also contains lively and intelligent introductions which, as I have suggested, draw explicitly on recent developments in Wilde criticism; so, for example , attention is given not only to the professional journalist, but also to Wilde's Irishness. These virtues aside, the Collins Wilde (in all its three incarnations) nevertheless has two significant drawbacks: an absence of explanatory annotation (which, given the allusiveness of Wilde, can present something of a handicap for modern readers) and the invisibility of the textual apparatus. With the exception of The Importance of Being Earnest and the poems, textual matters are rarely foregrounded and the editorial problems presented by the fact that some of Wilde's works exist in competing versions is thus silently ignored. In other words, the burgeon311 ELT 40:3 1997 ing market for "Wilde product" (which Merlin Holland is both aware of and deeply suspicious of) seems to have been satisfied at the expense of textual scholarship. Indeed, the trajectory marked by the Collins editions has been repeated by a number of other competing collections of Wilde's works, beginning with H. Montgomery Hyde's...