Wilde Companion

BOOK REVIEWS with unseemly dignity. The result is that The Quest for Jack the Ripper appears more uneven in its treatment of the subject than it really is. Then, too, Whittington-Egan's prose style may take more than a moment or two to get used to, because it is quite different from the toughguy , tabloid journalese so often affected in books about true crimes. Instead , Whittington-Egan's prose is an old-fashioned vehicle for wit and learning, closely derived from the great, quirky, and almost forgotten masters of the genre—William Roughead and Edmund Lester Pearson. At its best, Whittington-Egan's style can lift us well out of the late twentieth century, carry us back beyond time and space into the precise time and place, the very environment, he is addressing. In the end is the beginning, and while we know a great deal about the crimes and times of Jack the Ripper, after 110 years of searching we know very, very little about Jack himself. The plain fact is that we are no closer to capturing him now than were the stolid coppers who patrolled Whitechapel so long ago. In a short coda to his book, Whittington-Egan finds no case to bring against the many suspects he has seen. All are dismissed , no warrants are issued, and the verdict remains an open one, naming only some person or persons unknown. Quite probably, not even Jack's five sad victims knew or could supply the very thing that we have hunted for over a century—the name of the man who murdered them. Clinton Krauss ______________ Montpelier, Vermont Wilde Companion Peter Raby, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxii + 307 pp. Cloth $59.95 Paper $18.95 HISTORY TELLS US that the role of companion to Wilde could be stimulating but also hazardous, perhaps calling for a measure of heroworship as well as self-effacement. The fifteen contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde are all convinced of Wilde's importance as writer and icon, and his relevance to our own fin de siècle, but they exhibit different degrees of companionship or companionability. They also speak in very different voices, ranging from the wittily urbane to the grittily academic. In the excellent essay that opens the volume, for instance, Merlin Holland seems to have in mind the informed general reader, whereas Regenia Gagnier's reference, at the outset of the piece that follows ("Wilde and the Victorians"), to "modern value critique and postmodern perspec73 ELT 42 : 1 1999 tivism" is clearly (if that is the word) aimed at an audience very different from "the wider reading and theatre-going public" referred to in the editor 's preface. This is in fact the familiar kind of academic symposium in which contributors, for better or worse, do their own thing—in this instance , mostly for better. But its claim to be a "companion" is doubtful: such a work ought, for instance, to offer a much fuller and more usefully evaluative guide to Wilde biography and criticism than the "select bibliography " of less than four pages provided here. It ought also, arguably, to be more informative and more inclusive than a book of this length can be: the reference elements here are confined to a brief chronology and an even briefer "Index of Works by Oscar Wilde." This is, however, to question the concept and labelling of the series rather than to disparage the volume under review, which ranges reasonably widely over Wilde's life, work and background and offers much of interest—though, perhaps inevitably, compilations of this kind tend to represent an uneasy compromise between the ideal and the possible. Its three sections deal with "Contexts," "Wilde's Works," and "Themes and Influences," and of these the second provides the most satisfactory coverage of the field in question. Wilde was not, as Victorian authors went, a particularly prolific writer, but he did work over a remarkable spectrum of genres, and there are essays here on his poetry (by Karl Beckson and Bobby Fong), his journalism (John Stokes), his criticism (Lawrence Danson) and his fiction (Jerusha McCormack), as well...