Richard Le Gallienne—Liverpool’s Wild(e) Poet: An Exhibition Held at Liverpool Central Library, August–October 2016

Occupying the Hornby Room, one of several handsome spaces that grace Liverpool Central Library’s wonderfully refurbished building, the exhibition “Richard Le Gallienne—Liverpool’s Wild(e) Poet” offers a small but carefully curated and helpfully presented glimpse of the poet and his curious career. Organised by Mark Samuels Lasner and Margaret Stetz from the University of Delaware, the exhibition celebrates the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Le Gallienne’s birth. Working in collaboration with a number of Liverpool institutions and individuals, Lasner and Stetz bring together rich local resources with a number of important contributions from the University of Delaware and from private collectors. Prefaced with an opening reception and concluding with a symposium held on October 29, the exhibition forcefully suggests how cross-city collaborations can bring together a wide range of people, especially the famously knowledgeable general public of Liverpool, in ways that use local interest as a means of suggesting broader themes.

The central feature of the exhibition is Le Gallienne’s conversion to a Wildean vision of the poet/aesthete, largely as a consequence of attending one of Wilde’s lectures at the Claughton Music Hall in Birkenhead, December 1883. From a respectable and increasingly prosperous family, Le Gallienne (originally “Dick Gallienne”) responded to what he later called Wilde’s “unquestionable fascination” and decided to out-Wilde Wilde as an archetype of the decadent aesthete. Rather sweetly, Le Gallienne’s conservative father ultimately accepted his son’s conversion to the life poetic, even assembling scrapbooks devoted to his son’s public appearances. One such book of cuttings is in the exhibition. Le Gallienne left Liverpool in 1891, taking his new bride Mildred Lee to London, where he began a turbulent emotional life that lasted until his death in France in 1947. Nonetheless, he retained many contacts in Liverpool. His relationship with Wilde appears in the exhibition through correspondence and book dedications as well as through the ways in which Le Gallienne shaped his career. The most interesting aspect of his literary work shown here concerns his relationship with the publisher John Lane and his influence over the development of the “Keynotes” series. In particular, the exhibition suggests that Le Gallienne made crucial editorial changes to George Egerton’s (Mary Dunne’s) Keynotes volume of stories that were significant in developing the confrontational literary presence of the intellectually and sexually independent New Woman.

Beyond showing some contributions to the Yellow Book, the exhibition has little to say about late Victorian periodicals, but it does situate Le Gallienne firmly in the literary milieu of the 1890s. There is also a lot of information here about that fascinating late Victorian Liverpool literary phenomenon, Cope’s Smokeroom Booklets, which combined advertising with self-consciously literary aspirations to form an inventive serial publication. The captions for the exhibits are extensive and are written in a way that manages both to admire and offer amused commentary on the poet’s career. The richness of the holdings of Liverpool libraries is immediately evident in the exhibition, and the assembled letters, books, and documents offer an original and visually satisfying way of approaching the early career of a literary figure who became rather more substantial than his origins might have suggested.