Oscar Wilde in Philadelphia: The Rosenbach Exhibition

Years ago, while searching for archives of British manuscripts that I could afford to visit, I came across the impressive online finding aid to the collection of rare books and unpublished manuscripts at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Among its holdings were a number of unpublished manuscripts by George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. I ended up not needing to use them for my dissertation, and—naïvely—I assumed that these holdings must be common knowledge and so said nothing of them to others. Fortunately for the world of scholarship, when Professor Margaret Stetz of the University of Delaware and Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, recently came across the Wilde manuscripts, they were savvy enough to realize that these materials could make a significant contribution to current scholarly conversations on Oscar Wilde. Working with the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Stetz and Lasner worked tirelessly to ensure that other scholars would discover these manuscripts and that the public would have an opportunity to learn more about Wilde through an exhibition of these archival holdings.

Titled “‘Everything is Going on Brilliantly’: Oscar Wilde in Philadelphia” after a letter Wilde wrote while in Philadelphia in 1882, the exhibition ran from January 23, 2015, to April 26, 2015. In the words of the exhibition website, this project “was made possible by a generous gift from Barbara F. Freed and Alan Mittelman … and grants from the Pine Tree Foundation of New York and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.”¹ On display were, most notably, a handwritten draft of The Ballad of Reading Gaol with unpublished variations; a 140-page poetical notebook, c. 1879 to 1880, containing fragments and drafts of poems as well as vivid sketches from Wilde’s hand; and Wilde’s hand-corrected manuscript of the original French version of Salomé, containing numerous changes throughout. For example, in the original hand-written manuscript (owned by the Rosenbach), Wilde’s stage directions for Salomé’s dance read simply “elle danse.” In the corrected typescript (owned by the Free Library), Wilde changes this to “elle danse la danse des sept voiles,” showing that the dance of the seven veils from the Strauss opera was in fact Wilde’s own addition. The exhibition also included a poster advertising a Philadelphia production of Patience; a series of trading cards depicting the figure of the Wildean aesthete as a member of different races, with all of the racism one would expect; copies of Richard Strauss’s score to Salomé, annotated by Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy; and Charles Tomlinson Griffe’s musical setting of Wilde’s poem “Symphony in Yellow,” annotated by Marian Anderson.

In tandem with the exhibition, the Rosenbach hosted a series of lectures, all free with admission to the museum and exhibition. The first of these, “Conversations with the Curators,” led by Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, illuminated Wilde’s relationship with Philadelphia (and New Jersey, home of Walt Whitman) as well as Philadelphia’s long-standing fascination with Wilde. Next, playwright Michael Whistler and author Allen Crawford presented “Wilde Meets Whitman: Legendary Conversation,” which highlighted Wilde’s eagerness to meet Whitman and the two authors’ common interests. Finally, in “Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity,” David Friedman explored how Wilde used his time in America to build his name.

In addition to these lectures and the exhibition itself, the Rosenbach hosted an Oscar Wilde reading group, held from March 8 to May 3. The title “reading group” is something of a misnomer since it implies a loose, book-club type structure wherein a different work is discussed each week with participants drifting in and out. This reading group was instead structured as a mini-course, “Truth and Posing: The Many Faces of Oscar Wilde,” complete with a syllabus and a registration fee of $250.² In this mini-course, led by Professor Marylu Hill of Villanova University, participants read and discussed The Picture of Dorian Gray, An Ideal Husband, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” “The Critic as Artist,” “The Portrait of Mr. W. H...