Wilde Times Matthew Sturgis offers an insight into researching his recent biography of Oscar Wilde, which included a traditional and fruitful method of browsing through the Library’s Biography collection
Do we really need another book about Oscar Wilde? It is hard to escape the question. Certainly I posed it to myself when I embarked on my new biography of the great man. And – over the course of the six years that it took me to research and write the book – many others posed it to me. He has, after all, been much written about. The London Library lists over 300 titles about him and his work, divided principally between the ‘Biography’ and ‘L. English Lit. ’ sections, together with 17 fictional accounts, a scattering of ‘Pamphlets’ and several appearances on the ‘S. Trials’ shelf. Many aspects of Wilde’s achievement are touched on in these volumes, but the number of full, cradle-tothe-grave ‘biographies’ is relatively small. After an initial flurry of works in the years immediately after his death, generally 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
written by people who had known Wilde personally, the pace slowed to one book every decade or so: Boris Brasol’s Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist of 1938, Hesketh Pearson’s The Life of Oscar Wilde in 1946; there were lives by Philippe Jullian in the 1960s and H. Montgomery Hyde in the 1970s. And, in 1987, there appeared Richard Ellmann’s magisterial volume, Oscar Wilde. A wonderful book in many ways, it has pretty much held the field since then. Inevitably, though, the intervening three decades have altered its status. It became clearer and clearer that a new biography of Wilde was not just possible, but was necessary. A mass of important new material had come to light: the full transcript of Wilde’s celebrated libel trial was discovered, as were the witness statements gathered by the Marquess of Queensberry; many new items were brought together in a magnificent new edition in 2000 of Wilde’s letters put together by Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland (Wilde’s grandson). Wilde’s works began to be published – with copious scholarly notes – in the Oxford English Texts series. Dedicated biographies appeared of Wilde’s wife, his mother, his friends and his collaborators. There were fascinating studies of many specific aspects of his life: his working habits; his reading; his American sojourn; his sex life; his medical condition; his friendships with women; his theatrical ventures; his UK lectures; his love of Paris; his time in prison; his holiday at Worthing in 1894. All this needed to be integrated into the record. And there was more. Whole new frontiers of research had opened up. The first decades of the twenty-first century had seen the enormous growth of the
Internet – with its opportunities for sharing information, tracing articles and conducting debate. There had also been the digitisation of thousands of historic newspapers – now accessible through the Library’s eLibrary hub. For anyone who can recall the long trek out to Colindale to visit the old British Library Newspapers archive, the exhausting hours spent hunched over the microfilm reader in an eye-wearying search for a single stray mention of one’s subject, there seems something almost indecent about the new ability to type in a ‘search term’ and bring up, in an instant, dozens, if not hundreds, of new references. But, even with all these fresh horizons to scan, I was keen not to ignore more traditional modes of research in my attempt to create the fullest possible picture of Wilde’s life and times. There were also old byways to be explored in the quest for previously overlooked materials. And one of the most promising of these byways led through the Library. Given Wilde’s great fame during the 46 years of his lifetime (from 1854 to 1900), I reasoned that anyone who had known him, or had encountered him, would – if they had written about their own lives – leave some record of that contact. They might preserve a unique anecdote or aperçu, or give details of an otherwise unrecorded meeting. My idea was to browse along the shelves of the Library’s extensive Biography section – spread over the third and fourth floors of the main building – looking into every memoir or biography written in the half-century after Wilde’s death in search of such references. This was a plan that could not have been contemplated but for the Library’s unique arrangement of having the bookstacks,
