BOOK: Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 9: Plays II: Lady Lancing. Ed. by Joseph Donohue. Oxford University Press, 2019. 9780198821595. xxv + 607 pp.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 10: Plays III: The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘A Wife's Tragedy’. Ed. by Joseph Donohue. Oxford University Press, 2019. 9780198821601. xix + 581 pp.

[Note: the above ISBNs are useless; they are only selling both volumes as a set, under a separate ISBN: 9780198119586.]

I have long known and loved The Importance of Being Earnest as one of Wilde's funniest plays, but I had no idea that this play exists in two substantially different versions, a longer one with four acts and a shorter one with three acts; the second of these is the one we usually hear about. Of the present two volumes, vol. 9 deals with the longer version, Lady Lancing (the title is really a temporary fake one; Wilde was in the habit of making up such titles and using them until he was ready to reveal the real one; p. 4), and vol. 10 deals with the shorter version under its real title, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Similar to the first volume of Wilde's plays in this series (see my post about it from a few years ago), there is also an impressive mass of introductions by the editor, Joseph Donohue — a historical introduction, an editorial introduction, a historical editorial introduction, and even a plain old adjectiveless introduction — most of which make for very interesting reading and give us a good overview of the making of both plays, as well as a number of glimpses into the history of theatre (which seems to be the editor's chief specialty).

Wilde initially wrote Lady Lancing in a fairly short period, over a few months in the autumn of 1894. In terms of genre and length it was apparently something of a deviation from the norms; it combines elements of comedy and farce, and Wilde occasionally described it as a farcical comedy (pp. 7, 61, 155). But farces usually had three acts in his time (earlier in the 19th century they were even shorter, having just one act; pp. 34, 155), so Wilde's four-act play was unusually long by the standards of farce. I found these things very interesting because I had never been used to paying much attention to these details about genre before. I had the vague idea that if a play tries to make you laugh, it's a comedy (of which perhaps farce is a particular subspecies), whereas if it's serious it must be a tragedy — that is all (to borrow a favourite phrase of Wilde's :)). Here in the editor's introduction, however, it is clear that comedy and farce are thought of as two distinct genres with a number of quite clear differences between them (see e.g. pp. 107, 136, 155), and it seems that these aren't just things imposed upon them by later literary scholars but also something that the audience of Wilde's own time would have had in mind.

Anyway, Wilde tried to interest several theatre managers in his play, including one Charles Frohman in New York, which is fortunate since his archive preserved a complete text of the more-or-less final version of this play which might otherwise have been lost (pp. 35, 180). [Interesting factoid: Frohman later died in the sinking of the Lusitania; p. 177.] In London, a manager named Charles Wyndham accepted his play tentatively, but couldn't put it on right away as his actors were currently performing another play that was still going strong (ibid.). A few months later, in January 1895, George Alexander — the manager of another theatre, who had previously rejected Lady Lancing — found out that his current play, Guy Domville by Henry James, was doing poorly* and that he would need something new much sooner than expected. Wilde agreed to provide his play, but apparently he and Alexander had different ideas on what to do with it, so Alexander soon sent Wilde on a vacation while he and his actors adapted and rehearsed the play; in this process it was shortened from four acts to three and turned into something that is much more clearly a farce rather than something halfway between farce and comedy; the result is the Importance of Being Earnest as we mostly know it now. It seems that Alexander's reasons for making the play shorter were partly to bring it closer to being the sort of three-act farce that the audience was familiar with, and partly because this allowed him to perform a short one-act “curtain raiser” play before the IBE itself, and this in turn allowed “fashionable” (= upper-class) playgoers to “linger over dinner” (pp. 665, 750, 1023) a bit longer before coming to the play “fashionably late” (p. 1043; so they would skip the curtain-raiser and come just in time for the performance of the IBE itself). Donohue jokes that Alexander's efforts changed Lady Lancing so much that “even her own author did not know her” (p. 60), and Wilde himself jokingly complimented Alexander after the opening night that it was “charming, quite charming [. . .] from time to time I was reminded of a play I once wrote myself” (pp. 165, 667). Donohue estimates that Alexander's cuts shortened the duration of the play from three hours to about two and a half (p. 700) — frankly, from the amount of material removed, I'm surprised that the difference isn't even larger.

[*This was all quite new to me, and very interesting. Henry James is of course famous as a novelist, but apparently he was also a lifelong theatre enthusiast (p. 19), though his efforts as a playwright weren't too successful. His play, Guy Domville, was apparently liked well enough by the better-off sorts of people, but these constituted a minority of the audience and their applause was drowned out by “such an explosion of cat-calls and boos and hisses as was seldom heard even in those days when first-night disturbances were not uncommon” (p. 27). James “determined never to write for the theatre again” (ibid.).]

Nor does the history of the play end there. In 1898, after Wilde got out of prison, he prepared the IBE for publication as a book (by the (in)famous Leonard Smithers, the only publisher who dared to print Wilde's books in his last few years), resulting in a new version that restores some (but not much) material from LL. After Wilde's death, his friend and literary executor Robert Ross seems to have prepared a kind of mix of both versions (by taking the four-act version and importing into it some material from the three-act one), which formed a basis for a translation into German by Hermann von Teschenberg, an Austrian writer (pp. 40–2, 47–8); profits from translations into other European languages were an important part of the effort to repay the debts that Wilde had left when he died; these were successfully paid off by 1906 (p. 48). Later Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, tried to reconstruct Ross's version by comparing the German translation with various extant typescripts of both the LL and IBE (“an ingenious and novel approach”; pp. 52–3); some of the typescripts themselves were published by Sarah Dickson in 1956 (pp. 49–51); and finally Ruth Berggren (Donohue's Ph.D. student) published a critical edition of the four-act version in 1987 (p. 150).

Wilde seems to have revised his work quite a lot when working on this play, resulting in a series of typescripts, many of which are still extant. He would send a manuscript out to be typed, then annotate the resulting typescript with his changes, send the new version out to be typed again, etc. The amount of attention dedicated by the editor to these details is awe-inspiring if somewhat boring (e.g. there's a discussion of how some annotations are in pencil and some in ink, indicating that Wilde did two passes of editing on the same typescript; pp. 112–3). I wonder how the literary scholars of the future will deal with these things since present-day authors presumably edit their works in a word processor and don't leave a mass of typescripts and manuscripts behind. (And some of them are deliberately hostile in this process; I think it was either Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett who said something along the lines of “I keep several older versions of a novel in separate files while I'm working on it, but when it's finished I delete them all with a cry of ‘fuck you, literary scholars of the future, get an honest job!’ ”)

Anyway, this abundance of different variants of the text also means that the critical apparatus is bulkier than in most of the previous volumes of Wilde's works; often it takes up more than half of each page. But it seems that earlier manuscripts were even longer than the final version of Lady Lancing, so by looking at the critical apparatus you can discover a number of potentially interesting passages that Wilde removed in the process of reworking the text. This the editor advises us to do (p. 177), and I haven't regretted following his advice. Probably Wilde had a good reason for cutting these things, e.g. because a shorter play would be more effective (after all, we can see that Alexander later went a step further and cut it even more, from four acts to three), but many of the cut passages are witty and fun to read anyway.

There's also a useful appendix (pp. 507–607) showing the text of LL and of the IBE (as performed in 1895) side by side, so that you can see the deletions (and other smaller changes) very easily. The biggest cuts appear in acts 2 and 3 of LL, which were merged into act 2 of the IBE. This involved the removal of a very funny scene where a solicitor shows up ready to arrest Ernest Worthing over unpaid bills for dinners at a fancy London restaurant. The bills were actually Jack's, who had been in the habit of posing as his fictional brother Ernest on his trips to London; but now Jack's friend Algernon is posing as Ernest while visiting Jack's country house (and trying to seduce Jack's ward Cecily), so it is Algernon that nearly gets arrested until Jack magnanimously offers to pay ‘his’ bills.

I don't doubt that George Alexander knew what he was doing and had good reasons for this and other (smaller) cuts, and that the result was quite possibly a better piece of theatre; but I for my part liked the longer version better. I enjoyed the play and had no reason to want it to end sooner rather than later; and plenty of amusing, witty or funny things were lost through these cuts. (Donohue quotes a reviewer's opinion that the “[l]oss of so many witticisms was ultimately the equivalent of ‘chips that the diamond cutter must sometimes necessarily sacrifice’ ”; p. 147.) As one of the early reviews remarked, all the characters in this play speak “full and undiluted Wildese” (p. 1026) pretty much all the time, so any cut is a tragic loss of wit. In fact, if the material from the earliest manuscripts of LL were included, I would like it still better — these were things which Wilde himself had cut before finishing LL, and which now appear only in the critical apparatus. An example occurs early in Act 1, where Jack (posing as Ernest) is trying to conceal the location of his country house from Algernon (while visiting him in London). He tries to be vague about the location, until Algernon points out that what he had said so far puts his stables about 150 miles away from his house, which must surely be “rather inconvenient” :)) (P. 195.)

As usual in the OET edition of Wilde's works, the editor's commentary is also extremely exhaustive and full of interesting bits of information. I particularly liked the way he used late-19th-century reference books (e.g. Cassell's Domestic Dictionary: An Encyclopaedia of the Household (1877–9), various tourist guides to London, advertisements, railroad timetables, etc.) to show us what Wilde and his original audience would have known or thought about something. There's even a recipe (from a contemporary magazine) for cucumber sandwiches of the sort that Algy is stuffing himself with in act 1 (p. 867). There is also a long discussion about the names of the characters; Wilde liked to use English place-names for this (“territorial names have always a cachet of distinction; they fall on the ear full toned with secular dignity”, Wilde said to Frank Harris; pp. 367, 881*) and apparently put a good deal of thought into it. For example, Lady Bracknell of the IEB was called Lady Brancaster in LL, but he renamed her Bracknell after Lady Queensberry's estate (“deliciously appropriate”, p. 664). The title Lady Lancing comes from a town in Sussex (p. 4). I was surprised by the discussion of Bunbury, the name of Algernon's fictional invalid friend; Jack calls it an “absurd name” (p. 202), and I was happy to agree with him, but it turns out that there were actually number of very respectable Victorians with that name, as well as a village in Cheshire; and there was a Henry Bunbury, family friend of Wilde's parents (pp. 368–9, 884).

[*Donohue adds that Harris often embellished his anecdotes but that this one, “if it isn't true, it ought to be”.]

The editor also provides a very interesting account of the opening night of the play (pp. 615–22, 1015–23), based on various remarks scattered through some fifty or so newspaper reviews as well as from various later memoirs, e.g. those of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson (‘the Sphinx’). It was by all accounts a triumph, perhaps the acme of Wilde's theatrical career, the feeling of which is intensified by our knowing, while we read about this triumphant first night, what a terrible catastrophe was about to strike his life so soon after it. Some premonitions of it appear during the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest itself: we see the dastardly Marquess of Queensberry prowling about the theatre, determined to cause a scene if he can, and only being kept out thanks to massive precautions by Wilde and by the theatre manager (who apparently engaged some twenty policemen to keep Queensberry out; p. 617). Only a few days later the Marquess would leave that fateful calling card (“posing somdomite” etc.) at Wilde's club (p. 623), which then led to the lawsuit, the trials, and to Wilde's downfall.

In the Season

As an appendix, vol. 10 also includes In the Season, the short one-act play that was performed just before The Importance of Being Earnest during its first theatrical run in early 1895. It was written by Langdon E. Mitchell, an American playwright. I didn't like it very much; a man has just been definitely rejected by the woman he had been wooing, and he decides he is so over her that he even burns the letter of rejection that she sent him. But a friend convinces him to try talking to her once more after all. She is highly offended to learn that he has burned her letter, and takes it as a sign that he can hardly have really loved her at all, but, well, one thing leads to another and by the end of the conversation they get together again. Unfortunately I haven't got the life experience necessary to judge whether this sort of sudden vehement emotional shifts are plausible or not; but I guess they are — they certainly seem to appear often enough in fiction. For my part, while reading this play I couldn't help wishing that people would be a little more sober and reasonable about these matters, and that they would make up their minds and then stick to their decisions. Anyway, I think those fashionable theatregoers who, as Donohue says, skipped this curtain-raiser so they could prolong their dinner a little more, didn't miss much by doing so.

A Wife's Tragedy

This is an unfinished work of Wilde's, completely unrelated to The Importance of Being Earnest, and I had never heard of it before reading this book. It is extant in a short manuscript that is believed to date from around 1890 or so (p. 1072), i.e. relatively shortly before he started writing his triumphantly successful society comedies. It seems to be quite a rough and fragmentary early draft; the editor first gives the text of the manuscript as it is, then a lightly edited version, and then finally one in which the fragments have been rearranged into what seems to be the order that makes the most sense. It was quite impressive to see how much better and more readable the final version is thanks to these efforts by the editor.

I liked the play quite a bit even in its unfinished state, and I think it's a pity that Wilde didn't get around to finishing it. It deals with a sort of love-quadrangle involving four upper-class English people in Venice. There's Gerald, a poet, and his wife Nellie; he hasn't actually written much poetry since they got married, and he seems to regard the marriage as primarily an “intellectual union” (p. 1139) with “a delightful intellectual companion” (p. 1134), with the unsurprising result that his wife feels a bit neglected. Gerald makes a big deal out of following Paterian ideals of life (“Those of us live best who crowd into this little span of life the most fiery-coloured moments”, p. 1139). There's Arthur, an old acquaintance of his from their college years, who is a much more conventional person and is currently on leave from his military career. And finally there's the Countess, a somewhat older but apparently still quite good-looking woman, the widow of a French aristocrat.

Gerald falls in love with the Countess, who affects some of the same quasi-artistic ideals of life as he does; but after a while she realizes that she desperately needs to marry for money, due partly to her own debts (“economy is inartistic”, p. 1142) and partly those of her late husband (whose speculations on the stock exchange hadn't turned out well), so she wants to dump Gerald and marry Arthur instead. Meanwhile Arthur and the neglected Nellie have fallen in love, but decide that they shouldn't pursue this any further and Arthur departs from Venice. So at the end of the play, all the relationships have fallen apart: the marriage of Gerald and Nellie seems unlikely to survive; Nellie's relationship with Arthur is over; and the Countess has broken up with Gerald and is now unable to enter a relationship with Arthur, because he is gone. I think this is a very nice modernization of the traditional tragic ending where all the main characters get killed; here they just end up alone and miserable instead.

One thing that I found somewhat untypical of Wilde is that the character of Gerald is — or at least seems to me to be — presented as a negative one. Gerald is the proponent of the sort of ideals that we usually associate with Aestheticism, with art, with Walter Pater, etc. — the sort of things that Wilde himself (or so we imagine him) championed in his works and in his life. He often has characters that embrace these things, and they are usually portrayed in a way that makes it clear that he is on their side, and wants you the reader to be on their side as well: Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, Vivian in The Decay of Lying, Gilbert in The Critic as Artist, etc. — all these frivolous dandies, whose life is a nonstop sequence of outrageous epigrams and whom we know and love so much in Wilde's works. But Gerald is not one of these; neither he nor anyone else in this play says much in the way of typical Wildean aphorisms; his pursuit of the Paterian ideals is revealed as shallow and empty; and it leaves both him and his wife miserable. It is an interesting change from Wilde's other works, and shows that he could write in a more serious tone as well when he set his mind to it.

A lovely passage crossed out by Wilde, showing that he couldn't turn off his comic wit even when writing a tragedy: the Countess says that her husband “either died of a broken heart or got a situation in the Civil service, I really am not quite sure which. But I know he was wretched.” (P. 1136.) And the editor joins in on the fun by adding, in his commentary: “as an alternative to dying of a broken heart, the British civil service might be said to have much to recommend it” (p. 1158). But surely the late Count, being a Frenchman, would have joined the French civil service?

Miscellaneous

• The historical introduction includes a useful explanation of a few theatrical terms whose meaning I was only dimly aware of until now: stalls were individual seats while the pit was an area consisting of benches, where tickets were cheaper (p. 9). Over the course of the 19th century, benches were slowly getting replaced by stalls as the interest of better-off people in the theatre grew again (p. 10).

• The editor describes The Importance of Being Earnest as “Wilde's single best-known work” (p. 61) — this surprised me, as I would imagine that his best-known work must be either Dorian Gray or Salomé.

• Wilde poked fun at his publishers, Messrs. John Lane & Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head, by naming two servants in Lady Lancing after them (p. 72; “a clear case of literary revenge”, pp. 349, 861). He later abandoned the name Mathews, but Lane is still there, even in the final version of The Importance of Being Earnest.

• Some interesting remarks about Wilde's handwriting: “He writes rapidly and with great facility; ideas crowd upon him, and his pen records them as swiftly as they occur, resulting in numerous elisions, especially of the endings of words and common last syllables as ‘-ly’, ‘-ing’, and ‘-tly’.” (P. 111.) See also the images of a few pages from Wilde's manuscripts scattered here and there in both volumes.

• Donohue occasionally quotes from Wilde's “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (e.g. p. 164, n. 67), which hasn't appeared in any of the volumes of the OET Complete Works of Wilde so far, but it did appear in Ross's 1908 edition of Wilde's works. Let's hope that it will be included in some subsequent volume of the OET edition; I thought that a few more volumes of plays are all that's missing now, but hopefully there will be a volume of miscellaneous stuff as well.

• Dr. Chasuble upon being asked by Jack if he would have any objections to christening him as an adult: “Oh, I am not by any means a bigoted Paedobaptist.” (Lady Lancing, act 2; p. 245. This sentence was omitted from IBE; p. 802.) This probably sounded much less funny in 1894 than it does now when everyone is so obsessed with pedophiles in the church :)))

• From early manuscripts of LL, act 2 (when Mr. Gribsby of Gribsby and Parker, Solicitors, shows up to arrest ‘Ernest’ (actually Algy) for his debts): “Jack. You are Gribsby, aren't you? What is Parker like?/ Gribsby. I am both, Sir. Grisby when I am on unpleasant business, Parker on occasions of a less severe kind.” (P. 256.)

• An interesting recurring theme in this play, as also elsewhere in Wilde's work, is the decline of the British aristocracy, which (especially if it relied on land for its income, as it traditionally did) was unable to keep up with the wealth of the industrial plutocrats and, by the late 19th century, also lost its stranglehold over politics.

Thus for example, in a manuscript of Lady Lancing, act 1, Lady Brancaster says of the Morning Post: “that paper has become sadly democratic lately: which is strange, as it is only a few years since it lowered its price in order to suit the diminished incomes of the aristocracy./ Jack. My dear Lady Brancaster, I don't care twopence whether the ‘Morning Post’ notices me or not. Who on earth would care?/ Lady Brancaster. The price of the paper is, I am glad to say, merely one penny.” (Pp. 218, 979.)

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell asks: “Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?” (P. 782; not in LL, see p. 215. See also the commentary at p. 917.)

Elsewhere Wilde alludes to the recently introduced inheritance taxes, which devastated many an heir to an agricultural estate (pp. 213, 394; an “extremely timely” comment, p. 912); and to the “agricultural depression” which “the aristocracy are suffering very much from [. . .] just at present” (pp. 286, 819, 983; land was less and less profitable in Britain because their agriculture couldn't compete with cheaper foreign imports). Trollope summarized these changes by saying that now “[l]and is a luxury, and of all luxuries the most costly” (p. 912).

• Wilde uses “type-writer” in the sense “typist” (p. 220).

• Jack in early manuscripts of Lady Lancing, act 1: “The fact is, women aren't nearly as clever as we men say they are.” (P. 224.) And Cecily in early manuscripts of act 3: “Women are not so clever as men say they are. But they are much cleverer than men think they are.” (P. 279.)

• From Lady Lancing, act 3 (p. 285): “Cecily. When I see a spade I call it a spade./ Gwendolen. I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.” (Also in the IBE, act 2; p. 818.) The editor points out that Gwendolen was probably exaggerating; it's true that she was a city girl, but one could even buy a spade at Harrod's (p. 461).

• Wilde never misses a chance to poke fun at his fellow authors. Here's Jack in Lady Lancing, act 4: “To invent anything at all is an act of sheer genius, and, in a commercial age like ours, shews considerable physical courage. Few of our modern novelists ever dare to invent a single thing. It is an open secret that they don't know how to do it.” (Pp. 316–7. Omitted in the IBE; p. 840.)

• In an early manuscript of Lady Lancing, act 4, Jack says: “More young men are ruined nowadays by paying their bills than by anything else. I know many fashionable young men in London, young men of rank and position, whose rooms are absolutely littered with receipts, and who with a callousness that seems to me absolutely cynical, have no hesitation in paying ready money for the mere luxuries of life. Such conduct seems to me to strike at the very foundation of things. The only basis for good Society is unlimited credit. Wihout that, Society, as we know it, crumbles. Why is it that we all despise the middle classes? Surely because they invariably pay what they owe.” (Pp. 317–8, 935.) As they say on the internets: this but unironically :)

By the way, Wilde later reused this quip in an 1897 letter to his publisher, Leonard Smithers: “Where will you end if you go on like this? Bankruptcy is always in store for those who pay their debts. It is their punishment.” (P. 649. Alas, Smithers would indeed end up bankrupt eventually.)

• In Lady Lancing, act 4, Wilde strikes back at the Green Carnation, the novel parodizing him: “Lady Brancaster. This treatise, the ‘Green Carnation’, as I see it is called, seems to be a book about the culture of exotics. [. . .] It seems a morbid and middle-class affair.” (P. 338; omitted from IBE, p. 850.) This novel had been published in September 1894, shortly before Wilde started working on his play (p. 699).

• Wilde's opinion on Beardsley's drawing for the cover of the Yellow Book: “Oh, you can imagine the sort of thing. A terrible naked harlot smiling through a mask — and with ELKIN MATHEWS written on one breast and JOHN LANE on the other.” (Pp. 349, 862.) But on the cover as it was actually published, the harlot isn't naked and the publishers' names do not appear on her breasts.

• British theatre at the time liked to borrow from French plays,* but it was subject to a stricter system of censorship. A French critic, Augustin Filon, describes the ludicrous ways of getting around this: “Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word ‘cocotte’ in black and white, they replace it by the word ‘actress.’ Where we have unblushingly written ‘adultery,’ they have inserted ‘flirtation.’ ” (P. 378. The audience had no difficulty translating these things back in their minds. See also p. 379 for a beautiful, impassioned statement by Wilde protesting against the censorship, quoted from pp. 370–2 of Stuart Mason's bibliography of Wilde.)

[*In fact this borrowing was so widespread that they had a special term, “Entirely Original”, used to advertise the fact that “the play was not an adaptation from the French” (p. 723, n. 70; and see also p. 1030).]

• Wilde said that while writing Dorian Gray, he “studied long lists of jewelry [. . .] spent hours over a catalogue published by a firm of horticulturists” etc. (pp. 435, 959) — the same naturalist methods that we know e.g. from Huysmans, who went from being a naturalist to being a decadent while keeping the same methods of work.

• An interesting remark from an unpublished notebook by Wilde: “I have never sowed wild oats: I have planted a few orchids” (p. 437). I wonder if that's just a reference to orchids being beautiful and exotic and decadent, or is it somehow a homosexual reference (due to the well-known fact that the word “orchid” comes from the Greek word for “testicle”).

• We have mentioned the fear of draughts on the pages of this blog before. Nowadays it is widespread in Central and Eastern Europe, but it seems to be unknown in English-speaking countries. So I was very interested to learn that little more than a hundred years ago it was a thing in England as well: “Most people of any experience are afraid of being exposed to draughts of cold air, and rightly so, because they are fruitful causes of rheumatism, colds, and coughs, and ought to be most carefully avoided by all” (Cassell's Domestic Dictionary (1877–9), quoted by Donohue on p. 440).

• An interesting factoid from p. 479: Wilde's mother, Lady Jane Wilde, observed that “about sixteen thousand women in London live by literature; that is, there are amongst us sixteen thousand bundles of abnormal nerves and sensibilities and quivering emotions, fiery fancies, tumultuous passions, and throbbing brains, all working day and night to formulate themselves into words”.

• One of my favourite lines from the play is Lady Bracknell's from the first act: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both seems like carelessness.” I was surprised to see that this appears in LL (p. 215) and in early manuscripts of the IBE, but not in the final version of the IBE, where it is reduced to “Both? That seems like carelessness.” (P. 782). I could have sworn that I've seen the longer version before, but where? The cheap Wordsworth edition of Wilde's works that I read years ago has the shorter version from the final text of the IBE.

• A lovely pun from The Importance of Being Earnest: “Gwendolen. I had no idea there were any flowers in the country./ Cecily. Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London.” (P. 819. Not in LL; p. 286.)

• I thought that the type in these two volumes was unusually small, but after measuring it and comparing it with two of the previous volumes (3 and 5), it turns out to be the same size. The lines in the main body of the text are 11 points apart, while those in the commentary are 10 points apart. Either way, these two books waste no space and pack a prodigious quantity of material into a total of nearly 1200 pages.

• From Wilde's letter to Robert Ross while preparing the printed edition of The Importance of Being Earnest (1898): “I feel sure my ‘woulds’ and ‘shoulds’, my ‘wills’ and ‘shalls’ are all wrong. Perhaps you might look at them.” (P. 646) Frankly, after seeing the discussion of the gloriously abstruse traditional will-and-shall system in The King's English, I'm surprised that anyone ever got them right :)

• On my usual subject of gripes about errors and typos, there are a few in these two volumes but not as many as in some of the previous ones. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much — “in a long work 'tis fair to steal repose” (as Byron says), and all that.

• The wholesale decline and collapse of the postal system — I would like to say the British one, but I suspect it's more widespread than that* — seems to continue unabated. I ordered these two volumes directly from the Oxford University Press, as usual; soon I got an e-mail that the books had been sent off... and then waited another five weeks for the books to actually get here. This is insane. You could probably walk from England to Slovenia in this time. Perhaps Britain is not only exiting from the EU but also from planet Earth, if not from the entire solar system. And judging by some of the labels on the parcel, it seems to have passed through Hungary at one point. Why, just why?

[*But credit where it's due: books from Sweden still reach me in less than a week. That country at least doesn't seem to have quite gone to the dogs yet, though recent experiences with trying to order copies of old newspaper pages from the Kungliga biblioteket are starting to force me to reconsider this view... My first idea was that that department must have been outsourced to orangutans, but on second thought that would be a gross insult to orangutans.]

ToRead:

• Antony Edmonds: Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath (2014). Mentioned here on p. 2, n. 3.
• Jonathan Fryer: Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde's Devoted Friend (2000). Mentioned on p. 46, n. 30.
• Katharine Worth: Oscar Wilde (1984). Mentioned on p. 154, n. 48.
• Frank Harris: Mr. and Mrs. Daventry. Based on a scenario by Wilde (pp. 170, 648.).
• Ada Leverson: Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde with Reminiscences of the Author (London: Duckworth, 1930). Mentioned on pp. 384, 618. Judging by the quotes in these two volumes, it also contains some very interesting reminiscences of the overall atmosphere of the 1890s by Ada Leverson.
• Merlin Holland: Irish Peacock and the Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (2003). Mentioned on pp. xvii, 115.
• H. Montgomery Hyde: Oscar Wilde (1975). Mentioned on p. 433.
• George Ives: A Book of Chains (1897). Mentioned on pp. 366, 880. A volume of poems by Ives, who was a friend of Wilde's; Wilde used his address in the play as Jack's address when visiting the town (and posing as Ernest).
• John Gray, André Raffalovich: A Northern Aspect: The Ambush of Young Days. Two Duologues (privately printed, 1895). A “satirical sketch” (pp. 379; see also pp. 440, 893).
• Lady Wilde: The Works of Oscar Wilde: Essays and Stories by Lady Wilde (Speranza) (Sunflower edn., 1909). Donohue often quotes from her essays (pp. 432, 466 etc.).
• Theodore Wratislaw: Oscar Wilde: A Memoir, ed. by Karl Beckson (London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 1979). Mentioned on p. 433.
• Horace Wyndham: Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde (1951). Mentioned on p. 477.
• Linda Stratmann: The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde's Nemesis (2013). Mentioned on p. 616, n. 18.
• Michael S. Foldy: Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (1997). Mentioned on p. 622, n. 41.
• Nicholas Franke: Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (2017). Mentioned on p. 639, n. 82; about Wilde's final years.
• James Albery: Pink Dominos (1877). In The Dramatic Works of James Albery, ed. Wyndham Albery, vol. 2 (London: Peter Davies, 1939). Mentioned here on p. 715; a comedy containing an idea similar to Wilde's ‘Bunburying’. Adapted from Les dominos roses by Alfred Hennequin and Alfred Delacour.
• Michael Seeney: From Bow Street to the Ritz: Oscar Wilde's Theatrical Career from 1895 to 1908 (High Wycombe, Bucks.: Rivendale Press, 2015). Mentioned here on p. 733, n. 98; Sweeney “compiled an exhaustive account of West End plays on tour during this period”.
• Stephen Philips: Paolo and Francesca (1895). Mentioned here on p. 736; this tragedy replaced Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in St. James's Theatre in from 6 March 1895.
• George Gissing: New Grub Street (1891). A novel, mentioned here on pp. 886, 904.
• John Francis Bloxam: The Priest and the Acolyte (1894). Published anonymously in the Chameleon, which he edited. Wilde contributed some aphorisms for the only issue of that magazine (p. 914 here).
• Frederic Whyte: William Heinemann: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). Mentioned on p. 963.
• Hesketh Pearson: Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter (1956). Mentioned on p. 13, n. 33.
• Hesketh Pearson: The Last Actor-Managers (1950). Mentioned on p. 11, n. 25; p. 1044, n. 2.
• Anna, Comtesse de Brémont: Oscar Wilde and His Mother: A Memoir (London: Everett, 1911). Anna was “an Irish-American woman named Anna Dunphy who, according to Richard Ellmann, had married ‘a putative count’ ” (p. 1151). She got to know Wilde during his visit to America in 1882 and kept up the acquaintance later.
• W. S. Gilbert: Patience; or, Bunthorne's Bride (1881). Mentioned on p. 1153; Gilbert was satirizing Wilde as “Bunthorne, the mystic poet”.
• Oscar Wilde: The English Renaissance of Art: Essays and Lectures (6th ed., 1928). Mentioned here on p. 1153. I wonder if these things will eventually appear in the present OET edition of Wilde's works as well.
• Elizabeth Aslin: The Aesthetic Movement: Prelude to Art Noveau (1969). Mentioned on p. 1153.
• Ian Small (ed.): The Aesthetes: A Sourcebook (1979). Mentioned on p. 1156.