Wilde

however, it is worth remembering that he was sent to prison for shagging underage rent boys, and that remains just as much of a crime now as it was then.

*sigh*

Apparently he kept in touch with a lot of people he had met in prison and tried to help them in the outside world, and not in a seedy hanging around with bits of rough kind of way either.

As for shagging underage boys...wasn't Bosie at least twenty at the time? I don't know the specifics of anyone else. I thought the problem was sodomy, not underage sodomy.

was 'dorian gray' a popular novel?

my sense is that it was a bestseller. y/n

Yeah, I feel like it was, too, but can't confirm sorry.

I can't find figures. It was originally published in a magazine, Wilde was an eminent figure, critics accusing it of being a dirty book, it must have sold well.

Yeah, the wide range of newspapers calling Wilde out for suggesting that homosexuality might exist (but without mentioning the dirty word themselves)--to such an extent that when it came out as a book, Wilde appended a preface defending the artist's pursuit of beauty (as if he needed an excuse)--suggests that it was pretty popular.

thx guys.

this and the eliot musings both relate to a phd chapter on... alfred hitchcock...

Cool. Might you be persuadable to let us have a look at that when you finish?

xpost Of course. I'm up to my ears revising a chapter and was happy to think about another author for five minutes at least.

http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/images/Wcornelwilde.jpg

im over 20,000 words. about 13,000 over target...

Jeez. Sounds like me. I'm right now going back over all my chapters (written over the past four years) to revise them for submission, and they're all longer than I remembered (and longer than they should be). I'm finding it really tough to cut them down--especially when a lot of my 'editing' should be plugging in reams of criticism in the footnotes to 'show my work'.

How do I make 15,000+2,000=12,000?

I remember helping a friend edit his PhD years back. I'm a really vicious editor.

*emails gigantic word file*

I'm also v. lazy.

“Oscar is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter him every six months.”

~ Uncyclopedia on Oscar Wilde

Wilde's letters defending Dorian Grey to philistine editors and reviews = CLASSIC.

And, yes, it was a best-seller. I forgot where I read that Thomas Hardy wrote Wilde to congratulate him for joining the controversial best-sellers club.

the idealistic part of me thinks that, had homosexuality been generally accepted in the 1890s, the whole shebang could have been avoided and he could have just settled down with Robbie Ross and carried on writing until he reached old age

Right, but he would have been writing crap liek "The Sphinx" and verse plays.

Auden and Edmund Wilson are right: Wilde needed tension and drama -- to know that any moment the panthers were going to feast on him, as it were -- to produce great literature. It's mind-blowing to consider that most polished of plays, The Importance of Being Earnest, was written piece-meal, as if it were a potboiler.

i played Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband in high school. really, really love that play.

Alfred Hitchcock's movies were very popular, just as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was in the 1890s.1

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1. Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, "And, Yes, It Was a Best-Seller," ILX Message Board, 21 October 2007, 12:22am. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text.

I like the way that everyone keeps quiet about the fact he was a paedo.

lol

xpost

yeah this thread has kept that under wraps:

however, it is worth remembering that he was sent to prison for shagging underage rent boys, and that remains just as much of a crime now as it was then.

-- The Dirty Vicar, Monday, August 13, 2001 1:00 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

I mean generally.

It's the love that still dare not speak its name.

this fucking guy. I return to his stuff a lot. awhile ago it was the transcript of his trial, which is amazing (starts off sparklingly funny and full of bon mots, spirals downward into horrible, tragic ugliness). re-reading De Profundis at the moment.

however, it is worth remembering that he was sent to prison for shagging underage rent boys, and that remains just as much of a crime now as it was then.

also this is not, strictly speaking, true