Wilde collection sells for €1.25m

A COLLECTION of works by Oscar Wilde made just under €1.25 million at auction yesterday.

An original handwritten chapter of Dublin-born Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray sold for €103,600.

The heavily revised working manuscript of Chapter 16 of the book was one of the rare items of Wilde memorabilia to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London.

It was one of six chapters that Wilde wrote in addition to the original story.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, which tells the story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty was published in 1890. The added chapter includes Dorian’s visit to an opium den.

The chapter was part of a sale of a collection of first editions, presentation copies, letters, manuscripts and original photographs, which was timed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Wilde’s birth.

The collection had been put together over the past 20 years by a private collector in Britain and fetched a total of €1,223,468.86 when it was sold yesterday, well above the €865,000 estimate.

Other works on sale included Wilde’s annotated rehearsal copy of his first published play Vera, or the Nihilists, which sold for €72,500 to a British dealer. It is one of approximately 20 copies printed in the first American edition.

Also auctioned was the only known presentation copy of a rare, privately printed historical tragedy, The Duchess of Padua.

It was sold for €87,000.

Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of surgeon Sir William Wilde and nationalist writer Jane Francesca Elgee.

A brilliant classical scholar, he studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate poetry prize.

He married Constance Lloyd in 1884.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only published novel, was a gothic melodrama which aroused scandalised protest when it was serialised in a magazine.

In his preface, Wilde wrote: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”

His brilliant epigrams and shrewd social observations brought him theatrical success in the early 1890s with The Importance Of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman Of No Importance and An Ideal Husband.

Wilde’s love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas landed him the maximum sentence of two years’ hard labour in jail in 1895 for seven counts of gross indecency.

He was released, an outcast and a broken man, in 1897. He went to live in exile in Paris, where he died, disgraced and penniless in a cheap hotel in 1900, aged only 46.