A new kind of biography: What the books Wilde kept say about him

Sometimes an individual is such a pain that, even when he’s dead, people go out of their way to get back at him. Like the gravediggers responsible for burying John Douglas. He left instructions that he was to be buried standing upright. The lads interred him head down. Even in death, they wanted to stick it to him.

Douglas, the man responsible for boxing’s Queensberry Rules, was the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. Or maybe the 8th.

The third in the line was a lunatic cannibal, and so they tried to write him out of the family history, leaving some confusion as to which number was worn by John Douglas. The latter wasn’t a cannibal, but he came close.

He was possessed of an unending supply of bile and venom. He fought with his colleagues in the House of Lords, (a rampant atheist, he wouldn’t take the oath, refusing to engage in what he called “Christian tomfoolery”), with actors who were total strangers to him (creating havoc in the middle of a play because he didn’t like the way an atheist character was presented) with his wives (the second one stuck with him for less than a year), with his sons and with Oscar Wilde.

He hated Wilde because the Irishman was engaged in a relationship with Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, a talented young man who carried at least some of the traits of his appalling father.

Never mind that Wilde had taken “Bosie,” as Lord Alfred was called, under his wing for more than sexual purposes, mentoring him in his studies, drawing up a reading programme for him and ensuring he got the university degree he would otherwise have flunked.

The closeness of the relationship drove Queensbury even more nuts than he was to start with. He left an open message for Wilde at his club that — when Queensberry’s misspellings were taken into account — accused the playwright of sodomy. Wilde, unwisely, sued, lost and ended up convicted of gross indecency, for which he served a prison sentence of hard labour, losing his family in the process.

Queensberry was awarded £600 in legal costs, a fortune at the time. He insisted on payment. As a result, while Wilde was picking oakum in Holloway Prison, his library of beautiful books was put up for public auction to pay off some of his debts.

So many gawkers, pickpockets and book dealers turned up on the day of the book auction that fisticuffs broke out and the police had to be called to restore order. Not that there was much order, anyway. The books had been thrown together in mismatched bundles without thought to their individual or group value, and the net take for the entire library was £130.

Some of the books were bought on the day by Oscar’s friends, grieved at his loss. Other friends, spotting annotated and signed volumes in the windows of bookshops for resale in the following months, bought them for much more than the dealers had spent on them at the auction and returned them to their original owner. But a collection of books it had taken a man 30 years to build was scattered to the four winds in one chaotic day.

“The one of all my material losses the most distressing to me,” was how Oscar described the destruction of his library a couple of years later.

The dispersal of Oscar Wilde’s library is the central theme of a new book, the product of an obsession on the part of author Thomas Wright that goes back to his teen years.

“Twenty years ago, when I was 16, I was browsing the shelves of a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge,” Wright explains. “The black and white spine of the Oxford Authors edition of Oscar Wilde’s writings caught my eye and I took it down. It was cheap. I liked the sweet smell of its pages, and I knew that Wilde was a ‘Lord of Language’ from the beautiful fairy tales that had been read to me as a child.

“I bought the book, and, later the same day, I started to read Dorian Gray. By the end of the first chapter I was overwhelmed… like many of its first readers back in the 1890s, I was so enchanted by the novel that I read it 15, or perhaps even 20 times, sometimes finishing it and beginning it again on the same day.”

He decided to read everything Wilde ever wrote. In the process, because Wilde, in addition to being a playwright, was an award-winning academic and literary critic, he (Wright) was steered by the dead man to countless other writers.

One book led to another, and to a realisation that, although his surgeon father Dr William Wilde and poet mother who wrote as “Speranza” (two “preposterously gifted” parents, Wright dubs them) had been profoundly influential in Oscar’s intellectual development, it was the books he chose for himself that most shaped his thinking and attitudes.

In them, he discovered aspects of himself for the first time, encountered historic cultures that elevated his instincts into legitimate, nay, admirable cultural norms, and caused him to interrogate the world around him.

Therein lay the germ of a new kind of biography: an account of what a man’s books say about him. Or, more precisely, what the books a man KEEPS say about him — because the catalogue for the sale of Wilde’s library includes several of what could only be described as the Danielle Steele’s of their time. We don’t know if Wilde read them. We just know he found shelf space for them.

Wright tracked 50 of the original books to museums and private collections and received permission to examine them. Before he viewed Wilde’s own copy of a particular text, he would buy his own copy, read it, then bring it with him and carefully reproduce, on every page, the annotations Wilde had left in the original. A paradox quickly emerged.

“Oscar Wilde devoured and luxuriated in books. When he was sick and when the prison doors were closed upon him, books were the first things he asked for. He turned to them, too, as he crawled towards death in his final years, for comfort and consolation…”

Yet his books were battered and doodled and scribbled on — the handwriting adding up to an impassioned dialogue with each author.

Most biographies take the testimony of those who loved or hated the central figure introducing the inevitable — and large — limitations of eyewitness evidence into the portrait. Wright’s approach removes all that, offering instead the chance to watch a man’s thinking and attitudes take shape, using his own private notes rather than statements made for public consumption. His book is a corrective to the tendency of recent times to interpret all of Oscar’s life through the lens of his own self-inflicted destruction.

And for that, ironically, we have to thank the man who forced the sale of the library: the 9th Marquess of Queensberry.

Or the 8th, if you leave out the cannibal.