Oscar Wilde & His Circle

Oscar Wilde & His Circle Catalogue 1512 Oscar Wilde & His Circle The Cohen Collection Part 1 Catalogue 1512 London Maggs Bros Ltd. MMXXI MAGGS BROS LTD., 48 BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON WC1B 3DR +44 207 493 7160 www.maggs.com Orders and enquiries to [email protected] All items are offered subject to prior sale, and sales are subject to our standard conditions of sale, not least of which is that title does not pass until payment is made in full. The full terms & conditions may be viewed at https://www.maggs.com/terms_and_conditions/ This catalogue was produced under lockdown conditions during the first year of the Great Pandemic, and its production has been a collaborative effort between Phil Cohen, Ed Maggs, Alice Rowell, Theo Miles, Ivo Karaivanov, Ashley Baynton-Williams, and all the Maggs team. - Front cover item 3 - Front endpapers from Wilde’s The House of Pomegranates,item 15 - Frontispiece, previously unpublished portrait by Vander Weyde of Lillie Langtry as Effie Deans, styled by Millais. Effectively her first stage role. Item 223. - Rear endpapers from Beardsley’s endpapers for De Vere Stacpoole’s Pierrot! A Story, item 137 - Rear cover, detail from the binding of John Gray’s Silverpoints, item 181 Contents Foreword 2 Performance History 36 John Barlas 68 Aubrey Beardsley 93 Max Beerbohm 120 Edward Carson 127 Olive Custance 134 Rudolf Dircks 135 Lord Alfred Douglas 136 Julia Frankau 144 John Gray 145 Frank Harris 165 Robert Hichens 167 Coulson Kernahan 169 Lillie Langtry 170 Stuart Merrill 177 Frank Miles 179 [Friedrich] Max Müller 182 Vincent O’Sullivan 184 Walter Herries Pollock 203 Frederick York Powell 204 Marc André Raffalovich 205 Ricketts and Shannon 206 Rennell Rodd 207 Robert Sherard 208 Reginald Turner 213 James McNeill Whistler 215 Constance Wilde 219 Theodore Wratislaw 220 Bibliographical and biographical 224 Foreword Inspired by my mentor, Professor James G. Nelson, who was among the pioneers in the field, I chose the Aesthetic and Decadent Literature of the 1890s as my scholarly specialty. This relatively new area of study offered the unfettered opportunity to do original work. I had little interest in writing a pedantic dissertation on Keats’s use of the semi-colon, Shakespeare’s table manners, or Byron’s aquatic skills. Instead, I headed for the fron- tier and the unexplored terrain beyond. Jim’s ‘Nineties seminar met in a semi-basement with windows on one wall just below ceiling level. One day he brought to class a fine copy of John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues in polished dark blue buckram with a superb gilt-stamped cover design by Walter West. The moment he set the book down, the clouds parted and a fiery shaft of sunlight struck the cover from above, illuminating it to an incandescent brilliance. I had an epiphany: I was born to be a book collector. It soon became clear that the deliberately lim- ited, often rare books of the aesthetes and decadents were usually difficult to access, so collecting could be considered an adjunct to my research. For my first book, The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (1978), I relied almost entirely on the holdings of the University of Wisconsin Library. In contrast, my second book, John Evelyn Barlas, A Critical Biography, depended heavily on my own collection. By the time that book appeared, 34 years after the first, the collection had grown to become an indispensable scholarly resource. In the early 1980s I had branched out to include another burgeoning area of literary study, New Woman/feminist writers 1880 – 1914. Photographic portraits and theatrical material of the period constitute my last major diversification. All the while, however, I very occasionally acquired interesting material by the second-generation Romantics, high Victorians, and precursors to my “core writers”. Instead of the academic vocation for which I had trained, I enjoyed a managerial career in public service. But collecting kept me connected to my roots and provided a perfect complement to my vocation. 3 Foreword I have greatly enjoyed acquiring, owning, handling, and studying the materials in my collection. But I also understand that, in the context of culture and history, the collector’s ownership is a mere legal concept. And it entails responsibilities as well as privileges. Collectors who build something of cultural significance are really just temporary custodians in a long and hopefully endless succes- sion of individuals whose job it is to protect, preserve, illuminate and ultimately pass along what we only temporarily possess. My interest has always been bringing together artifacts, often rare, that belong in each other’s company. As the collection grew, I discovered an increasing number of interconnections within it and numerous bibliographical “points.” At one time I intend- ed to publish the fruits of my bibliographical research, but the catalogues will include this information, along with some of my research on the literary and historical background of specific items. But it’s an understatement to say that the lion’s share of the work, including the correction of my errors, was done by abler hands. The result, I hope, is a worthwhile contribution to the re-creation and understanding of select literary sub-cultures. My ideal would be to aggregate and integrate all available information on the Aesthetes and Decadents. This gathering of all relevant books, letters, memoirs, photographs, ephemera, and scholarly studies would be the raw material for a visionary under- taking. Though I confess to technophobia, I can envision a fas- cinating interactive hologram streaming service. In the hands of an adroit team of well-read programmers with magical powers, the raw materials would yield, instead of still more tedious tweets and twitters, the Ultimate Literary/Historical Reality Show. Imagine, for example, entering the compound search term “30 August 1890” + “Café Royal” + “Oscar Wilde,” and finding your- self seated at the table with Wilde, Sherard, Davidson, Barlas, and whoever else was present there and then, getting suitably tipsy in their company—a little absinthe goes a long way—and intently following their conversation. Philip K. Cohen, Washington, D.C., March 2021 Introduction This is the first of a short series of catalogues of material from the remarkable and extensive collection of Philip K. Cohen, PhD. Phil did his PhD under Jim Nelson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the great historians of the late 19th Century. Born with a strong collecting gene, he has assembled a really remarkable collection, full of rarity and beauty. This first catalogue is devoted to Oscar Wilde and his circle. The circles of influence and friendship in any literary period, but par- ticularly at the close of the nineteenth century, overlap like a baf- fling array of Venn diagrams, and it has been an unsettling job to try and divide the collection into more or less malleable sections. Items included here could easily have found themselves in forth- coming catalogues which will include The New Woman, an area which Cohen has pursued assiduously for decades; The poets of the Rhymers’ Club, with superb collections of books by Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson; The Performing Arts;or Book Arts. Items are listed chronologically, subsequent editions of a book listed after the earliest edition. Standard mounted dimensions of Carte de Visite cards, in centi- metres, height before width: Carte de Visite; 10 x 6.5 Cabinet Card; 16 by 11 Imperial Cabinet Card; 25 x 17 Oscar Wilde It is a more than usually intimidating task to write an introduction to Oscar Wilde: surely this is for once someone who needs no introduction. Besides, which Oscar to introduce? The glittering public intel- lectual who introduced a new aesthetic to the middle classes of the English-speaking world through dress, life, and work? The supporter of young writers, the sympathetic editor, the feminist, the socialist? The self-publicist and conversationalist of his generation, the master of paradox, uniquely blessed with the ability not to talk his ideas out, but to talk them in to his art, art which included the finest drawing room comic dramas ever written, still mainstays of all levels of theatre? The pioneer of homosexual equality, the martyr, or the first performance artist, who created his whole life as an artwork, to be finally trapped in his own legend? Maybe as booksellers we should recognise the trap of trying to be cultural commentators, and restrict ourselves to something we should know about: Wilde and book-collecting. The drama of his life, the quality of his writing, the depths of his influences, and the way his books and manuscripts reflect his aesthetic sensibility, make Wilde an almost uniquely rewarding subject for the collector. The disasters that befell him and so many of his associates also meant that their material was quite widely dis- persed, providing ample opportunities to buy first rate material. There was evidence of a modest but significant collectors’ market in Wilde editions during his lifetime, with five appearances in the auction records in 1895 and four in 1896, including Charles Shannon’s purchase of The Sphinxand The House of Pomegranates together in 1896 for £2, but it is notable that most of the auction records from those years that mention the name “Wilde” are for the Kelmscott Press edition of his mother’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress. In 1902 books from Wilde’s bankruptcy sale were still in the market, Le Gallienne’s Book Bills of Narcissus, Oscar Wilde 6 Volumes in Folio, and My Lady’s Sonnets inscribed to Wilde were only worth £2/12/- in 1902/3, and Robert Sherard’s Whispers inscribed to Wilde made £1/7/- on its own.

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