Making Oscar Wilde
by Michèle Mendelssohn, OUP, 360pp, £20
In January 1882, Oscar Wilde toured America with a trunkful of lace-trimmed velvet coats and low-cut Byronic blouses. From New York to Colorado, audiences went wild for Oscar, whose applications of rouge and dyed green carnation buttonholes were so unlike anything worn by the majority of cowboys.
Throughout his 10-month American adventure, the 27-year-old Dublin-born aesthete presented a celebrity-conscious image of style and self-adornment. His plan as a lecturer was to bring the English Aesthetic movement to America and rid the nation of its vulgar (as he saw it) tendency towards materialism. This was no hazy brainwave, but a determined effort to introduce Yankees and Southerners alike to Walter Pater’s art-for-art’s sake aesthetic.
