My Own Dear Darling Boy: The Letters of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas

by Oscar Wilde, Ulrich Baer (Editor)

One of the greatest playwrights in the English language, Oscar Wilde was also a legendary wit and a poetic provocateur. He was put on trial and sentenced to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency” by the same English society whose hypocrisy he had put on stage to great effect. His refusal to renounce his homosexuality and love for Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”) made him first a martyr and later an icon for free love and a myth onto himself. This edition of surviving letters that Wilde wrote to his “own dear darling boy” is a testament to the enduring power and radical force of love. Included are the introductory essays by legendary bookseller A. S. W. Rosenbach and philanthropist William Clark, who first published these letters in 1924, and a little-known letter from Douglas to Wilde.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish playwright, poet, and novelist, known for his biting wit, defense of aesthetics, and defiance of social conventions. The author of celebrated comedies, including The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and the iconic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, spent the last years of his life in exile in France, supported by only a few friends. Today his grave is a site of pilgrimage for anyone who believes in free love.

Ulrich Baer holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships, and is University Professor at New York University. He has published books on poetry, photography, and free speech, a novel, short stories, and edited Dickinson, Nietzsche, Rilke, Shakespeare, and Wilde on Love.

Genres: Classics, Queer, Nonfiction

140 pages, Paperback

First published August 18, 2021

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am emotional over this book

i did skip the notes on the letters, the afterword, etc. but the letters just. agh they're so good

[jasmeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.”
whenever i need to remind myself what love is, i’m going to reread this book

[Berth Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, to have a love like theirs

[L.R. Liverpool · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been almost a year since I read this book, but I’ve been wanting to write a review on it ever since. I know that Bosie is considered to be the devil who ruined Oscar’s life, and since this book contains only one letter written by him, it is very hard to know what kind of a man Bosie really was and how exactly he felt. I’m not a fan of toxic relationships, and I’m sure a lot of people see Oscar and Bosie’s relationship as such. But Oscar was a poet, a writer, a genius. Any artistic soul needs inspiration to create masterpieces. And if Bosie was Oscar’s muse, then who are we to judge? Who can really tell what was going on between them, or why Bosie acted this way or that way? Only they knew the truth, only Wilde himself could judge whether that relationship was worth going through everything he went through. Judging by this book, it seems like he found it worthy. What beautiful, heartfelt letters he wrote to Bosie! It’s evident that Wilde was soaring high even thinking about his “boy”. It’s touching, it’s poetic, it’s very sincere. I encourage everyone interested in his life to buy this book, because nobody can tell his story better than he himself.

[arabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

«we’re apt to leave behind us // letters that we ought to burn»

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

„… Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other …"

[Susannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting short volume of the letters of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas with accompanying notes, biographical information and a couple of essays on the letters and love letters generally.