Abstract
The statement that Oscar Wilde was one of the direct instruments in freeing Alfred Dreyfus1 has been freely criticised. To the commonplace mind only commonplace things are possible. One critic, in particular, ‘jibbed’ at my remark that Wilde objected to meeting Zola2 on the ground that the latter was the author of immoral books, and concludes with the remark that ‘Wilde is understood to have become a reformed character, but he cannot be believed to have suddenly developed into a Maw-worm.’
Confessions of a journalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904) pp. 130–8.
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Notes
Max Nordau, ‘Decadence and Aesthetes’, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895) pp. 319–22
On Wilde and Decadence see also William Aspenwall Bradley, ‘What Is Decadence?“ The Bookman (New York), xxxvii (June 1913) 431–8
G. K. Chesterton, ‘Writing “Finis” to Decadence’, Independent (Boston), lxxxix (15 Jan 1917) 100
Russell M. Goldfarb, ‘Late Victorian Decadence’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xx (summer 1962) 369–73
Shane Leslie, ‘Degeneracy or Decadence?’, National Review (New York), xv (19 Nov 1963) 445–6
Paul Elmer More, ‘A Naughty Decade: Oscar Wilde and Other Decadents of the Nineties’, The Nation (New York), xcviii (14 May 1914) 566–8 and (21 May 1914), 598–600
Clyde de L. Ryals, ‘Toward a Definition of “Decadent” As Applied to British Literature of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVII (Sep 1958) 85–92
Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, CLVII (June 1895) 833–45.
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© 1979 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Healy, C. (1979). The Latter Days of Oscar Wilde. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) Oscar Wilde. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03926-5_35
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