When Oscar Wilde was in his third year at Oxford, in 1877, he completed a personal questionnaire in a Confessions Album . 1 Contributors were asked to list their ambitions, favourite artists, and authors and to note the character traits they most admired in themselves and others. When responding to the question, “What is your aim in life?” Wilde wrote that he wanted to achieve “Success: fame or even notoriety.” 2 By the time the trials for gross indecency took place in 1895, he had experienced a sudden and traumatic shift between these two forms of success. Wilde’s achievements as an author were eclipsed by the trials, which exposed his sexual relationships with young men and resulted in a two-year prison sentence . This historically significant turn of events has led many scholars to concentrate on the literature that Wilde produced in the 1890s. This book, however, emphasizes that Wilde began his career as a promising young classicist and that his public profile began to take shape while he was at Oxford.
When commenting on Wilde’s academic history, Linda Dowling reminds us: “Wilde would have been famous beyond Oxford for his Newdigate and his Double First. As it was, his First was widely known to have been the best of his year.” 3 Dowling’s study, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994), has been most influential in establishing the significance of Wilde’s background as a student of the Classics. In recent years, the collective efforts to publish and analyse archival material from Wilde’s undergraduate years has meant that we know much more about the literature and philosophical theories that he studied at Oxford. We also have the advantage of referring to Wilde’s letters, notebooks, and early essays to learn more about this important period in his intellectual life.
Wilde’s identity as a classically trained intellectual has gained more attention as scholars have started to focus on Wilde’s reception of Classical literature. While this area of scholarship is gaining momentum, so far, Iain Ross’s Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013) is the only comprehensive study which considers the influential teachers and texts that Wilde encountered while studying at Trinity College and Magdalen College . 4 Ross’s study has done much to strengthen our view of Wilde as a Classical scholar, but so far most of the research on this subject has arisen from a handful of articles and book chapters which look to Classicism as another way to contextualize Wilde’s sexual politics. 5 The present book offers a different approach, one that is anchored the history surrounding Classical studies at Oxford and Wilde’s conceptualization of aestheticism as an alternative style of education.
Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Education charts the development of Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy , beginning with his undergraduate writing, and ending with his prison letter, which was addressed to his lover, Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas. My study adopts a narrative approach that outlines the path that Wilde took to become a career-aesthete after he completed his studies at Magdalen College , Oxford . The history of Wilde’s connection to Oxford is introduced with reference to earlier texts, such as his Oxford letters (1876–1877), travel poetry (1877–1879), and American lectures (1882). My focus on Oxford Classicism also delivers a new approach to interpreting Wilde’s well-known literary works , including “The Critic as Artist ” (1890, revised 1891 and 1894), The Soul of Man (1891), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891), and Wilde’s prison letter (composed between late 1896 and early 1897). In framing Wilde as a classically trained intellectual, I argue that Wilde’s literature and aesthetic theory speaks to the consumer public and encourages them to create an intellectual life for themselves via the Aesthetic Movement . The expression “aesthetic education ” relates to Wilde’s vision of aestheticism as a self-directed learning process or a mode of self-culture, which is motivated by a desire to recognize beauty, in all of its variegated forms, and to derive pleasure from aesthetic appreciation. 6 Of course, this style of learning could only extend to those who had a disposable income and the leisure time to make art an integral part of their everyday life.
The aim of this study is to show that Wilde used the culture of the Aesthetic Movement to maintain an intellectual relationship with Oxford. As a promoter of aestheticism , Wilde invited his audience to view the home as an intellectual domain where they could recreate the world of the university. Consumers could capture some of Oxford’s medieval aesthetic by decorating their homes with arts and crafts style furnishings that were inspired by medieval designs. Moreover, the dialogic structure of “The Critic as Artist ” and the exchanges that take place between the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray both recreate the intimacy of the college tutorial. These works also serve as a reminder that Plato’s philosophy could be approached through a reading of Wilde’s aesthetic literature .
1 Oscar Wilde and Oxford
Initially, Oscar Wilde moved to Oxford because he intended to pursue a career as a Classical scholar and believed that having a degree from Oxford would improve his chances of gaining a fellowship . Before beginning his studies in England, he received an elite Classical education in Ireland . He was introduced to Classical studies at Portora Royal School , Enniskillen, where he developed a talent for composing “deft and mellifluous oral translations from Thucydides, Plato and Virgil” and won an award for his translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon . 7 In his late teens, he continued his studies at Trinity College Dublin for three years, after being awarded a scholarship (1871–1874). During his time at Trinity, Wilde began to explore his interest in Roman Catholicism and befriended his ancient history tutor , Reverend John Pentland Mahaffy . Mahaffy was struck by Wilde’s “aptitude for, and keen delight in, Hellenic studies,” and became Wilde’s earliest academic mentor. 8 Likewise, Wilde admired Mahaffy enough to maintain contact with him while he was at Oxford and even joined him on trips to Italy and Greece .
In 1874, Wilde left Trinity before completing his degree because he had secured another scholarship (known as a demyship) at Magdalen College . By the time that Wilde was nearing the completion of his second degree in 1878, his plans for the future were much more uncertain. His father, Sir William Wilde , had died in 1876, leaving the family in debt, and as final exams were looming, Wilde feared that he was nearing the awful prospect of “leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread.” 9 But Wilde set this fear aside after winning the Newdigate English Verse Prize for Ravenna (1878) and achieving his First in Literæ Humaniores (or “Greats ”) in close succession. Literæ Humaniores was the official name of the examination in Classical studies, but it was commonly referred to as “Greats ” because the literary component of the exam focused on “the best authors from humane literature.” 10 Despite Wilde’s impressive academic achievements, he was not offered a fellowship at Magdalen —and we can only speculate as to why a fellowship eluded him.
Wilde’s closest friends sensed that his attitude towards academic work was rather ambivalent. In his memoir, In Victorian Days (1939), Sir David Hunter-Blair recalls a conversation that took place while he and Wilde were together at Magdalen. A close mutual friend named William Ward asked Wilde to describe his plans for the future; Wilde answered: “God knows … I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.” 11 This strangely prophetic comment indicates that Wilde was aware that the work of a don was far from glamorous. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, tutors at Oxford colleges were responsible for coaching their students to perform well under exam conditions, and the demands of teaching left them with little time for writing and independent research. Oxford dons spent most of their professional life correcting translations, reading texts with their students, and questioning their tutees on their interpretatio...