Wilde Album: Public and Private
Images of Oscar Wilde by Merlin
Holland
A Little Gem For Folks Wild For Wilde
Oscar Wilde was a man ahead of his time. He was famous for pushing the
parameters of socially accepted sexual codes (albeit with disastrous
results), and, as a playwright, for introducing a new, extraordinarily
modern, idea of comedy that combined psychological insight with social
satire. But he was also one of the primary inventors of the art and science
of self-invention and self-promotion. The Wilde Album by Merlin Holland
(Wildes grandson) is a fascinating and comprehensive examination of how
Wilde the artist consciously conjured--through a complicated and savvy
use of the media--Wilde the personality. Holland has assembled an
enormous number of artifacts--from press clippings to political cartoons to
theater programs --that map Wildes emergence as a media celebrity and
chart how this image was used against him as his popularity foundered in
the face of scandal. What makes The Wilde Album ultimately moving,
and unique, is Hollands use of rare family photos and personal material.

Juxtaposed with the vivaciousness of the public life, and in the context of
the governments persecution of the artist, this more private material
embodies and expresses the pain and needless tragedy of Wildes life.
Personal Review: Wilde Album: Public and Private Images of
Oscar Wilde by Merlin Holland
Mr. Oscar Wilde, the toast of all London for his successful plays revealing
the immoral soft underbelly of the British aristocracy, received a
slanderous calling card at his club from the Marquess of Queensberry,
whose son Al was assisting Mr. Wilde in his investigations of the more
corrupt and immoral and hypocritical aspects of those filthily wealthy
imperialists.
At Al's urgent request, Mr. Wilde filed suit for slander against Al's own
father, serving as noted in this book in Mr. Wilde's own words, as the dice
in a cruel and callous oedipal gamble between father and son. Mr. Wilde
lost; the petit bourgeois father won and before the Crown brought charges
against Mr. WIlde under a new immoral activities act, the father had Mr.
Wilde's home ramsacked and auctioned, all of Mr. Wilde's treasured and
expensive belongings, and those of his wife and two small sons, in order
ostensibly to cover his own legal costs in defending himself against Mr.
Wilde's charge of slander. The auction, staged as it was, brought only a
very small percentage of its actual worth, yet destroyed all that the family
owned.
Mr. Wilde's grandson, in gathering this present album, mentions the fact of
this destruction of his family heritage by alluding to the registry of six family
albums which were sold and discarded beyond any recovery. Merlin
mentions this fact cold, without further comment, but the skilled reader may
read between the lines the deep and painful import of this action to Merlin
personally. Thus this present effort grows immeasurably poignant and
important.
Though others praise the photographs here, it is the comprehensive and
extensive and brilliant essay by Merlin here which makes this book as well.
This book grows thereby essential for any reader of the English language,
and for any reader of Irish resistance to English colonialist power, in
particular that fatal power which was so coldly brought to bear against its
most subtle and charming and astute and eloquent and Irish critic, greater
even than GB Shaw, more subtle even than the great Mr. James Joyce.
Never mind please my ramblings nor the effusiveness of other reviews
which here appear upon this page. My one qualm regarding this book is
that it is not BIG enough!
Please see as well the excellent, if painfully abridged, production of An
Ideal Husband in the BBC collection The Oscar Wilde Collection (The
Importance of Being Earnest / The Picture of Dorian Gray / An Ideal
Husband / Lady Windermere's Fan) if only to see younger and slimmer and

in his prime he who would later play for them Sherlock Holmes. The
Importance . . .in this collection is also tolerable if abridged and awkward;
Lady Windermere's Fan begins slow with the mournful Lord, but grows
inexorably to a heart wrenching finale without sentimentality.
Read all of Mr. Wilde's published work (lacking of course the bulk his
writings for Women's World, and lacking his original French text of Salome)
in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics). The original French
text of Salome you may find at Salome: Drame en un acte (Collected
Works of Oscar Wilde) in order to perform your own translation into English
which will undoubtedly replace Al's. It is also available in a Spanish
translation at Salome - Bajo El Monte and a fine selection of his short
stories at El Fantasma de Canterville y Otros Cuentos (Serie Roja
Alfaguara) (Serie Roja Alfaguara).
Please read this book and know the extent of the destructive power of an
offended British aristocracy, a destiny, as Merlin here indicates, as
inexorable as any ancient Greek drama. Merlin's assessments of his
grandfather's oeuvre are also excellent and right on, although too brief!
Find further critical work by himself as well as by his father Vyvyan
Holland, whose photographs as a small boy are so telling here.
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