Description
The Pierpont Morgan Library in association with The British Library, Published 2001. Wraps, 48 pp.; 25 cm; illustrated throughout in color and black-and-white; with a decorated frontispiece for The Sphinx by Charles Ricketts.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Pictorial paper covers, front cover a hand-tinted Sarony photograph of Wilde on a maroon field, turquoise printed inside covers; mild surface wear and light bumping to the edges. Morgan Library shop price sticker on back cover. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Sally Brown's illustrated life of Wilde, written for the centenary exhibition Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts, shown at the British Library from November 2000 to February 2001 and at the Pierpont Morgan Library from September 2001 to January 2002. Brown, then Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, curated the London showing and organized Wilde's life as six acts, from Merrion Square and Magdalen through the years of celebrity to the Queensberry libel action, Reading Gaol, and the Hotel d'Alsace. The exhibition it accompanies was a landmark: the autograph manuscript of De Profundis, Wilde's long prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, was shown in the United States for the first time, alongside the Morgan's manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Beardsley's title page for Salome, and Wilde's only surviving love letter to Constance, displayed with her letters to him from the collection of Mary, Viscountess Eccles, the greatest private holding of Wilde material. The book reproduces manuscripts, photographs, caricatures, and family objects from the British Library, the Morgan, the Public Record Office, Magdalen College, the Eccles collection, and the collection of Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland, among them Wilde's earliest surviving letter home from school, the decorated envelope in which he kept a lock of his dead sister Isola's hair, the Sarony studio portraits, and the calling card Queensberry left at the Albemarle Club that set the ruin in motion. With a Wilde chronology. The Morgan Library issue of the American edition, published a year after the British Library's London edition.