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Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de SiÃ¨cle
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Author(s): DeaglÃ¡n Ã“ Donghaile
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Oscar Wilde and the Radical
Politics of the Fin de Siècle
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys
Recent books in the series: The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence
Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces and Celtic Identity
Lizzy Welby Michael Shaw
The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the
Dowson Victorian Press
Kostas Boyiopoulos Iain Crawford
British India and Victorian Literary Culture Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Máire ní Fhlathúin Clare Walker Gore
The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British
Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and
Literature, 1843–mc1907
Literary Form
Giles Whiteley
Frederik Van Dam
The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry
Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century Reza Taher-Kermani
British Imagination
Jenn Fuller Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin
Diane Warren and Laura Peters
Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the
Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel
Strand Magazine, 1891–1930
Jessica R. Valdez
Jonathan Cranfield
Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature: Literary Content as
The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Artistic Experience
Marion Thain Patrick Fessenbecker
Gender, Technology and the New Woman Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London
Lena Wånggren Lisa Robertson
Self-Harm in New Woman Writing Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology
Alexandra Gray Eleanor Dobson
Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle
Lucy Ella Rose Deaglán Ó Donghaile
Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted
Thought and Place Sexualities
Kevin A. Morrison Patricia Pulham
The Victorian Male Body Forthcoming volumes:

Joanne-Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism
Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature in Florence Marryat’s Fiction
and Art Tatiana Kontou
Fariha Shaikh Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920
The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Clare Gill
Eleonora Sasso Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject
Amber Regis
The Late-Victorian Little Magazine
Koenraad Claes Gissing, Shakespeare and the Life of Writing
Thomas Ue
Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
Matthew Ingleby and Matt P. M. Kerr Women’s Mobility in Henry James
Anna Despotopoulou
Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid- Michael Field’s Revisionary Poetics
Nineteenth-Century Urban Development Jill Ehnenn
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
The Americanisation of W.T. Stead
Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Helena Goodwyn
Literature and Science
Philipp Erchinger Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian
Literature
Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical Christopher Pittard
Caley Ehnes Pastoral in Early-Victorian Fiction: Environment and
The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage Modernity
Renata Kobetts Miller Mark Frost
Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and Edmund Yates and Victorian Periodicals: Gossip, Celebrity,
the Pantomime of Life and Gendered Spaces
Jonathan Buckmaster Kathryn Ledbetter
Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature Literature, Architecture and Perversion: Building Sexual
and Culture Culture in Europe, 1850–1930
Patricia Cove Aina Marti
Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Manufacturing Female Beauty in British Literature and
Nineteenth-Century Britain Periodicals, 1850–1914
Melissa Dickson Michelle Smith
Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer,
Nineteenth-Century Realism 1820–60
Mary L. Mullen Alexis Easley
For a complete list of titles published visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.
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Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Diane Piccitto and Patricia Pulham
ISSN: 2044–2416
www.eupjournals.com/vic
Oscar Wilde and
the Radical Politics of
the Fin de Siècle
Deaglán Ó Donghaile
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
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© Deaglán Ó Donghaile, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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The right of Deaglán Ó Donghaile to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vi

Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Wilde and Politics 1

1. Anticolonial Wilde 29
2. Coercion and Resistance: Vera . . . or the Land War 57
3. Class, Criticism and Culture: ‘The Soul of Man
Under Socialism’ 88
4. Fairy Tales for Revolutionaries 120
5. The Politics of Art and The Picture of Dorian Gray 150
6. Civil Disobedience and The Importance of Being Earnest 174
7. ‘De Profundis’, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and the
Politics of Imprisonment 200
8. Conclusion: Oscar Wilde – The Lost Revolutionary? 226
Bibliography 233
Index 246
Series Editor’s Preface
‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined con-

cept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all mean-
ingful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist
about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s
Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word
for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought,
belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in
nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institu-
tional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at
the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question
the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-
called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian
and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a
breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an inter-
rogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner,
which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects.
Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innu-
merable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into
suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the
approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical,
empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be
incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the
Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed
off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital
interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part,
even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pur-
sued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between
different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the
service of reading the nineteenth century.
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up
both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from
convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for
Series Editor’s Preface vii
the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the
most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose
is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplin-
ary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and
untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and iden-
tity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what
has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all,
in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope
of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and
original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the
‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and
epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of
literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader
provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar,
and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original
sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical
models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not
simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth cen-
tury, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional,
strategic redrawing of those borders.
Julian Wolfreys
Acknowledgements
Since embarking on this project I have enjoyed the friendship of

countless people who have helped my research in many ways. I have
also had considerable support from libraries, research institutes and
universities, which is where my thanks must begin. My research on
Wilde found a very warm welcome at the William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles,
where I spent two months as a Visiting Fellow in 2009. I was awarded
another Clark Library Fellowship in 2013, and returned again to
conduct more research there in 2016. My thanks go to the Clark
Library and to its administering body, the UCLA Center for Seven-
teenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, which awarded both Visit-
ing Fellowships and facilitated my research in every way possible.
During each of these stays the hospitality and expertise offered by the
Clark Library’s staff and Directors guided this project from its incep-
tion to its closing stages. Scott Jacobs, Rebecca Fenning Marschall,
Nina Schneider, Carole Sommer, Bruce Whitman and Gerald
Cloud were always on hand with their extensive knowledge of and
insights into the collection, Oscar Wilde and His Circle. Staff at the
Bancroft Library, the University of California, Berkeley, and at the
San Francisco Public Library helped me to locate rare newspapers
and periodicals. I have also been helped by staff at the National
Library of Ireland, the Trinity College Dublin Library, the Aldham
Roberts Library at Liverpool John Moores University, the Sydney
Jones Library at the University of Liverpool, the Working Class
Movement Library, Salford and the British Library.
The award of a Huntington Library Mayers Fellowship in 2013
allowed me to consult the library’s important holdings on Irish and
British political periodicals of the 1880s and 1890s and to participate
in the library’s esteemed community of scholarship. My research at
the Clark and Huntington libraries was also supported in 2013 with
a British Academy Small Research Grant. I received a University of
Salford Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship in 2012, and Liverpool
John Moores University supported my research with grants awarded
Acknowledgements ix
from 2016 to 2018 and a research sabbatical in 2016. All of this pro-
vided vital help at a time when university research budgets have been
so badly cut in England.
Many of the ideas in this book were raised during lectures, semi-
nars and symposia held in venues in Ireland, Scotland, England,
France, Belgium and the United States. These include the Huntington
Library, Sorbonne University, KU Leuven, the San Francisco Irish Liter-
ary and Historical Society, the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute and
Library, the Open University, the USAC Irish Studies Summer School
at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Arizona State Univer-
sity, Drew University, the Foyle Pride Festival, Derry, the North-West
Long Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar in Manchester, the Liver-
pool 1916 Commemoration Committee, the Liverpool John Moores
University Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History, Edin-
burgh Napier University, and the University of Portsmouth. Questions
and responses from audiences at each of these events have helped me to
reflect upon and further shape my research on Wilde.
Friends and fellow academics freely offered advice and insights
that guided this project in many ways. These include: Lynda Dryden,
Laurence Davies, Darryl Jones, Willie McLaughlin, Kryss MacLeod,
Alex Tickell, Sarah Crabtree, Anthony Galluzzo, Daniel Lewis,
Sasha Hoffmann, Sarah Wood, Michael Calabrese, Jennifer Coleby,
Joan O’Neill, Tina O’Toole, John L. Murphy, Niall Carson, Edward
Molloy, Mark Quigley, David Lloyd, Patrick Bixby, Caoilfhionn Ní
Bheacháin, Angus Mitchell, Tim Keane, Scott Brewster and Lucie
Armitt. Ever since my undergraduate days, Nicholas Daly has been
an advocate and inspirer of my research on fin de siècle literature,
culture and politics, and his help and advice with this project have
been immeasurable. I have also benefited from the wisdom and
advice offered by Professor Joseph Bristow of UCLA, who guides
Wilde scholarship with immense intellectual generosity.
Tony Bucher and Taryn Edwards also helped over the years by
hosting public events and facilitating networking and outreach activ-
ity in the San Francisco Bay Area, as did Robert and Rebecca Tracy.
Jim Doherty of the Foyle Pride Festival has time and again helped
me to bring Wilde’s ideas directly to audiences in my home town of
Derry, from whom I have learned much. Joe Yates and Alex Miles,
in their roles as Dean of Arts and Director of Humanities and Social
Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University, provided my work
with all of the institutional support at their disposal. Glenda Nor-
quay, Director of the LJMU Research Institute for English Literature
and Cultural History has also always been on hand to offer wisdom
and practical support. So too have Colin Harrison, Filippo Menozzi,
x Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle
Sondeep Kandola, Ross Dawson, Gerry Smyth, Joe Moran, Alice

Ferrebe, Rebecca Bailey, Brian Maidment and Christinna Hazzard.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir!
Edinburgh University Press has been greatly supportive of this
project. The anonymous readers who read early draft material offered
valuable insights on how to improve its tone and content. Their sug-
gestions were enormously helpful with the overall shaping of my
arguments and encouraged me to define my key points more clearly.
As Commissioning Editor at EUP, Michelle Houston has shown
much kindness and patience while carefully guiding this monograph
through the writing and publishing process, as has Ersev Ersoy as
Assistant Commissioning Editor. Julian Wolfreys, Series Editor for
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture, also provided much
valued practical support and critical encouragement.
The greatest debts incurred by writing and researching this mono-
graph are owed to my family. I have been discussing Wilde and his
radical beliefs for some time now with my mother- and father-in law,
Barbara and Alan Jones, and I hope that they will enjoy the finished
product as much as I value their insights into nineteenth-century
political history. My brother, Ruairí and my sisters, Úna, Niamh and
Caoimhe, have followed my work on Wilde with deep interest and I
hope that this book will continue to answer their questions on this great
man. Another great man, my father, Michael, inspired my research and
still helps me to better understand the historical continuities that make
Wilde’s radicalism so relevant to our present moment. My mother,
Martina, died before this book was completed but her love, influence
and compassion live on in every one of its pages. It was upon her knee
that I first heard the name of Oscar Wilde and it was from her that I
first learned about the Selfish Giant and the Happy Prince. She told me
why these stories are concerned with real people whose dignity and
humanity will always outlive the violence of empires and capitalism.
Like Wilde, my mother loved the poor and oppressed in every land,
and this book is proudly dedicated to her memory.
It is also dedicated to three other brilliant women. My wife,
Sam, has guided my thinking at every turn and each day helps me
to better understand why art, culture, collectivity and community
are as vital to us now as they were to Oscar Wilde. My daughters,
Niamh and Bláithín, both budding Wildeans in their own right,
never cease to inspire and amaze me with their own compassion,
wisdom and insight.
Introduction: Wilde and Politics
How radical was Oscar Wilde, and how were his beliefs regarded,
portrayed, mediated and distorted by contemporary conservatives?
These questions are answered in an unsigned article that appeared
in the ironically entitled British periodical, Truth, which, in 1883,
berated Wilde for his rebellious nature. Over a decade before Max
Nordau depicted him as a conceited megalomaniac in his famously
hyperbolic tome, Degeneration,1 Truth described Aestheticism as an
expression of deep-seated mental illness and social decay. The maga-
zine amplified this personal attack on Wilde by complaining about
the nefariously ‘Celtic origin of Oscar’ and drew its readers’ atten-
tions to his curious history at Oxford, all the better to queer him with:
from his earliest days at university, it complained, he showed ‘no
inclination to do for himself what others were only too ready to do
for him’. This unmanly selfishness isolated Wilde from his peers as he
was ‘held in abhorrence by masculine athletes’, all of whom had no
time for him, or any other ‘feminine undergraduates’. Linking Wilde
to the university’s subcultural scene of effete, ‘epicene youth, who
first began to talk art jargon, to worship blue china, and to adore
the wall-papers of Mr. William Morris’, the journal claimed that his
characteristic unpleasantness had distinctively political origins:
Of this cult Oscar was admitted as the head [. . .] he preferred Radical

aestheticism to Tory ritualism, and, once elected high priest, he allowed
his locks to grow, and tucked them behind his ears. With the applause
bestowed on ‘Ravenna’ ringing in his ears, he complacently waited for
something to turn up, and in the meantime called upon all to observe
that a new light had risen on the horizon. His success in London society
was not at first very marked. He condescended to tea-parties in Kensing-
ton and Bayswater, and hunted up the Irish brigade that had attended
the Wilde receptions in the old Dublin days.2
Oscar Wilde, Truth complained, was both radical and oppositional.

At once queer, alternative and politically suspect, he was, it warned,
2 Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle
an opponent of the standards that had been established and carefully

maintained through the cultural routines and general machismo of
British conservatism. Most seriously of all, this rogue and upstart Celt
had proceeded to dupe the unsuspecting public immediately after grad-
uating from university and, upon his arrival in London, in another act
of subversive trickery, he renewed the dissident intellectual network
that his separatist parents had established in Ireland decades before.
Circulating among anticolonial writers, dissident literary types and
countercultural artists, he had no difficulty infiltrating society soirées
and insinuating himself among the influential. Sneakily promoting
Aestheticism by disguising its revolutionary position on politics and
culture, Wilde’s true objective, Truth declared, was the destruction of
the stabilising influence of tradition, thereby bringing about the ulti-
mate, clammy nightmare of every British conservative since the days
of Edmund Burke. His infiltration of the metropolis and its cultural
spheres had already succeeded because, now, every ‘Irishman of a cer-
tain type possesses a very amiable art of insinuation, particularly if he
has a striking individuality and can talk fluently’.
Wilde’s true, subversive genius, then, lay in his capacity to speak,
charm and deceive – gifts that drew their power from the fusion of his
novel public personality with an especially Celtic type of mendacity
that secured his celebrity status in late Victorian England. To be Irish
and articulate, Truth protested, was particularly dangerous:
Every Johnson must have a Boswell, and the Irish Oscar, being an agree-
able companion, soon found a dozen Boswells ready to do for him what
the photographers do for professional beauties. They got him talked
about. When people, week after week, kept hearing about what Oscar
Wilde did and said, they became anxious to know who Oscar Wilde
was. Such in our days is the manufacture of notoriety [. . .] It was his
Irish persistency, his unruffled good-nature, and his calm indifference to
the sneers of his own sex, that made Oscar for the moment the jester and
joke of a certain section of society.3
Framing Aestheticism as a dangerously progressive movement that

countered the conservatism of existing high cultural practice, Truth
portrayed Wilde as a hazardously radical figure who operated on
multiple levels. The incarnations at work in this representation
include the subversive Irish genius, the queer upstart and the radical
aesthete. In combination they produced a politically-conscious artist,
something that was later acknowledged by anarchists upon Wilde’s
imprisonment in 1895, when they praised his radical literary and
political beliefs and practices.4
What distinguishes Truth’s representation of Wilde as a danger-

ously innovative and uniquely rebellious individual is its attempt to
portray him as a public figure whose utterances, writings and beliefs
ultimately counted for nothing. This reassuring denial of the value of
Oscar Wilde’s words, actions and agency was part of a broader and
very consistent effort whereby his opponents tried to dismiss him as
a meaningless curiosity. The magazine represented him as a strange
and alien, if sometimes entertaining presence within the metropolitan
scene whose deceptive use of language, combined with an unusual
degree of personality and charm, had allowed him to manipulate the
public and secure his place at the heart of British imperial society. This
attempt to reduce Wilde to a sexually ambiguous cipher, or ‘joke’,
and depict him as a foppishly intellectual (though still-threatening)
countercultural figure appeared elsewhere in 1883, when other hos-
tile publications also portrayed him as an impostor. He was identified
as an ‘Irishman by birth’ in one regional newspaper, which noted that
Wilde’s ‘tongue hardly ever reveals the fact, although, according to
Mr. Punch, he speaks with a strong Irish brogue!’5
Wilde was frequently accused of dullness and unoriginality by his
critics in the British press6 but the popular satirical magazine, Punch,
went further than portraying him as a ‘played-out Charlatan’7 when
it directly associated him with revolutionary politics. Upon the can-
cellation of the London premiere of his first and most explicitly
political play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, in the winter of 1881, Punch
accused Wilde of being an evasive ‘Veerer’ for refusing to explain
the reasons behind the play’s abandonment.8 One month later, and
shortly after his arrival in the United States, the magazine equated
his literary writing with anarchist and Fenian violence in the parodi-
cal poem, ‘Murder Made Easy: A Ballad à la Mode’. Attributed to
‘“Brother Jonathan” Wilde’, the poem compared him to the Fenian
leader, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, and to nihilists, anarchists and
other ‘Poisoning Worms’ of the militant Left. Still furious with the
political content of Vera; or, The Nihilists, Punch accused him of
inspiring attacks carried out with ‘Gunpowder, Shots and Stabs!’. It
also likened the political content of Wilde’s dramatic writing to the
deadly materièl of ‘Nitroglycerine, Potions, and Pills [. . .] Bombs and
Gun-Cotton, Dagger and Bowl!’. In the magazine’s opinion, Wilde’s
fusion of Aestheticism and anticolonialism posed a clear threat to
British imperialism and the domestic class system that upheld it.
Equating his literary avant-gardism with the militancy of Fenian
dynamiters, its message was clear: the insurgent Irish, including
Wilde, had ‘shaken off babyhood’s bands’ and were now at large in
the metropolis, equipped with a dangerous arsenal of ‘Knives, Nux

Vomica, Bullets, and Brains!’. The well-documented racist Victorian
stereotype of the Irish as infantile, unevolved and degenerate sub-
humans was updated by Punch to include the unique contribution
that it charged Wilde with adding to the revolutionists’ armoury: his
subversive intellect and disarming wit.9 Included among the revolu-
tionaries bucking against the ‘checks and restrains’ of constitutional
politics, Wilde is portrayed here as an instigator of revolutionary vio-
lence and his literary writings are condemned for expressing radical
beliefs.10 Comparing the cultural work of Aestheticism to the activi-
ties of Russian revolutionaries and militant Irish nationalists, Punch
depicted Wilde as a seditious writer whose message was heard and
understood across the political spectrum of the international Left,
and whose works also appealed to the anticolonial imagination.
This equation of radical politics with the subversive cultural prac-
tice of the Aesthete reveals much about the late Victorian conserva-
tive imagination. This projection of the spectre of revolt onto the
contemporary cultural scene by Punch depicts Wilde as the represen-
tative of a particularly modern and articulate type of insurgency.11
In case the poet’s pseudonym was not suitably accusatory (‘Brother
Jonathan’ was a contemporary moniker for the United States, where
Wilde had just begun his lecture tour when the poem was pub-
lished), the piece is immediately followed by another attack. Hop-
ing to prolong the critical battering to which Punch had subjected
Wilde’s Poems in 1881 (it described his verse as a diluted mixture of
‘Swinburne and Water’),12 its next skit was addressed ‘To an Æsthetic
Poet’ who deserved to be tied to the stocks for inflicting ‘sick’ning
maudlin gush’ on the British public.13
Sensitive to the threat posed to imperial hegemony by the com-
bined menace of political and artistic radicalism, the Tory press
remained consistently hostile towards Aestheticism and what it
perceived as its links to the ‘dirty politics’ of Irish nationalism.14 By
adopting this position, Punch excused and normalised the repressive
legislation with which Ireland was being governed from Westmin-
ster, and stressed the imperialist orthodoxy that the Irish, like every
other colonial subject population, had to be violently disciplined.
The magazine popularised colonial discourse within the literary and
cultural fields at this key point in Wilde’s early career, and these
attempts to isolate and ridicule him had as their objective the elimi-
nation of his reputation as a public intellectual. The coercion Acts
that sanctioned police and military violence across late-nineteenth-
century Ireland were accompanied by newspaper propaganda which,
like these examples, validated imperial power while also justifying

the force with which it was imposed. This comparison of Wilde,
who was by 1881 already known as a socialist and Irish republican,
with assassins, agitators and revolutionaries, represents an impor-
tant node in the ideological network that included parliament, the
press, the police and the repressive legislation that, as we shall see,
the young Oscar Wilde publicly condemned.
This monograph offers a necessarily selective analysis of Oscar
Wilde’s radical politics. The limitations of space have prevented my
study from including the full range of radicalism as expressed across
all of his work and I hope that more will be written about these
matters in future projects. I explore here Wilde’s engagement with
politics in relation to the crises generated by late Victorian imperial-
ism and capitalism, issues that were at the forefront of his literary,
cultural and political thought. Chapter 1 examines Wilde’s expres-
sion of radical anticolonial beliefs through the speeches, lectures
and statements that he delivered during his 1882 tour of the United
States. Chapter 2 explores how his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists,
which was abandoned before it was even performed in London in
1881 and then staged briefly in New York in 1883, used its dramatic
setting of Csarist Russia to criticise British imperial policy in Ireland.
Chapter 3 discusses Wilde’s treatment of class as a cultural issue in
his 1891 essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. Chapter 4 con-
centrates on the critiques of imperialism and capitalism offered in his
short stories, particularly his fairy tales and fables; and Chapter 5
considers his discussion of the relationship between art and politics
in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter 6 proposes that
the matters of civil disobedience and rebellion are key concerns of
Wilde’s 1895 social comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest; and
Chapter 7 interprets Wilde’s critique of the politics of imprisonment,
as expressed in De Profundis and ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’.
While I have discussed these issues at length, more can be said
about Wilde’s wider engagements with politics. These include his
progressive analyses of the cultural and political conservatism in the
essays collected in Intentions, his expressions of support for feminism
in his journalism and plays, his confrontation with homophobia in
The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his challenge to religious dogma in
‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, to cite just several of his broader
concerns. The sheer volume of Wilde’s literary output and the con-
sistency of his radical expression throughout his entire oeuvre testify
to his progressive perspectives on all of these matters, and it is hoped
that this study will encourage further scholarship in these areas.
Coercion and Culture
Oscar Wilde criticised imperialist violence in Ireland, where, he com-

plained, ‘the English conquest destroyed art’;15 his 1889 review of
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s collection of poems, In Vinculis, also described
coercive legislation as ‘ungodly’. Blunt, who had been imprisoned
for chairing an anti-eviction meeting in County Galway a year ear-
lier, had been prosecuted, in Wilde’s opinion, for supporting ‘a noble
cause’.16 Michael Davitt, the former Fenian prisoner and leader of the
Irish Land League, with whom Wilde corresponded on the issue of
prison reform, described the ‘permanent ring’ of repressive legislation
with which successive British administrations governed Ireland. This
‘rule-by-state-of-siege principles’ was modernised with the passage of
fifty-two separate coercion Acts between 1830 and 1885.17 Wilde’s
claim in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ that human progress had
only ever been achieved ‘through disobedience and through rebellion’
echoes Davitt’s claim that Irish nationalists had only ever wrested
concessions from the British as a result of their centuries-long antico-
lonial struggle.18
During the 1840s Wilde’s mother, Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde,
who wrote under the pseudonym, Speranza, criticised the repression
and surveillance through which Ireland was ruled by the British. Pri-
vately, she complained: ‘What an incubus this English government
is on our country [. . .] It strangles all life.’19 Publicly, she called
for an armed rebellion in her 1848 essay, ‘Jacta Alea Est’,20 and
her son inherited these anticolonial sentiments. During his tour of
the United States, when he was also being ridiculed in the British
press as an ‘Ass-thete’,21 Wilde referred an audience in Minnesota
to his mother’s writings and argued that an understanding of the
long tradition of anticolonial resistance that she had participated in
during the 1840s was essential for anyone who wanted to compre-
hend Irish history. He insisted that his country’s past was marked
by its prolonged exposure to imperialist violence, dispossession and
the profound cultural losses that resulted from these intense and
destructive cycles of colonial conquest: ‘[W]ith the coming of the
English, art in Ireland came to an end, and it has had no existence
for over seven hundred years [. . .] for art could not live and flourish
under a tyrant.’22
Wilde’s anger at the ‘squalid’ treatment of the Irish by their British
occupiers, gaolers and landlords resurfaced in an 1887 review of his
mother’s book, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions
of Ireland, in which he described Irish mythology as ‘the genius of the
race’ that Britain ‘essayed in vain to assimilate or subdue’. He also

described the subjugation of Ireland as Britain’s ‘perpetual difficulty
and disgrace’.23 Later, in 1888, Wilde described himself ‘a most recal-
citrant patriot’,24 but as John Stokes and Mark Turner have argued in
their analysis of his journalism in their ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, his commitment to anticolonial
politics was broader than this self-effacing disclaimer indicates: ‘to
see Wilde as merely “recalcitrant” may be to define the sphere of
the political far too narrowly and to misunderstand his own sense
of political engagement’.25 Wilde was keenly aware of the political
and cultural potential of the book review, both as an influential form
and medium. Along with his public lectures in San Francisco and
Minnesota, he repeatedly used reviewing to criticise British policy
in Ireland. Wilde was also opposed to the stage Irishness that domi-
nated much literary writing about the country. ‘The Celtic element in
literature is extremely valuable,’ he wrote, ‘but there is absolutely no
excuse for shrieking “Shillelagh!” and “O’Gorrah!”’26
Socialism and Radical Aestheticism
Wilde’s anticolonial beliefs were accompanied by a thoughtful and

sustained belief in the socially-committed individual. Throughout
his career, he addressed the profound tension that distanced capi-
talism and imperialism from Aestheticism’s oppositional ‘ideal of
self-culture and self-development’. He insisted that this progressive
doctrine should motivate the artistic and political imagination of the
aesthete.27 Wilde’s own political views aligned very clearly with his
aesthetic beliefs, and he argued for unrestricted artistic expression
during a time when culture was being rigorously policed. As Gilbert
complains in ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Anything approaching to the free
play of the mind is practically unknown.’28 Wilde also believed that
the era’s restrictive moral and political values ensured that literary
practice was undertaken in an atmosphere of ‘sordid terror’. Writers,
readers and audiences, he insisted, were compelled to adhere to
‘sterile’ middle-class and imperialist strictures. Ernest’s response to
Gilbert that ‘all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous’29 subtly
conveys how the British metropolis had assimilated the coercive
atmosphere of the colonies.
Wilde warned his readers that, in this repressive climate, the art-
ist should be an insurgent figure dedicated to the decolonisation of
art. He believed that modern imperialism represented the private
aggrandisement of the bourgeoisie writ large and on a global scale,

and he was convinced that capitalist modernity was inherently vio-
lent. Writing in The Nineteenth Century almost a decade after his
tour of the United States, he revisited this idea by proposing that the
democratic evaluation of art and culture would encourage identifi-
cation with the Other. In this piece, which was republished as ‘The
Critic as Artist’, Wilde predicted that conflict between states could
be discredited by developing and expanding popular awareness of
art. Doing so would highlight the contrast between the grandeur of
culture and the baseness of state violence:
Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of

the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make
war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to
destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important
element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its
fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
The change will of course be slow, and people will not be conscious of
it. They will not say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is
perfect,’ but because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the
land. Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer
than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give
us the peace that springs from understanding.30
For Wilde, Aestheticism was a social project that had explicitly polit-
ical objectives as well as artistic ambitions, and ‘criticism’ – by which
he meant meaningful and deeply reflective immersion in culture –
involved the individual in the practice of a decidedly humanist form
of internationalism. Wilde believed that the late nineteenth century
was a characteristically ‘selfish age’ but he was also convinced that
empire and capital, with their ‘vulgar and discordant’ drives, could
be subverted by the artist. This idealism, along with his proposal
for the development of a reflective and progressive ‘self-culture’, was
clearly informed by his anticolonial beliefs, as he argued that auton-
omy had political as well as personal consequences: ‘England will
never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is
more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surren-
der for so fair a land.’ This cultural, political and social transforma-
tion would counter the influence of fanatical critics and politicians
by encouraging mutual sympathy and solidarity across classes and
national borders. It would sustain what Wilde termed ‘the peace that
springs from understanding.’31
Wilde’s declaration that ‘Criticism [. . .] makes us cosmopolitan’32

was also critical of the violence through which capitalism and impe-
rialism functioned. He proposed art as a serious counter-strategy to
the state’s apparatus of coercion and its continual provocation of
conflict. Whereas for Matthew Arnold culture suggested the need for
government and ‘the idea of the State’,33 Wilde believed that culture
could be deployed to dismantle it. He was recognised by his con-
temporaries as a member of what Leela Gandhi has described as the
dissident ‘affective communities’ that confronted imperialism from
within the British metropolis. These progressive circles provided the
ideological and aesthetic spaces from which a wide range of radical
writers, artists and thinkers could mount symbolic and material acts
of resistance. Circulating within these broader networks of ‘associa-
tion, alliance, relationality, community’,34 Wilde’s work, like Blunt’s
anti-imperialist poetry and the experimental socialist writings of
Edward Carpenter, contributed to a significant current of radical dis-
course that opposed the dangerously live circuits of imperial power
and coercion.35
Resistance against the hegemonising forces of empire and capital
was a central theme in Wilde’s fiction, drama, poetry and essays, and
it remained an important theme in many of his book reviews and
public lectures. In all of these works, Wilde addressed the historical
realities of poverty, suffering, hunger and colonisation. For example,
social inequality provided the material backdrop to his 1887 story,
‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’, which opens with its narrator observ-
ing ‘the strange panorama of pride and poverty’ that Wilde associ-
ated with late Victorian London.36 Here and in his more explicitly
political writings, he repeatedly identified with what he termed ‘the
community of suffering’.37 This allowed him to develop a radical
position as an aesthete: by drawing on the experiences of the mar-
ginalised, the dispossessed and the colonised, his writings connected
radical class politics with anti-imperialism; his work also associated
queerness with creativity and aligned anarchism with Aestheticism.
All the while, he constantly depicted authority as being harmful to
the creative spirit.38
Radical Politics and Wilde’s Literary Practice
Radical political thought was central to Wilde’s creative conscious-

ness as an aesthete and, as Terry Eagleton has shown, the question
of style is intimately linked in his work to the issues of commitment
and identity.39 The political atmosphere in late Victorian Britain was

characterised by the intensification of class conflict, the deployment
of increasing levels of imperialist violence in its colonies, and the
domestic application of coercive laws that had been honed in Ireland.
England’s nearest and oldest contested colony, Ireland served as a mil-
itary and political laboratory where violent strategies and practices of
coercion were developed throughout the nineteenth century.40 Wilde’s
fictions, plays and essays criticised imperial policy in more distant
colonies while always paying close attention to the persecution of the
English poor, as domestic state violence remained a persistent theme
in his work.
Wilde’s assumption of a bourgeois, metropolitan identity was
subversive. More than a simple contrarian or a reluctant rebel, he
strategically and sometimes explicitly placed radical political ideas
at the centre of his literary writing.41 His writings often reflect the
experiences of British society’s subaltern classes – the destitute work-
ers, women, children, prisoners and colonised peoples with whom he
identified. Whenever the privileged take centre stage in these works
they often appear against the background of the ‘[r]eality’ of labour,
which, for example, interrupts a conversation on the relationship
between pleasure and slavery in The Picture of Dorian Gray ‘in the
shape of a servant’.42 Despite the imaginative settings of Wilde’s fan-
tastic stories and fairy tales, and despite the bourgeois social remove
from which his plays appear to discuss class and colonialism, these
works address very immediate political problems, including the con-
cealed forms of state violence that, as he complained, in ‘The Critic
as Artist’, always accompanied the manipulation of public opinion
and popular taste.43
Malcontents are present throughout Wilde’s plays, poems and fic-
tion. They appear as political revolutionaries in Vera; or, The Nihilists
and as the ‘Christs that die upon the barricades’, for whom he com-
posed his 1881 ‘Sonnet to Liberty’.44 Dissent is expressed by the hero-
ically insolent butler, Lane, in The Importance of Being Earnest and
by the starving peasants and workers who populate his short stories,
along with those who attempt to rectify inequality, even if doing so
will guarantee their own destruction, as happens to the Happy Prince.
In them we find the expression of his own self-positioning as a radical
author, theorist and critic whose work was determined by his sym-
pathy with the oppressed. All of this underlines the subversiveness of
Wilde’s treatment of appearances, deception and the forgery of iden-
tity in works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘The Portrait of
Mr W.H.’ and The Importance of Being Earnest.
As Kevin Whelan has shown, the coding of unspeakable colonial

truths was not an unusual feature of nineteenth-century Irish litera-
ture. In his essay on James Joyce’s short story of 1914, ‘The Dead’,
Whelan points to the long history of repression and censorship that
compelled Irish nationalist and republican authors to develop stra-
tegic forms of literary and political expression. These authors could
not articulate their beliefs openly without leaving themselves open
to accusations of political subversion. Instead, they subtly structured
their complaints about the condition of occupied Ireland as a kind of
literary and political survival technique. When read from the histori-
cally sensitive perspective that is vital for an understanding of late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish literary culture, texts
like the stories collected in Dubliners or Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses,
assume an entirely different, even insurgent quality. Saturated with
references to the historical traces of colonisation and the ongoing
resonances of imperial violence, literary works by writers like James
Clarence Mangan, Thomas Moore and Joyce were charged with what
Whelan terms ‘a spiral of connectivity, a recursive, clotted, elliptical
matrix’ within which politics was at once camouflaged and commu-
nicated. This was the cultural-political source from which the works
composed by these writers extracted ‘their power and presence, their
aura’.45 While lecturing in San Francisco in 1882, Wilde referred
directly to this problem when he described Ireland’s cultural destruc-
tion at the hands of its English colonisers, views that he expressed
later through the encoded means that Whelan describes.
The assumption that Wilde never took political risks and instead
concealed himself behind a screen of privilege overlooks his ideo-
logical beliefs and commitments. These were more complex than
the narcissistic motivations described by his biographer, Richard
Ellmann.46 Conscious of the dangers posed to anticolonial writers,
Wilde encoded his rebellious ideas within the broader framework of
aesthetic discourse, facilitating a safer distribution of his republican
and socialist thought. This was particularly the case after the com-
mercial failure of his first, openly political play, Vera; or, The Nihilists,
in 1883. Wilde’s cautious explorations of politics occurred along
what Leela Gandhi terms the necessarily ‘faint battle lines’ of his
later writing. These works should be read against the context of the
more politically explicit points made in his earlier work, including
his lectures and book reviews.47 In these texts, written throughout the
1880s and 1890s, Wilde condemned coercion in Ireland, criticised
class violence and offered nuanced discussions of the distortion of
history in the service of power. These radical statements appeared in
a range of works, including Vera, book reviews published in the Pall

Mall Gazette and public lectures delivered in Britain, Ireland and the
United States. His anticolonial and socialist ideas were not diluted
as his career progressed, but were conveyed to readers through more
tactically conscious discourse. By the spring of 1895, this threw play-
goers into subversive laughter, after having already provoked indig-
nation among readers of his short stories.48
When Irish writers did directly criticise empire at home, or when
they advocated complete decolonisation, as Wilde’s mother did in
1848, and as her friend, Christopher Manus O’Keeffe had also
done during the Fenian insurgency of the 1860s, they did so under
the very immediate threat of prosecution and imprisonment. The
publication of her militant essay, ‘Jacta Alea Est’ in the Young Ire-
land newspaper, The Nation, in July 1848, led to the publication’s
seizure and suppression.49 Later, in 1865, O’Keeffe was imprisoned
for writing anti-imperialist articles in the Fenian newspaper, the
Irish People. He was sentenced along with Jeremiah O’Donovan
Rossa, who after his release went on to organise the Fenian dyna-
mite campaign of the 1880s. An Irish language scholar, antiquar-
ian, novelist and journalist, O’Keeffe wrote to William Wilde,
praising ‘those beautiful children of yours’ and predicted great
things for them, underlining the progressive class views and anti-
colonial opinions of the Wildes’ milieu in Dublin: ‘In a few years
they will be men. Full of talent & highly educated they must feel
that natural pride which is inseparable from intellectual superior-
ity. This will make it impossible for them to fawn on aristocratic
patrons.’50 More advanced than the constitutional nationalism of
Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, Wilde’s Irish
republicanism – the ideology that he shared with the militant
Fenian movement – was concealed in his literary writing within
what Whelan terms ‘the language of the politically unsayable, of
the impossible public sphere’. In this way, like Joyce, Wilde articu-
lated ideas that were censored, forbidden and deemed subversive
by the state.51 This strategic concealment was not a matter of eva-
siveness on Wilde’s part, but evidence of his consistent, radical
and carefully planned strategic engagements with contemporary
politics. Through these slightly encrypted expressions of radical-
ism his works conveyed ideological proposals and ideas that were
discernible to politically-informed readers like Alexander Cohen,
the anarchist who defended Wilde’s literary, political and sexual
reputations in The Torch when he was imprisoned for committing
the crime of ‘gross indecency’ in 1895.
Wilde and the Anarchists
From the earliest stages of his career Wilde was conscious of the
need to secure influential and prominent sponsors and contacts. His
networking efforts included meeting the Tory peer, poet and philan-
thropist, Richard Monckton Milnes, on instruction from the union-
ist academic, John Pentland Mahaffy, who had been Wilde’s tutor
at Trinity College, Dublin. Weeks beforehand, he also sent his work
to the former Fenian prisoner, John Boyle O’Reilly, for publication
in the Boston Pilot. O’Reilly owned and edited the paper, through
which he promoted Irish separatism in the United States.52 A year
later, Wilde wrote to the former Prime Minister, William Ewart
Gladstone, hoping that his approval might secure the publication
of his work in journals like Nineteenth Century and the Spectator.53
Moving among powerful circles when at his most famous, and by
appealing to these influential figures when he was younger, Wilde
cultivated his reputation as a writer, celebrity and public intellec-
tual by strategically positioning himself at those points where the
political and cultural spheres overlapped. His agitational stance was
central to his public identity and this was recognised by the Scottish
anarchist, Thomas Hastie Bell, who believed that Wilde ‘opposed
[. . .] all governmentalism’. He was, in Bell’s opinion, ‘undoubtedly
[. . .] an Anarchist of the type of Edward Carpenter or Elisee [sic]
Reclus [. . .] an Anarchist philosophic and humanitarian’ whose
‘clean-cut and clean-spoken’ radicalism attracted more people to the
anarchist cause than the less polished writings of other revolutionar-
ies.54 Likewise, the poet and critic, Arthur Symons, urged readers to
study Wilde’s prose and its sophisticated ‘convolutions of sentiment’
so as to better understand his political genius.55
In 1907, Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist journal, Liberty, reprinted
the French poet, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier’s article, ‘The Soul of
Man Under Socialism’, which praised Wilde’s original essay. The
article first appeared in the socialist newspaper, L’Aurore, which in
1898 had famously published Émile Zola’s defence of Alfred Drey-
fus, ‘J’accuse . . . !’ (the paper’s full title was L’Aurore Litteraire,
Artistique, Sociale). De Bouhélier complained that contemporary
politics amounted to the absorption of ‘inner liberty [. . .] by the
mass’: in a bourgeois democracy, he warned, ‘originality attracts
suspicion, strips off power, annihilates’. Thus the creative and resis-
tant individual always found himself at odds with ‘the innumerable
absurdity of the fanatical and illiterate multitude’.56 Writing in 1916,
John Cowper Powys also claimed that Wilde was ‘the most extreme
of individualists’ who stood for ‘an affiliation in revolt between the

artist and the masses’. This radicalism, Powys believed, was prac-
tical rather than theoretical because it associated the possibility of
political progress with a ‘natural human craving for life and beauty’.
His cultural position was revolutionary because it proved that ‘life
with all its emotional, intellectual and imaginative possibilities, can
be endured without the gross, coarsening, dulling “anæsthetic” of
money-making toil’.57 Wilde’s radical views were also clear to Robert
Hichens, whose 1894 satire, The Green Carnation, parodied the aes-
thetic movement. Although the novel was critical of Wilde, who is
represented by the irritatingly flamboyant and paradoxical aesthete,
Esmé Amarinth, Hitchens was unable to dismiss his target’s politi-
cal views. Instead, he cast Esmé as a figure who recognises the crises
generated by capitalism and regards society as existing directly ‘upon
the edge of a precipice’.58
The concealment of outrage was a necessary strategy for Wilde
as he assumed an increasingly central public role as a writer who
stood in ‘symbolic relation’ to the wider culture of the fin de siè-
cle.59 His theories on the links that bound art to revolutionary
politics suggested that Aestheticism could be an agitational move-
ment capable of countering the cultural and political hegemony of
capital: as he stressed in 1883 while promoting The Duchess of
Padua, ‘[A]ll art must be capable of scientific analysis; it is not
mere prettiness.’60 Wilde also echoed and politicised Walter Pater’s
ideas about the intensity of art with his own claim that ‘we burn
with a hundred flames’. By making ‘culture [. . .] a gem that reflects
light from a myriad facets’, Wilde believed that Aestheticism could
define the beautiful as the product of material and historical experi-
ence.61 From Wilde’s perspective, culture engaged with every aspect
of contemporary life, adding a political charge to Pater’s claim that
it should express the artist’s ‘spirit of rebellion and revolt against
[. . .] moral and religious ideas’.62 Art, he argued, was reflective
of and informed by political and economic realities. It circulated
among the social classes that produced and paid for it and, while
their interests were embedded within the political, the artist’s quest
for autonomy paradoxically resisted the hegemony of capital and
the state. Responding to James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s claim
that art should be socially disengaged, Wilde asserted that no work
could function in a social or political vacuum. ‘An artist is not an
isolated fact,’ he maintained, because ‘he is resultant of a certain
milieu and a certain entourage’. This was why the writer, painter
or musician ‘can be no more born of a nation that is devoid of any
sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom
from a thistle’.63
Wilde was as interested in anarchism as he was supportive of
what Joe Cleary terms the ‘outlaw ideology’ of Irish republican-
ism,64 and these sympathies were recognised by his contemporary,
Thomas Hastie Bell, who drew attention to Wilde’s alignment of
anarchism with anticolonialism in his application of ‘autonomy
against empire’.65 Anarchism was a transnational, decentralised
ideology that travelled across borders, undermining contemporary
bourgeois notions of citizenship, cultural identity and the legitimacy
of the state.66 For conservatives, it highlighted the problem of work-
ing-class mobility, which was equated in journalism and popular
fiction with the threat of terrorism.67 Described by its political oppo-
nents as a movement of violent transients, criminals and immigrants,
anarchism articulated the oppositional, alternative consciousness of
those who existed on the margins of late-nineteenth-century capital-
ism. Although severely critical of anarchism himself, George Ber-
nard Shaw complained that the popular ‘imaginative’ association
of anarchists with criminality resulted from their misrepresentation
by the conservative press.68 Like the influential anarchist theorist
and historian, Peter Kropotkin, along with other anarchist contem-
poraries like Emma Goldman and Bell, Wilde regarded capitalist
competition as a ‘waste of energy’, and sought to replace it with a
utopian, co-operative ideal in which authority played no part.69
While some critics have dismissed Wilde’s commitment to anar-
chism and have worked to depoliticise his writing, the close readings
provided in this monograph show how, in his journalism and literary
publications, Wilde clearly and repeatedly engaged with anarchism’s
radical cultural and political perspectives.70 In response, Kropotkin,
Bell and Goldman engaged enthusiastically with his work.71 For
Wilde, anarchic subjectivity and radical consciousness were timeless
phenomena that resisted the implicit and explicit violence of being
governed. He insisted that these crises were not irreversible because
they could be countered by art and by the aesthetically conscious
individual. In his essay on the ancient Chinese philosopher, Chuang
Tsŭ, Wilde accepted that the aesthete’s fusion of artistic and political
subversion was perilous activity because late Victorian society was
ultimately governed through coercion. He was not the only writer
to make this connection, as anarchists regarded the cultural field
as offering practical and artistic analogues to their political efforts,
and many emphasised the centrality of art and literature to rebel-
lion during this period.72 As John Barlas, another anarchist who was
also a friend of Wilde’s, indicated in his 1892 review of The Picture

of Dorian Gray, anarchism did not function in straightforwardly
political terms but was instead a more comprehensive form of resis-
tance that integrated political and cultural activity in its expressions
of revolt. Consequently, it appealed quite directly to the creatively
minded. During the 1890s anarchists became increasingly interested
in literary expression and in the political purchase of cultural Symbol-
ism, a process that, in turn, associated their politics with the déclassé
consciousness of avant-garde bohemians.73 Wilde was equally inter-
ested in the synthesis of avant-garde art with radical politics, an issue
that came, increasingly, to characterise aesthetic literary and cultural
production at the fin de siècle.
Anarchism was a highly mediated form of radicalism: French anar-
chists circulated their ideas in journals such as La Révolte and the
edgier Le Père Peinard, while journals such as Freedom, Anarchy and
The Torch were published and circulated in Britain. It applied a range
of artistically-oriented images, codes and practices because its politi-
cal culture was underlined by its keenly aestheticised consciousness.
Trading in shocking political images, French anarchists also moved
comfortably within Symbolist circles and the relationship between
the literary and political avant gardes cultivated ‘total rather than
relative comprehension’ within both circles, whose adherents valued
immediate experience over critical reflection.74 This was complicated
further because the French anarchist movement practised the strategy
of ‘propaganda par le fait’, or propaganda by deed – violent strikes
that targeted politicians (including, even, the French president, Sadi
Carnot, who was stabbed to death in 1894), political institutions
like the national assembly, and sites of conspicuous consumption
such as the Café Terminus in Paris. With these spectacular attentats,
militant anarchists acquired a fearsome reputation for causing politi-
cal shocks that countered the systematic and institutional violence
of belle époque capitalism. Wilde publicly declared his support for
anarchism and his contacts and friends within the anarchist move-
ment included Sergius Kravchinsky, also known as Stepniak, who
killed General Mezentsev, the chief of the Russian secret police, in
1878. Wilde was also close to John Barlas, admired Peter Kropotkin
and mingled with the socialist writers, George Bernard Shaw and
William Morris. His acquaintances in Paris numbered Félix Fénéon,
the journalist, propagandist, editor and alleged bomber with whom
he remained a close friend after his release from prison in 1897.75
Another French anarchist, Adolphe Retté, corrected an early draft of
Wilde’s deeply politicised play, Salome.
Art and Empire
As an Irish republican Wilde felt the impact of imperialism very

acutely, and Ireland’s centuries-long history of occupation and resis-
tance generated the dialectical tension from which his own radical
avant-gardism emerged. As we have seen, his anti-imperialist views
were made very apparent during his lecture tour of the United States
but on his return Wilde became necessarily more circumspect in
voicing these views directly.76 His famous statement that ‘[a]ll art is
quite useless’, announced at the end of the preface to The Picture of
Dorian Gray77 subversively underlines how art, when not hindered
or co-opted by the dead weight of capital, can oppose bourgeois-
imperial values and practices. Despite Aestheticism’s perceived stress
on the social isolation of art and the artist, Wilde believed that art’s
radical potential, like the revolutionary charge carried by the self-
aware individual, lay squarely within its claims to autonomy. For
these reasons, he was convinced that the true ‘value of beautiful sur-
roundings’78 had a significantly social purchase.
Wilde stressed the entanglement of imperial politics, national-
ist culture and aesthetic concerns in his first published article, ‘The
Grosvenor Gallery’, which appeared in the Dublin University Maga-
zine in July 1877. Drawing attention to the works of the Irish art-
ist, Frederick Burton, he indicated his own nationalist views, stating
Burton had sympathised with the Young Ireland movement of the
1840s.79 Later that year, he returned to the subject of Irish cultural
politics by praising the artist and antiquarian, Henry O’Neill, for
influencing the Celtic Revival of the 1880s. The now elderly O’Neill
was enduring financial distress and Wilde called for donations from
‘those who have any appreciation of an unselfish and patriotic life’.
Stressing that O’Neill’s monograph, The Most Interesting of the
Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland, was an important nationalist
work, Wilde emphasised the hold that it exerted over the modern
Irish imagination:
Of Mr. O’Neill’s practical influence we can give no better example than

the great change which has taken place in our funeral art, since the pub-
lication of his book. Everywhere in our cemeteries there are now to be
seen stately and graceful Irish crosses, which are suitable memorials of
our dead, not merely as being Christian emblems, but as the works of
native hand and brain. These beautiful crosses have quite displaced the
urns and sarcophagi, formerly so common; emblems which were mean-
ingless, since we neither burn nor embalm our dead, and inartistic, as
being unsuited to the material and the climate.80
Regarding the Victorian fixation with neoclassical decoration as artless

and redundant, Wilde proposed that the Celtic cross was a superior,
indigenous form that remained uncontaminated by colonial influences.
The significance of O’Neill’s researches lay in their popularisation of
a specifically Irish art form, the material evidence of which could be
found in the fashion for elaborate and expensive reproductions of
ancient Irish crosses that his scholarly work had encouraged. Wilde
believed that O’Neill had placed the Celtic cross firmly within the
modern Irish cultural imaginary, ending the fad for what he regarded
as alien funerary decoration by proposing a more suitable style drawn
from native labour and art. As a symbol of the cultural revival of the
second half of the nineteenth century, the Celtic cross had enormous
symbolic purchase, while it also served as a distinctive emblem of Irish
political nationalism.81 Wilde promoted it as such, along with O’Neill’s
scholarly efforts to preserve surviving originals.
The recycling of these artefacts and images from the past did not
just have cultural and aesthetic significance: Wilde confirmed that their
modern application was deeply political because O’Neill had ‘benefit-
ted his country, in rescuing her from the imputations of barbarism in
early ages’. Propaganda representing the Irish as violent and bestial
had been circulated by colonial propagandists since the composition
of Giraldus Cambrensis’ twelfth- century travelogue, Topographica
Hibernica.82 This continued during Wilde’s lifetime in simian carica-
tures of the Irish published in Punch and in racist depictions of the
Irish by authors such as the Oxford historian, James Anthony Froude,
who in 1872 described the Irish peasantry as ‘some animal work-
ing by instinct, some missing link’.83 As we shall see in Chapter 1,
Wilde did not just target the images of Irish savagery being circulated
by Tory historians and the imperialist press: even the great liberal
intellectual, John Ruskin, included the Irish in his own catalogue of
backward and ultimately doomed races. When considered against the
long-term history of racist caricatures, distortions and propaganda
that remained influential during Wilde’s own lifetime, his journalistic
promotion of Celtic revivalism, along with the general significance of
‘Irish genius in the field of art’,84 seems a clear public acknowledge-
ment of Irish culture’s role in the wider struggle against empire.
‘Civilization’, ‘Barbarism’ and Art for the Workers
In 1882, when a reporter from the Philadelphia Press asked,

‘What are your politics, Liberal or Conservative, Mr. Wilde?’ he
answered: ‘Those matters are of no importance to me. I know only
two terms – civilization and barbarism; and I am on the side of

civilization.’ With a deliberate swipe at British parliamentarian-
ism, he added: ‘It is very strange that in the House of Commons
you never hear the word “Civilization”’. Wilde believed that West-
minster, with its divisive atmosphere and ‘wretched party spirit’
distracted the public from the threat posed by the bourgeoisie’s
relentless self-aggrandisement and ‘vast accumulation of capital’.
Wilde had witnessed capitalism operating on a vast scale in the
United States, and during his 1882 trip he noted that American
plutocrats were outmatching the British aristocracy:
We have as yet nothing like it in England. We call a man rich over there
when he owns a share of Scotland, or a county or so. But he doesn’t have
such a control of ready money as does an American capitalist.85
During his visit to Chicago, he described alienation as the funda-

mental problem of capitalist modernity and proposed that instead
of being dedicated to the generation of wealth for the elite, society
could be improved by harnessing technology and industry so as to
‘create a civilization greater or even as great’ as ancient Greece.86
Social equality could be achieved through the sharing of economic
resources and this would, in turn, facilitate the democratisation of
art and culture. Their appreciation would ensure that culture would
no longer remain another example of ‘luxury confined to the rich’.87
In another interview, Wilde explained that Aestheticism could
enhance the quality of life for the working classes. When asked
whether he wanted to ‘teach the “common people”, even the abjectly
poor, to find these beauties, and by them to elevate their lives?’ he
answered:
The two classes we must directly work upon are the handicraftsmen and
the artists. As for the class between, the idle people, rich or poor, it is
useless to go to them, and tell them, ‘You must do this, and you ought to
do that.’ There must be a great mass of handicraft produced before you
can hope to affect the masses. And the handicraftsmen must be directed
by the artists; and the artists must be inspired with true designs. It is only
through those classes we can work.88
Beauty was to be found in the products of skilled labour, and if

made well, these would facilitate the development of a popular
and democratic Aestheticism. The growth of a broader apprecia-
tion of the value of art among the working class could be fostered
by socially-engaged workers and artists. Mass culture was not the
problem, Wilde explained; it was authority, with the prescriptive

demands it imposed on workers, that was stifling culture. The
exploitation of labour and the misdirection of the energy of skilled
workers was unsettling for Wilde, and he outlined his critique of
material culture under capitalism by explaining that ‘it is absurd to
seek to make the material include the spiritual, to make the body
mean the soul’.89 The reporter noted that Wilde appeared melan-
choly as he asked:
[W]hy does not science busy itself with drainage and sanitary engineer-
ing? Why does it not clean the streets and free the rivers from pollution?
Why, in England, is there scarcely a river which at some point is not pol-
luted; and the flowers are all withering on the banks!90
Nature, culture, art and consciousness, he believed, were all suffering

under the stress of capitalism and the ‘intolerable noise’ that it cre-
ated.91 The misery of labour lay in this dissonance: ‘All art depends
upon exquisite and delicate sensibility,’ Wilde told his English audi-
ences, ‘and such continual turmoil must ultimately be destructive of
the musical faculty.’92 Industrial modernity was damaging the aes-
thetic capacity of the individual and reducing the value attached to
culture by society as a whole, and the Denver Daily Times elaborated
on Wilde’s views when it reported:
What he comes to proclaim is, that in the rush and hurry of modern
civilization we have lost that appreciation of the beautiful in nature and
art which gives joy and zest to life. We do not stop to think for ourselves,
but let others think for us.93
Following a lecture in Philadelphia, one of Wilde’s admirers wrote

to the local press to defend Aestheticism against its political enemies
within the city’s ‘aristocratic’ establishment. The correspondent was
convinced that it was an ideology that could never be rationalised or
appreciated by the capitalists whose economic interests were harm-
ing American society:
Mr. Wilde’s lecture was a very clear defense of men, who whatever their
faults, are certainly poets in the best sense, and, to his aestheticism, is it
not a higher and nobler thing than the mercantile spirit of our age – a
spirit once confined to tradesmen – but which now invades the noble
professions of the law and of medicine? We hear more of the fees men
make than of their speeches or their cures.94
Halfway through Wilde’s US tour another reporter praised ‘the great

and catholic purpose of aesthetic culture’ and defended the accuracy
of his criticisms of American society by recommending that ‘[t]he
more closely we follow his trainings and adopt his hints and sugges-
tions, the more nearly we shall approach the beautiful and avoid the
ugly and repulsive in our civilization’.95 After the tour ended, these
public discussions of Aestheticism’s political and social relevance
continued during 1883 and 1884 when Wilde delivered his lecture,
‘Impressions of America’. He told audiences in England and Ireland
that ‘poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation’ and
emphasised the importance of ‘the beauty of the word Freedom and
the value of the thing Liberty’.96 Connecting language to liberation,
he criticised the assumption that poor people and workers were cul-
turally incapable ‘unaesthetics’ and stressed that they possessed an
acute aesthetic consciousness that underlined their right to partici-
pate in culture.97 This book explores Wilde’s admiration for those
he described as the ‘best classes’ in society; these were the poor, the
dispossessed and the colonised. Believing that the political, economic
and cultural establishments refused to comprehend or implement the
lessons of Aestheticism, he remained convinced that these margin-
alised communities understood culture and insisted that their appe-
tite for art and beauty was greater than both the capitalist’s demands
for profit and the imperialist’s desire for conquest.98
Notes
1. Max Nordau, Degeneration (originally published in 1893 as Entartung

(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895)), pp. 317, 497.
2. ‘Exit Oscar’, Truth, 19 July 1883 (no page no.), UCLA Clark Library,
Wildeana, Box 10: ‘Wilde in America’, 10.19.
3. Ibid.
4. Alexander Cohen, untitled, The Torch, 2.1, 18 June 1895, p. 6.
5. ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde on America’, The West Midlands Advertiser and
Chelsea and Pimlico Chronicle, 14 July 1883 (no page no.), UCLA
Clark Library, Wildeana, Box 10: Wilde in America, 10.17 A.
6. See, for example, ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’s “Impressions”’, The Daily Telegraph,
12 July 1883 (no page no.), UCLA Clark Library, Wildeana, Box 10:
Wilde in America, 10.17B.
7. ‘Impressions of an Impressionist’, Punch, 21 July 1883 (no page no.),
UCLA Clark Library, Wildeana, Box 10: Wilde in America, 10.16.
8. Punch, 10 December 1881, p. 12, quoted in Stuart Mason, Bibliography
of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914) p. 255.
9. For an account of this racist stereotyping, see L. Perry Curtis, Apes

and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). Liz Curtis also examines Victo-
rian anti-Irish caricatures in relation to later examples published dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s. Her research has shown how the frequency
of their publication increases during periods of anticolonial insurgency
dating from the Middle Ages until the mid-1980s. See Liz Curtis,
Nothing But the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism
(London: Information on Ireland, 1983).
10. ‘Murder Made Easy: A Ballad à la Mode. By “Brother Jonathan”’
Wilde’, Punch, 14 January 1882, p. 18.
11. For a historical overview of anti-anarchist paranoia and other ‘red
scares’ that were invented and manipulated by European governments
during the fin de siècle, see Alex Butterworth, The World That Never
Was: Dreamers, Schemers and Secret Agents (London: Bodley Head,
2010).
12. ‘Swinburne and Water’, Punch, 23 July 1881, p. 26.
13. ‘To an Æsethtic Poet’, Punch, 14 January 1882, p. 18.
14. ‘Home Rule’, Punch, 4 April, 1885, p. 162.
15. Quoted in Robert D. Pepper, ‘Introduction’, in Oscar Wilde, Irish Poets
and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (San Francisco: The Book Club
of California, 1972), p. 3.
16. Oscar Wilde, ‘Poetry and Prison: Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s “In Vinculis”’,
Pall Mall Gazette, 3 January 1889, p. 3, in The Complete Works of
Oscar Wilde, vol. 7: Journalism 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), pp. 149–52, pp. 149, 151.
17. Michael Davitt, Leaves from a Prison Diary; Or, Lectures to a ‘Solitary’
Audience, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), pp. 222, 197.
18. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man’, in The Complete Works of Oscar
Wilde, vol. 4: Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.
231–68, p. 235.
19. Jane Francesca Wilde to Lotten von Kramer, undated, quoted in Joy
Melville, Mother of Oscar Wilde: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde
(London: Allison and Busby, 1999), p. 97.
20. ‘Jacta Alea Est’ (‘The Die is Cast’), appeared in the Young Ireland news-
paper, The Nation, when its editor, Charles Gavin Duffy, was being
tried for treason. In this piece, Speranza called for the Irish to initiate
a ‘war’ against their British occupiers. The essay was reprinted in its
entirety by Robert Harborough Sherard in his 1906 biography of Wilde.
See Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London:
T. Werner Laurie, 1906, reprinted 1911), pp. 46–55, p. 50.
21. ‘Oscar Wilde – Very Wild’, Moonshine, Saturday, 18 March 1882,
p. 129.
22. Undated report in the Saint Paul Globe, quoted in Lloyd Lewis and
Henry Justin Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 1882 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), p. 225.
23. Oscar Wilde, ‘Ancient Legends of Ireland’, Pall Mall Gazette, 19

February 1887, p. 4, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 6:
Journalism 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 125–8, p. 125.
24. Oscar Wilde to James Nicol Dunn, November-December 1888,
The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate,
2000), p. 371.
25. John Stokes and Mark W. Turner, ‘Introduction’, in Complete Works,
vol. 6, pp. xi–li, p. xxvii.
26. See ‘The Poet’s Corner’, Pall Mall Gazette, 20 January 1888, p. 3, in
Complete Works, vol. 7, pp. 52–5, p. 53.
27. Oscar Wilde, ‘A Chinese Sage’, The Speaker, 8 February 1890, in
Complete Works, vol. 7, pp. 237–43, p. 242.
28. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Complete Works, vol. 4,
pp. 123–206, p. 204.
29. Ibid. p. 205.
30. Ibid. p. 203. The dialogue was originally published in two parts in The
Nineteenth Century as ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’ in
July and September 1890. It appeared as a single piece in the collection,
Intentions, published in May 1891.
31. Complete Works, vol. 4, pp. 181, 191, 204.
32. Ibid. p. 202.
33. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 96.
34. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-
Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006), p. 36.
35. See Edward Carpenter’s fusion of autobiographical writing, poetry,
political and historical observation and manifesto in Towards Democ-
racy (London: John Heywood, 1883), which was published in four
parts between 1883 and 1902, and then issued as a single volume in
1905 (reprinted London: GMP, 1985).
36. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret: An Etching’, in The Com-
plete Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 205.
37. Oscar Wilde to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, 27 May 1897, in
Complete Letters, pp. 847–55, p. 851.
38. Ibid.
39. Terry Eagleton, ‘Foreword’, in Saint Oscar (Derry: Field Day, 1989),
pp. vii–xii, p. ix.
40. David Lloyd argues that the British imperial project in Ireland was
dedicated to the ‘deep penetration of civil society by surveillance tech-
niques through which the population is reconstituted as subjects of
state authority rather than as citizens’. See Lloyd’s essay ‘Regarding
Ireland in a Postcolonial Frame’ in his Ireland after History (Cork:
Cork University Press, 1999), pp. 37–52, quotation from p. 47.
41. Wilde’s political views are dismissed by Jerusha McCormack, who
regards him as a contrarian. Robert Pepper, who edited his important
lecture, ‘Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century’, claimed

that Wilde’s defence of Irish nationalism was the circumspect articula-
tion of ‘second thoughts’. See Jerusha McCormack, ‘Oscar Wilde: As
Daoist Sage’, in Michael Y. Bennett (ed.), Philosophy and Oscar Wilde
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 73–104, and Robert Pepper, in Ben-
nett (ed.), Philosophy, p. 20. Norbert Kohl’s 1980 study, Oscar Wilde:
The Works of a Conformist Rebel, reduces him to an ‘eccentric Irish
Londoner’ and a conflicted, guilt-ridden and self-serving nihilist whose
reputation was posthumously and artificially inflated by his admirers.
Kohl believed that Wilde’s literary writing could only be redeemed by
focusing ‘squarely upon the individuality of the work and not upon
that of the author’. See Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of
a Conformist Rebel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
originally published as Oscar Wilde: Das literarische Werk zwischen
Provokation und Anpassung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsver-
lag, 1980), pp. 1, 13.
42. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Complete
Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890
and 1891 Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 165–
357, p. 205.
43. As Margot Gayle Backus has argued, the Irish gothic articulates ideas
about violence that have been purged from official colonial culture,
exposing modernity’s occluded and marginalised voices and rendering
official violence more visible. See Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic
Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish
Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 14–16.
44. Oscar Wilde, ‘Sonnet to Liberty’, in The Complete Works of Oscar
Wilde, vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose (Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2000), p. 149, l.11.
45. Kevin Whelan, ‘The Memories of “The Dead”’, The Yale Journal of
Criticism, 15.1 (2002), pp. 59–97, pp. 77, 87.
46. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 305.
The anarchist historian, George Woodcock, also dismissed Wilde as
a political fraud. See George Woodcock, The Paradox of Oscar Wilde
(London and New York: Boardman & Co., 1949).
47. Gandhi, Affective Communities, p. 145.
48. George Bernard Shaw noted that Wilde’s drama ‘plays with everything:
with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors, and audience, with
the whole theatre’. Quoted from George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres
in the ‘Nineties, in Nicholas Freeman, 1895: Drama, Disaster and
Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011), p. 47.
49. Melville, Mother of Oscar, p. 46.
50. C. M. O’Keeffe to William Wilde, 20 September 1862. Clark Library
Wilde 04122L W6723 1862 Sep. 20.
51. Whelan, ‘The Memories of “The Dead”’, p. 71.

52. Wilde to Lord Houghton, October 1876, in Complete Letters, p. 33;
Wilde to Lord Houghton, c. 17 May 1877, Complete Letters, pp.
49–50; Wilde to John Boyle O’Reilly, September 1876, in Complete
Letters, p. 33.
53. Wilde to W. E. Gladstone, 14 May 1877, in Complete Letters, p. 46.
54. Bell claimed that Wilde did so in order to prevent his work from
being associated with violence. Thomas Hastie Bell, Oscar Wilde
without Whitewash, UCLA Clark Library MS. Wilde B435M3 0814
[19–]?, p. 93.
55. Arthur Symons, A Study of Oscar Wilde (London: Charles J. Sawyer,
1930), p. 22.
56. Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’,
Liberty, 16.4, October 1907, pp. 45–9, p. 47.
57. John Cowper Powys, ‘Oscar Wilde’, in Essays on Joseph Conrad
and Oscar Wilde (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1916), pp. 29–49,
pp. 38, 39.
58. Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (London: Robin Clark, 1992),
p. 72.
59. Wilde to Alfred Douglas, January–March, 1897, in Complete Letters,
pp. 683–780, p. 729.
60. Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, Ibid. pp. 196–203, p. 203.
61. Wilde to Rebecca Smith, July 1883, Ibid. pp. 215–16, p. 215. Pater’s
views on the necessary intensity of art were expressed in the conclusion
to his essay collection of 1873, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and
Poetry. He continued his discussion of the necessity of the unifying
intensity of art in his 1885 novel, Marius the Epicurean. See Walter
Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998) and Marius the Epicurean (London: Penguin,
1985).
62. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 16.
63. Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock’, Pall Mall Gazette, 21
February 1885, pp. 1–2, in Complete Works, vol. 6, pp. 34–6, p. 35.
64. Joe Cleary, ‘Republicanism and Aristocracy in Modern Ireland’, Field
Day Review, 10 (2014), pp. 4–39, p. 15.
65. Thomas Hastie Bell, Oscar Wilde without Whitewash, UCLA Clark
Library MS. Wilde B435M3 0814 [19–]?, p. 455.
66. For an account of how culture was used to cultivate subjectivity in rela-
tion to the nineteenth-century state, see David Lloyd and Paul Thomas,
Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998).
67. For discussions of the association of anarchism with terrorist violence in
the literary imagination, see my Blasted Literature: Victorian Political
Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2011), David Mulry’s Joseph Conrad Among the Anarchists:
Nineteenth-Century Terrorism and The Secret Agent (London: Palgrave,
2016) and Sarah Cole’s At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in
England and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
68. George Bernard Shaw, The Impossibilities of Anarchism (London: The
Fabian Society, 1895), p. 4.
69. Oscar Wilde, ‘A Chinese Sage’, in Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 238.
Emma Goldman’s key writings are anthologised in Anarchism and
Other Essays (originally published 1911, reprinted New York: Dover,
1969) and a comprehensive selection of Kropotkin’s work is published
in Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (New York:
Dover, 1970).
70. David Rose, Josephine Guy and Ian Small have dismissed Wilde’s polit-
ical commitment, particularly his sympathy with anarchism. For exam-
ple, Guy regards ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ as an essay that
is ‘not serious’ about its subject matter. See David Rose, ‘Oscar Wilde:
Socialite or Socialist’, in Ewe Boker, Richard Corballis and Julie Hib-
bard (eds), The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde
during the Last 100 Years (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 35–56;
Josephine M. Guy, ‘“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: A (Con)
Textual History’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Wilde Writings: Contextual
Conditions (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003), pp. 59–85; Ian
Small, ‘Introduction’, in Complete Works, vol. 4, pp. xix–lxxxvi, espe-
cially lxxiii–lxxvi.
71. Bell, Wilde without Whitewash; Emma Goldman, ‘The Hypocrisy of
Puritanism’, in Anarchism and Other Essays, pp. 167–76, p. 168; Peter
Kropotkin to Robert Ross, 6 May 1905, in Margery Ross (ed.), Robert
Ross, Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), pp. 112–14, p. 113.
72. See Charlotte Wilson (as ‘An English Anarchist’), ‘Justice’, The Anarchist,
1.5, July 1885, reprinted in Charlotte Wilson, Anarchist Essays (London:
Freedom Press, 2000), pp. 29–30.
73. Richard D. Sonn has documented French anarchism’s engagement
with culture at the fin de siècle, focusing on the crossover between
bohemian and radical political circles and networks in Paris, includ-
ing the activities of revolutionaries like Wilde’s friend, Felix Fénéon
and others including Thadée Nathanson and Jean Grave. See Richard
D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). See also Joan Ungersma
Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de–Siècle Paris
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
74. For a detailed discussion of anarchism’s influence over contemporary
literary writing, see David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic
Politics of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press,
1992). Quotation from p. 117.
75. Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 202–3.
76. In addition to attacks on Wilde that were published in Punch in Britain,

his visit to the United States provoked a rash of attacks in Ambrose
Bierce’s weekly magazine, The Wasp, that appeared in the publication
for years after his departure from the country.
77. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 168.
78. Wilde, ‘Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock’, in Complete Works, vol. 6.
79. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, Dublin University Magazine,
90, July 1877, pp. 118–26, in Complete Works, vol. 6, pp. 1–11, p. 5.
80. Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr. Henry O’Neill, Artist’, Saunders’s News Letter, 29
December 1877, p. 3, in Complete Works, vol. 6, pp. 13–15, p. 15.
Wilde repeated his call for financial support for O’Neill in January 1879
in the World. See John Stokes and Mark Turner, ‘Mr Henry O’Neill,
Artist: Publishing History’, in Complete Works, vol. 6, p. 214.
81. For a detailed discussion of the evolution and modernisation of Irish
cultural nationalism during the nineteenth century, see Joep Leersseen’s
Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Liter-
ary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork
University Press, 1996).
82. The text was written to justify the Anglo-Norman occupation of
Ireland. Giraldus accompanied an invading force led by Henry II’s
youngest son, John, which landed in 1185, and reported that the Irish
were murderous, ignorant, treacherous and inclined towards bestial-
ity. See Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland,
trans. from the Latin by John J. O’Meara (London: Penguin, 1982).
83. James Anthony Froude, ‘A Fortnight in Kerry. Part 1’, in Short Studies
on Great Subjects (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872),
pp. 178–210, p. 201.
84. Oscar Wilde, ‘Grosvenor Gallery (First Notice)’, Irish Daily News, 5
May 1879, p. 5, in Complete Works, vol. 6, pp. 16–18, p. 18.
85. Philadelphia Press, 17 January 1882, quoted in Lewis and Smith, Oscar
Wilde Discovers America, p. 41.
86. Uncited, quoted in Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America,
p. 168.
87. ‘Oscar Wilde’s Lecture’, Denver Daily Times, 13 April 1882, recorded
in Richard Butler Glaenzer, Oscar Wilde in America (unpublished ms.
and notes), Wildeana, UCLA Clark Library, Folder 11.
88. Wilde, interview with the Philadelphia Enquirer (undated, 1882),
quoted in Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, p. 65.
89. Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, p. 64.
90. Ibid. p. 65.
91. Ibid. p. 65.
92. Oscar Wilde, ‘Impressions of America’ (privately published by Mildred
Sherrod Bissinger, Kentfield, CA, 1975), pp. 3–4.
93. ‘Editorial’, Denver Daily Times, 13 April 1882, recorded in Glaenzer,
Wildeana, UCLA Clark Library, Folder 11.
94. E. M. N. to the Philadelphia Times, undated (early 1882), quoted

in Glaenzer, Wildeana, Folder 6, p. 20. UCLA Clark Library, Wilde
G54M3 081.
95. From the Trenton State Gazette, September 1882, quoted in Glaenzer,
Wildeana, Folder 6, p. 20. UCLA Clark Library, Wilde G54M3 081.
96. Oscar Wilde, ‘Impressions of America’, pp. 15, 16.
97. Quoted in ‘Art and Aesthetics’, The Tribune (Denver), 13 April 1882,
p. 8, recorded in Glaenzer, Wildeana, UCLA Clark Library, Folder 11.
98. ‘The Theories of a Poet’, recorded in Glaenzer, Wildeana, Folder 6,
p. 20. UCLA Clark Library, Wilde G54M3 081.
Chapter 1
Anticolonial Wilde
In 1882, during his year-long lecture tour of the United States, Oscar
Wilde told audiences of the violence done by British imperialism to
Irish people and their culture. On several occasions he described how,
despite historical waves of conquest and colonisation and the ongo-
ing application of coercion, the imposition of ‘alien English thought’
was still being resisted in Ireland. Influenced by his mother’s ear-
lier writings, Wilde complained that this violence was accompanied
by a careful programme of historical erasure, aimed at cultivating a
popular consciousness ‘far removed from any love or knowledge of
those wrongs of the people’.1 Decades earlier, Speranza’s poem, ‘The
Stricken Land’, which was published in the Young Ireland move-
ment’s newspaper, The Nation, in 1847, declared that the British
rulers of Ireland were deliberately starving the country into submis-
sion. Her 1879 essay, ‘The American Irish’, repeated her claim that
Britain’s key political objective was the ‘extermination’ of the Irish.
During his US tour Wilde added to her complaint by protesting that
Britain was inhibiting the imagination of an entire people.
Wilde’s explicit self-identification as an Irish republican is more
subversive than the emotive Celticism that has been attributed to
him: throughout his career he identified with the rebellious, the
violently oppressed and the economically vulnerable, particularly
during the land insurgencies of the late 1870s and 1880s.2 As David
Lloyd has argued, mid nineteenth-century Irish nationalist intel-
lectuals responded to Britain’s dismissal of their political agency
by turning towards the cultural sphere. The Nation, which was the
newspaper of the Young Ireland movement and for which Wilde’s
mother wrote under the pseudonym, ‘Speranza’, was a key platform
for their political and cultural expression. Wilde’s own public criti-
cism of British rule should be understood against the context of this
literary and political tradition, which Lloyd refers to as a radical
type of ‘minor writing’ that was thoroughly resistant to imperialist
culture: ‘a minor writing in the positive sense of one whose very

“inauthenticity” registers the radical non-identity of the colonized
subject’.3 Wilde’s Irish background includes the political-cultural
context of his experience as an emerging Irish writer, along with his
consciousness of his mother’s very public and internationally rec-
ognised role. Wilde’s writing was informed by his mother’s work;
as he told a journalist in San Francisco, her writings ‘inspired him
with the desire to become a poet’, and he responded subversively to
the British occupation of Ireland.4
Matthew Arnold and the Aesthetics of Empire
Nineteenth-century Ireland was a colonial police state where coer-

cive powers were repeatedly deployed, modified and integrated into
everyday political and social experience.5 Following the unsuccessful
Fenian rebellion of 1867, the militarised Royal Irish Constabulary
(RIC) enforced scores of ‘peace preservation’ acts and other coercive
laws passed by successive British governments at Westminster. These
acts outlawed public gatherings, banned demonstrations, legislated
for mass internment, imposed press censorship, frequently suspended
Habeas Corpus and subjected entire districts to military authority. A
decade after the formation of the RIC, one of Wilde’s earliest poems,
‘Italia’, appeared in the former Fenian, John Boyle O’Reilly’s nation-
alist newspaper, the Boston-published Pilot, in 1877.6 A former mem-
ber of the Fenian Brotherhood, O’Reilly escaped from the British
penal colony in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1869 before plan-
ning the successful escape of another six political prisoners in 1876.
Named for the whaling ship on board which these men escaped from
Australia, the ‘Catalpa rescue’ became a major propaganda coup
for the Fenian movement.7 O’Reilly had already published and pro-
moted Speranza’s work in the Pilot and Wilde met him at the begin-
ning of his US tour.8 At several points during the tour Wilde revealed
his own republican beliefs. In lectures delivered in Saint Paul and San
Francisco and in interviews he emphasised the relationship between
Irish literary writing and anticolonialism. These talks drew on but
also criticised Matthew Arnold’s romanticised construction of Irish-
ness, while they also confronted the kind of anti-Irish prejudice being
circulated by John Ruskin.
Arnold’s extended essay, ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’, is
drawn from a series of lectures delivered at Oxford from 1865 to
1866 which were published in book form in 1867, the year of the
Anticolonial Wilde 31
Fenian uprising. Although it is cited as an influential precursor to the

Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth century, Amy E. Martin
stresses how state violence is central to Arnold’s vision of culture and
its function within British imperial modernity.9 Key to this is his reduc-
tive construction of ‘the Celt’, by which term he principally meant
the Irish. While depicting them as an enchanting people, Arnold also
cast the Irish as violent, unpredictable, irrational and ungovernable,
and as in urgent need of cultural, political and even scientific dis-
cipline. While the ‘spell of Celtic genius’ could provide a healthy
counter to the scientific bias of Anglo-Saxon rationalism, Arnold
also warned that the Irish were radically estranged from British cul-
ture and that their ‘incurable’ political difference posed a threat to
the Union. Dismissing the Tory, Lord Lyndhurst’s description of the
Irish as ‘aliens in blood from us’, he proposed, instead, their assimi-
lation into imperial culture. This would not be an incorporation of
equals into the British mainstream, however, as Arnold’s ultimate
goal was the containment of this disruptive, resistant and marginal
people and their ethereal culture. Colonial policy had already left Ire-
land in a state of open and hostile rebellion against British authority,
rendering the Union ‘violently disturbed’; and Victorian modernity,
Arnold believed, was characterised by this crisis. The remedy that he
proposed involved dispensing a cultural cure: the English could only
know the Irish – and maintain some necessary distance from them –
by studying their literature. This would ‘break [. . .] down barriers
between us’, strengthen the Union and, most importantly, limit the
‘political and social Celticisation’ being popularised by the militants
of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenian movement.10
Arnold’s plan for the full and proper co-option of the Irish into the
British Empire was based on his assumption of their inferiority, as their
emotional intensity and intransigence excluded them from the rational
currents of industrial and imperial modernity. Their ‘energetic national
life and self-consciousness’ was articulated through intense ‘bursts’ of
literary expression, particularly poetry, as political and poetic impulses
were fused in the Celtic imagination. Their spontaneity could be under-
stood via ‘constructive criticism’ – a rational, imperial model of cultural
observation that had a markedly surveillant dynamic: ‘[W]hat we want
is to know the Celt and his genius; not to exalt him or to abase him,
but to know him.’ Irish literature was the ‘great key’ with which the
anticolonial imagination might be unlocked, understood and finally
commanded and contained by the liberal imperialist. The knowledge
acquired from this study could then be used to subdue and integrate
this ‘violent stormy people’.11
The false objectivism, or ‘protocol of pretended suprapolitical’

neutrality that Edward Said has associated with Orientalism’s denial
of its own political motivations was key to Arnold’s imperial-critical
project.12 Unlike politicians, scholars with expertise on Irish litera-
ture could decode the Irish people in a ‘disinterested’ but ‘positive’
manner that would serve the political interests of the imperial state.
His model of colonial criticism could be applied far more gently than
the coercive policies favoured by Tories like Lord Lyndhurst but they
would still be used in the service of the same objective: knowing and
controlling the Irish imagination. The exclusion of the Irish from
the cultural and political life of the Union prevented the necessary
‘intermingling’ of Irish and British interests, but with this approach
Britain could tie Ireland more firmly to its imperial authority through
the medium of literary and cultural criticism.13
The native’s lack of analytical ability is a familiar trope in Victo-
rian colonial writing: ‘balance, measure, and patience are just what
the Celt has never had’, Arnold claimed. The ‘steadiness, patience,
[and] sanity’ with which ‘expression [can] be given to the finest per-
ceptions and emotions’ are also lacking in the Celt,14 whose life is
spent, as Arnold famously put it, ‘chafing against the despotism of
fact’ and ‘straining after mere emotion’. This explained why Irish
culture had ‘accomplished nothing’:
In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, cro-

siers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his delicacy
of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties of painting
and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he has no
patience for.15
Arnold’s dismissal of these ancient works contrasts with Wilde’s rec-

ognition of their importance as evidence against imperialist repre-
sentations of the Irish as savages.16 The Celt’s ‘want of sanity and
steadfastness’ is reflected in such inferior artwork, which Arnold
considered to be as frustrating and exhilarating as the Irish them-
selves. Although fascinating to observe, they were a defective people
incapable of success in the fields of science, art, music and literature.
While their poetry was invested with a uniquely ‘splendid’ genius, it
was badly hindered by its emotional intensity which rendered it infe-
rior to the literary outputs of other European nations, and Arnold
believed that literary works such as Agamemnon and The Divine
Comedy were products of a ‘steady, deep-searching survey’ of which
the Irish were incapable. These superior, self-reflexive examples had
Anticolonial Wilde 33
been made possible by ‘a firm conception of the facts of human life’

that the easily distracted Celt ‘has not patience for’: ‘in the contents
of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of the world as
the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then sentiment, infi-
nite sentiment, can bring you’.17
Contemporary politics is always discernible in Arnold’s essay,
which is really a proposal on how best to contain the ‘Titanism’ of
Irish republicanism. Irish poetry’s ‘power of style’ is so closely con-
nected to the Celt’s uncontrollable ‘passion of revolt’, that Arnold
cites it as providing the model for the rebellious Satan’s hatred of
authority in John Milton’s seventeenth-century epic poem of politi-
cal conflict, Paradise Lost. However, he explains that revolution is
a costly enterprise as Ireland’s permanent state of disobedience has
come with dire material consequences: not only are the Irish inferior
on the intellectual or ‘spiritual’ level, their impulsive, undisciplined,
emotional, irrational, ultimately feminine and anarchic ‘rebellion
against fact’ has also ‘lamed the Celt [. . .] in the world of business
and politics’. The responsibility for their cultural, political, eco-
nomic and intellectual inferiority lay squarely in the hands of the
Irish because ‘the sensuousness of the Celt proper has made Ireland’.
Passionate, undisciplined and ‘cut [. . .] off from command of the
world of fact’, the Irish were at once unreal and wholly fascinating –
perfect subjects for the colonial laboratory where Britain’s cultural,
political and military experiments could flourish. Arnold’s essay ulti-
mately reassures the reader that despite the Celt’s unpredictability,
with careful study his comprehensively inferior subjectivity could be
harnessed for imperial purposes.18
While drawing on Arnold’s arguments about the uniqueness of
Irish literary and cultural expression, and repeating some of his ideas
about the inherent sentimentalism of the Celt, the lectures that Wilde
delivered in the US on Irish literature and history had a distinctively
rebellious tone that contradicted the calls for political and cultural
containment made in ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’. These
talks challenged the normalisation of British violence and countered
Arnold’s representation of the Irish as both conquerable and com-
modifiable. Despite Arnold’s hope that the authenticity and spiritual
intensity of Celtic literature might provide Victorian modernity with
a reassuring image of its colonised others, his essay conceals the
political facts of occupation and coercion that are more explicitly
discussed and lauded in his 1869 book, Culture and Anarchy. It is
with this avoidance that Arnold concluded his essay, claiming that
Fenianism was the result of the political and cultural philistinism
of the Tories, and not the organised expression of the anticolonial

agency of Irish revolutionaries. With this claim he attempted to
decontextualise Irish cultural and political history by ignoring the
influence exercised by colonial violence over both.
John Ruskin and Empire
Four years before Wilde arrived in Oxford, John Ruskin delivered a

series of similarly reductive lectures at the university that were osten-
sibly focused on the subject of sculpture. In the second of these, enti-
tled ‘Idolatry’, the great cultural critic and ‘master’ aesthetic theorist
whom Wilde admired greatly before publicly rejecting his teachings,19
connected the development of culture directly to the violent practices
of imperial conquest. Discussing what he regarded as the brutality
of colonised peoples, he placed China, India and Ireland among the
most defective ‘nations of inferior race’. Ruskin believed that their
sculpture, architecture and other forms of design were significantly
inferior to modern British works. Having been produced under ‘con-
ditions of vile terror’, they were artistically sterile and ‘destitute of
thought’. Sharing Arnold’s views on the inferiority of the Irish, he
explained how the world’s ‘greatest races’ had conquered its ‘baser’
cultures before ‘rapidly naturalizing and beautifying them’. While
Arnold wanted to absorb the Celt, Ruskin believed that colonisa-
tion had an aestheticising dynamic made possible by the processes
of cultural exclusion: by ‘admitting less of monster or brute’, the
British Empire would filter and improve the cultures of those under
its dominion. These cultures could be modified and upgraded by the
‘happy and holy imagination’ of the occupier, as Ruskin’s model of
assimilation did not involve the study of subject cultures advocated
by Arnold so much as it demanded their adaptation and obedience.
While Arnold’s Celt could be observed from a distance, Ruskin’s
defeated cultures could be forcibly fitted into more metropolitan
moulds. Once modernised and civilised in this way, they could con-
tribute to the prosperity of the British Empire and its superior condi-
tions of national existence.20
In justifying the aesthetic subjugation that accompanied the polit-
ical and economic violence of empire, Ruskin also conveyed his anxi-
ety about contemporary demands for democratic reform in Britain.
The colonised shared their worst characteristics and ‘earthliest vices’
with the English poor, whose experience and history were equally
alien to the ‘industrious, chaste and honest race’ from which Britain’s
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
Photo by J. W. McLellan] [Highbury.
SNOW-LEOPARD, OR OUNCE.
This is a striking portrait of a very beautiful
animal. Note the long bushy tail, thick coat, and
large eyes.
Leopards are essentially tree-living and nocturnal animals. Sleeping

in trees or caves by day, they are seldom disturbed. They do an
incredible amount of mischief among cattle, calves, sheep, and dogs,
being especially fond of killing and eating the latter. They seize their
prey by the throat, and cling with their claws until they succeed in
breaking the spine or in strangling the victim. The largest leopards
are popularly called Panthers. In India they sometimes become man-
eaters, and are always very dangerous. They have a habit of feeding
on putrid flesh; this makes wounds inflicted by their teeth or claws
liable to blood-poisoning. Nothing in the way of prey comes amiss to
them, from a cow in the pasture to a fowl up at roost. "In every
country," says Sir Samuel Baker, "the natives are unanimous in
saying that the leopard is more dangerous than the lion or tiger.
Wherever I have been in Africa, the natives have declared that they
had no fear of a lion, provided they were not hunting, for it would
not attack unprovoked, but that a leopard was never to be trusted. I
remember when a native boy, accompanied by his grown-up brother,
was busily employed with others in firing the reeds on the opposite
bank of a small stream. Being thirsty and hot, the boy stooped down
to drink, when he was immediately seized by a leopard. His brother,
with admirable aim, hurled his spear at the leopard while the boy
was in his jaws. The point separated the vertebræ of the neck, and
the leopard fell stone-dead. The boy was carried to my hut, but
there was no chance of recovery. The fangs had torn open the chest
and injured the lungs. These were exposed to view through the
cavity of the ribs. He died the same night."
In the great mountain-ranges of Central Asia the beautiful Snow-

leopard is found. It is a large creature, with thick, woolly coat, and a
long tail like a fur boa. The colour is white, clouded with beautiful
grey, like that of an Angora cat. The edges of the cloudings and
spots are marked with black or darker grey. The eyes are very large,
bluish grey or smoke-coloured. It lives on the wild sheep, ibex, and
other mountain animals. In captivity it is far the tamest and gentlest
of the large carnivora, not excepting the puma. Unlike the latter, it is
a sleepy, quiet animal, like a domestic cat. The specimen shown here
belonged to a lady in India, who kept it for some time as a pet. It
was then brought to the Zoological Gardens, where it was more
amiable and friendly than most cats. The writer has entered its cage
with the keeper, stroked it, and patted its head, without in the least
ruffling its good-temper. The heat of the lion-house did not suit it,
and it died of consumption.
Photo by Ottomar Anschütz]
[Berlin.
CHEETA.
A cheeta is a hunting-leopard; this
one is a particularly large specimen.
The cheetas are dealt with later on in
this chapter.
Photo by G.W. Wilson & Co., Ltd.]

[Aberdeen.
JAGUAR.
The largest and strongest of the Cats of the
New World. A South American species.
THE NEW WORLD CATS.
The cats, great and small, of the New World resemble those of the
Old, though not quite so closely as the caribou, wapiti deer, and
moose of the northern forests resemble the reindeer, red deer, and
elk of Europe. They are like, but with a difference. The Jaguar and
the Ocelot are respectively larger and far more beautiful than their
counterparts, the leopard and serval cats. But the Puma, the one
medium-sized feline animal which is unspotted, is something unique.
The jaguar and puma are found very far south in South America;
and though the jaguar is really a forest animal, it seems to have
wandered out on to the Pampas of Argentina, perhaps attracted by
the immense numbers of cattle, sheep, and horses on these plains.
Photo by Scholastic Photo. Co.,

Parson's Green.
PUMA.
A puma in the act of lying
down, like a domestic cat.
The Jaguar.
The Jaguar is as savage as it is formidable, but does not often attack

men. Its headquarters are the immense forests running from Central
America to Southern Brazil; and as all great forests are little
inhabited, the jaguar is seldom encountered by white men. By the
banks of the great rivers it is semi-aquatic; it swims and climbs with
equal ease, and will attack animals on board boats anchored in the
rivers. As there are few animals of great size in these forests, its
great strength is not often seen exercised, as is that of the lion; but
it is the personification of concentrated force, and its appearance is
well worth studying from that point of view. The spots are larger and
squarer than in the leopard, the head ponderous, the forearms and
feet one mass of muscle, knotted under the velvet skin. On the
Amazons it draws its food alike from the highest tree-tops and the
river-bed; in the former it catches monkeys in the branches, fish in
the shallows of the rivers, and scoops out turtles' eggs from the
sandbanks. Humboldt, who visited these regions when the white
population was scarce, declared that 4,000 jaguars were killed
annually, and 2,000 skins exported from Buenos Ayres alone. It was
clearly common on the Pampas in his day, and made as great havoc
among the cattle and horses as it does to-day.
The Puma.
Photo by Ottomar Anschütz] [Berlin.

FEMALE PUMA.
This shows a puma alert and vigilant, with ears
pricked forward.
The Puma is a far more interesting creature. It is found from the

mountains in Montana, next the Canadian boundary, to the south of
Patagonia. Yankee stories of its ferocity may have some foundation;
but the writer believes there is no recorded instance of the northern
puma attacking man unprovoked, though in the few places where it
now survives it kills cattle-calves and colts. It is relentlessly hunted
with dogs, treed, and shot. As to the puma of the southern plains
and central forests, the natives, whether Indians or Gauchos, agree
with the belief, steadily handed down from the days of the first
Spanish conquest, that the puma is the one wild cat which is
naturally friendly to man. The old Spaniards called it amigo del
Cristiano (the Christian's friend); and Mr. Hudson, in "The Naturalist
in La Plata," gives much evidence of this most curious and
interesting tendency: "It is notorious that where the puma is the
only large beast of prey it is perfectly safe for a small child to go out
and sleep on the plain.... The puma is always at heart a kitten,
taking unmeasured delight in its frolics; and when, as often
happens, one lives alone in the desert, it will amuse itself for hours
fighting mock battles or playing hide-and-seek with imaginary
companions, or lying in wait and putting all its wonderful strategy in
practice to capture a passing butterfly." From Azara downwards
these stories have been told too often not to be largely true; and in
old natural histories, whose writers believed the puma was a terrible
man-eater, they also appear as "wonderful escapes." One tells how a
man put his poncho, or cloak, over his back when crawling up to get
a shot at some duck, and felt something heavy on the end of it. He
crept from under it, and there was a puma sitting on it, which did
not offer to hurt him.

OCELOT.
Note the elongated spots, and their
arrangement in chains.
As space forbids further quotation from Mr. Hudson's experiences,

which should be read, the writer will only add one anecdote which
was told him by Mr. Everard im Thurn, C.B., formerly an official in
British Guiana. He was going up one of the big rivers in his steam-
launch, and gave a passage to an elderly and respectable Cornish
miner, who wanted to go up to a gold-mine. The visitor had his
meals on the boat, but at night went ashore with the men and slung
his hammock between two trees, leaving the cabin to his host. One
morning two of the Indian crew brought the miner's hammock on
board with a good deal of laughing and talking. Their master asked
what the joke was, whereupon, pointing to the trees whence they
had unslung the hammock, one said, "Tiger sleep with old man last
night." They were quite in earnest, and pointed out a hollow and
marks on the leaves, which showed that a puma had been lying just
under the man's hammock. When asked if he had noticed anything
in the night, he said, "Only the frogs croaking wakened me up." The
croaking of the frogs was probably the hoarse purring of the friendly
puma enjoying his proximity to a sleeping man. Mr. Hudson quotes a
case in which four pumas played round and leapt over a person
camping out on the Pampas. He watched them for some time, and
then went to sleep! Many of those brought to this country come with
their tempers ruined by ill-treatment and hardship; but a large
proportion are as tame as cats. Captain Marshall had one at Marlow
which used to follow him on a chain and watch the boats full of
pleasure-seekers at the lock.
The puma is always a beautiful creature,—the fur cinnamon-

coloured, tinged with gold; the belly and chest white; the tail long,
full, and round. Though friendly to man, it is a desperate cattle-killer,
and particularly fond of horse-flesh, so much so that it has been
suggested that the indigenous wild horses of America were
destroyed by the puma.
There are two other cats of the Pampas—the Grass-cat, not unlike
our wild cat in appearance and habits, and the Wood-cat, or
Geoffroy's Cat. It is a tabby, and a most elegant creature, of which
there is a specimen, at the time of writing, in the London Zoo.
The Ocelot.
In the forest region is also found the most beautiful of the medium-
sized cats. This is the Ocelot, which corresponds somewhat to the
servals, but is not the least like a lynx, as the servals are. It is
entirely a tree-cat, and lives on birds and monkeys. The following
detailed description of its coloration appeared in "Life at the Zoo":—
"Its coat, with the exception perhaps of that of the clouded leopard
of Sumatra, marks the highest development of ornament among
four-footed animals. The Argus pheasant alone seems to offer a
parallel to the beauties of the ocelot's fur, especially in the
development of the wonderful ocelli, which, though never reaching
in the beast the perfect cup-and-ball ornament seen on the wings of
the bird, can be traced in all the early stages of spots and wavy
lines, so far as the irregular shell-shaped rim and dot on the feet,
sides, and back, just as in the subsidiary ornament of the Argus
pheasant's feathers. Most of the ground-tint of the fur is smoky-
pearl colour, on which the spots develop from mere dots on the legs
and speckles on the feet and toes to large egg-shaped ocelli on the
flanks. There are also two beautiful pearl-coloured spots on the back
of each ear, like those which form the common ornaments of the
wings of many moths."
OCELOT FROM CENTRAL AMERICA.
The ocelot can be tamed and almost
domesticated if taken young, and is occasionally
kept as a pet by the forest Indians.
The nose is pink; the eye large, convex, and translucent.
A tame ocelot described by Wilson, the American naturalist, was

most playful and affectionate, but when fed with flesh was less
tractable. It jumped on to the back of a horse in the stable, and
tried to curl up on its hindquarters. The horse threw the ocelot off
and kicked it, curing it of any disposition to ride. On seeing a horse,
the ocelot always ran off to its kennel afterwards. When sent to
England, it caught hold of and threw down a child of four years old,
whom it rolled about with its paws without hurting it.
OTHER WILD CATS.
A handsome leopard-like animal is the Clouded Leopard. It is the size

of a small common leopard, but far gentler in disposition. Its fur is
not spotted, but marked with clouded patches, outlined in grey and
olive-brown. Its skin is among the most beautiful of the Cats. It is
found in the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Formosa, and along
the foot of the Himalaya from Nepal to Assam. Writing of two which
he kept, Sir Stamford Raffles said: "No kitten could be more good-
tempered. They were always courting intercourse with persons
passing by, and in the expression of their countenance showed the
greatest delight when noticed, throwing themselves on their backs,
and delighting in being tickled and rubbed. On board ship there was
a small dog, which used to play around the cage with the animal. It
was amusing to watch the tenderness and playfulness with which
the latter came in contact with its smaller-sized companion." Both
specimens were procured from the banks of the Bencoolin River, in
Sumatra. They are generally found near villages, and are not
dreaded by the natives, except in so far that they destroy their
poultry.
Photo by A. S. Rudland & Sons.

CLOUDED LEOPARD.
It shares with the ocelot the first
place among the highly ornamented
cats.

FISHING-CAT.
This wild cat haunts the sides of
rivers, and is an expert at catching
fish.
MARBLED CAT.
Another beautifully marked cat.
The tail is spotted and very
long, the marbled markings
being on the body only.

[Berlin.
GOLDEN CAT.
Sumatra is the home of this very
beautifully coloured cat. The general
tint is that of gold-stone. Sometimes
the belly is pure white.
The number of smaller leopard-cats and tiger-cats is very great.

They fall, roughly, into three groups: those which are yellow and
spotted, those which are grey and spotted, and those which are grey
and striped, or "whole-coloured." There is no wholly grey wild cat,
but several sandy-coloured species. All live on birds and small
mammals, and probably most share the tame cat's liking for fish.
Among the grey-and-spotted cats are the Mottled Cat of the Eastern
Himalaya and Straits Settlements and islands; the Tibetian Tiger-cat;
the Fishing-cat of India and Ceylon, which is large enough to kill
lambs, but lives much on fish and large marsh-snails; Geoffroy's Cat,
an American species; the Leopard-cat of Java and Japan, which
seems to have grey fur in Japan and a fulvous leopard-like skin in
India, where it is also called the Tiger-cat; and the smallest of all wild
cats, the little Rusty-spotted Cat of India. This has rusty spots on a
grey ground. "I had a kitten brought to me," says Dr. Jerdon of the
species, "when very young. It became quite tame, and was the
delight and admiration of all who saw it. When it was about eight
months old, I introduced the fawn of a gazelle into the room where
it was. The little creature flew at it the moment it saw it, seized it by
the nape of the neck, and was with difficulty taken off." Of the
whole-coloured wild cats—which include the Bay Cat, the American
Pampas-cat, Pallas' Cat of Tibet and India—the most beautiful is the
Golden Cat of Sumatra, one of which is now in the Zoological
Gardens. It has a coat the colour of gold-stone. The nose is pink, the
eyes large and topaz-coloured, the cheeks striped with white, and
the under-parts and lower part of the tail pure white.
PAMPAS-CAT.
Note the likeness of the thick
tail and barred legs to our
English wild cat. "Inexpressibly
savage in disposition"
(Hudson).
EYRA CAT.
The lowest and longest of the
cats, shaped more like a civet;
it is readily tamed, and makes a
charming pet.
Four kinds of wild cats are known in South Africa, of which the
largest is the Serval, a short-tailed, spotted animal, with rather more
woolly fur than the leopard's. The length is about 4 feet 2 inches, of
which the tail is only 12 inches. It is found from Algeria to the Cape;
but its favourite haunts, like those of all the wild cats of hot
countries, are in the reeds by rivers. It kills hares, rats, birds, and
small mammals generally.
BAY CAT.
This is an example of the
completely tawny small cats.
The Black-footed Wild Cat is another African species. It is a beautiful

spotted-and-lined tabby, the size of a small domestic cat, and as
likely as any other to be the origin of our tabby variety, if tame cats
came to Europe from Africa. At present it is only found south in the
Kalahari Desert and Bechuanaland.
The Kaffir Cat is the common wild cat of the Cape Colony, and a very
interesting animal. It is a whole-coloured tawny, upstanding animal,
with all the indifference to man and generally independent character
of the domestic tom-cat. It is, however, much stronger than the
tame cats, with which it interbreeds freely. In the Colony it is often
difficult to keep male tame cats, for the wild Kaffir cats come down
and fight them in the breeding-season. The Egyptian cat is really the
same animal, slightly modified by climate. A very distinct species is
the Jungle-cat, ranging from India, through Baluchistan, Syria, and
East Africa, and called in Hindustani the Chaus. The European striped
wild cat extends to the Himalaya, where the range of the lion-
coloured, yellow-eyed chaus begins. The chaus has a few black bars
inside the legs, which vary in different regions. The Indian chaus has
only one distinctly marked; the Kaffir cat has four or five. The
Egyptian Fettered Cat has been said to be the origin of the domestic
and sacred cats of Egypt. A male chaus is most formidable when
"cornered." General Hamilton chased one, which had prowled into
the cantonments on the look-out for fowls, into a fence. "After a
long time I spied the cat squatting in a hedge," he writes, "and
called for the dogs. When they came, I knelt down and began
clapping my hands and cheering them on. The cat suddenly made a
clean spring at my face. I had just time to catch it as one would a
cricket-ball, and, giving its ribs a strong squeeze, threw it to the
dogs; but not before it had made its teeth meet in my arm just
above the wrist. For some weeks I had to carry my arm in a sling,
and I shall carry the marks of the bite to my grave."

KAFFIR CAT.
The common wild cat of South
Africa. It will interbreed with
domestic cats.

AFRICAN CHAUS, OR JUNGLE-CAT.
The chaus is the Indian and African
equivalent of our wild cat. It is
equally strong and savage.
The chaus, as will be seen from the above, wanders boldly down
into the outskirts of large towns, cantonments, and bungalows, on
the look-out for chickens and pigeons. Its favourite plan is to lie up
at dawn in some piece of thick cover near to where the poultry
wander out to scratch, feed, and bask. It then pounces on the
nearest unhappy hen and rushes off with it into cover. An
acquaintance of the writer once had a number of fine Indian game
fowl, of which he was not a little proud. He noticed that one was
missing every morning for three days, and, not being able to
discover the robber, shut them up in a hen-house. Next morning he
heard a great commotion outside, and one of his bearers came
running in to say that a leopard was in the hen-house. As this was
only built of bamboo or some such light material, it did not seem
probable that a leopard would stay there. Getting his rifle, he went
out into the compound, and cautiously approached the hen-house,
in which the fowls were still making loud protests and cries of alarm.
The door was shut; but some creature—certainly not a leopard—
might have squeezed in through the small entrance used by the
hens. He opened the door, and saw at the back of the hen-house a
chaus sitting, with all its fur on end, looking almost as large as a
small leopard. On the floor was one dead fowl. The impudent jungle-
cat rushed for the door, but had the coolness to seize the hen as it
passed, and with this in its mouth rushed past the owner of the
hens, his servants and retainers, and reached a piece of thick scrub
near with its prize.
As the chaus is common both in India and Africa, a comparison of its

habits in both continents is somewhat interesting. Jerdon, the Indian
naturalist, writes: "It is the common wild cat from the Himalaya to
Cape Comorin, and from the level of the sea to 7,000 or 8,000 feet
elevation. It frequents alike the jungles and the open country, and is
very partial to long reeds, and grass, sugarcane-fields, and corn-
fields. It does much damage to all game, especially to hares and
partridges. Quite recently I shot a pea-fowl at the edge of a
sugarcane-field. One of these cats sprang out, seized the pea-fowl,
and after a short struggle—for the bird was not quite dead—carried
it off before my astonished eyes, and, in spite of my running up,
made his escape with his booty. It must have been stalking these
very birds, so closely did its spring follow my shot. It is said to breed
twice a year, and to have three or four young at a birth. I have very
often had the young brought to me, but always failed in rearing
them; and they always showed a savage and untamable disposition.
I have seen numbers of cats about villages in various parts of the
country that must have been hybrids between this cat and the tame
ones."
The late Sir Oliver St. John was more fortunate with his jungle-cat
kittens. He obtained three in Persia. These he reared till they were
three months old, by which time they became so tame that they
would climb on to his knees at breakfast-time, and behave like
ordinary kittens. One was killed by a greyhound, and another by a
scorpion—a curious fate for a kitten to meet. The survivor then
became morose and ill-tempered, but grew to be a large and strong
animal. "Two English bull-terriers of mine, which would make short
work of the largest domestic cat, could do nothing against my wild
cat," says the same writer. "In their almost daily battles the dogs
always got the worst of it."
Photo by L. Medland, F.Z.S.]

[North Finchley.
SERVAL.
This is a spotted cat, with long ears,
but no tufts on them, as in the true
lynxes.
In Africa the chaus haunts the thick cover bordering the rivers.
There it catches not only water-fowl, but also fish. According to
Messrs. Nicolls and Eglington, "its spoor may constantly be seen
imprinted on the mud surrounding such pools in the periodical
watercourses as are constantly being dried up, and in which fish may
probably be imprisoned without chance of escape." The chaus has
for neighbour in Africa the beautiful Serval, a larger wild cat. This
species is reddish in colour, spotted on the body, and striped on the
legs. The ears are long, but not tufted, like those of the lynx. The
serval is more common in North and Central Africa than in the
South. But it is also found south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Messrs.
Nicolls and Eglington say of it: "Northward through South Central
Africa it is fairly common. It frequents the thick bush in the vicinity
of rivers. The karosses, or mantles, made from its skins are only
worn by the chiefs and very high dignitaries amongst the native
tribes, and are in consequence eagerly sought after, on which
account the species runs a risk of rapid extermination. Its usual prey
consists of the young of the smaller antelopes, francolins, and wild
guinea-fowls, to the latter of which it is a most destructive enemy in
the breeding-season. When obtained young, the serval can be
tamed with little trouble; but it is difficult to rear, and always shows
a singular and almost unaccountable aversion to black men. Its
otherwise even temper is always aroused at the sight of a native.
When in anger, it is by no means a despicable antagonist, and very
few dogs would like to engage in a combat with one single-handed."
Photo by Ottomar
Anschütz]
[Berlin.
MALE SERVAL.
The serval is a link
between the leopards and
tiger-cats, quite large
enough to kill the young
of the smaller antelopes.
The Common Wild Cat.
The Wild Cat was once fairly common all over England. A curious
story, obviously exaggerated, shows that traditions of its ferocity
were common at a very early date. The tale is told of the church of
Barnborough, in Yorkshire, between Doncaster and Barnsley. It is
said that a man and a wild cat met in a wood near and began to
fight; that the cat drove the man out of the wood as far as the
church, where he took refuge in the porch; and that both the man
and cat were so injured that they died. According to Dr. Pearce, the
event was formerly commemorated by a rude painting in the church.
Photo by Ottomar
Anschütz]
[Berlin.
SERVAL CLIMBING.
Note the active, cat-like
method of climbing.
Mr. Charles St. John had an experience with a Scotch wild cat very
like that which General Douglas Hamilton tells of the jungle-cat. He
heard many stories of their attacking and wounding men when
trapped or when their escape was cut off, and before long found out
that these were true. "I was fishing in a river in Sutherland," he
wrote, "and in passing from one pool to another had to climb over
some rocky ground. In doing so, I sank almost up to my knees in
some rotten heather and moss, almost upon a wild cat which was
concealed under it. I was quite as much startled as the cat itself
could be, when I saw the wild-looking beast rush so unexpectedly
from between my feet, with every hair on her body on end, making
her look twice as large as she really was. I had three small Skye
terriers with me, which immediately gave chase, and pursued her till
she took refuge in a corner of the rocks, where, perched in a kind of
recess out of reach of her enemies, she stood with her hair bristled
out, spitting and growling like a common cat. Having no weapon
with me, I laid down my rod, cut a good-sized stick, and proceeded
to dislodge her. As soon as I was within six or seven feet of the
place, she sprang straight at my face over the dogs' heads. Had I
not struck her in mid-air as she leaped at me, I should probably
have received a severe wound. As it was, she fell with her back half
broken among the dogs, who with my assistance dispatched her. I
never saw an animal fight so desperately, or one which was so
difficult to kill. If a tame cat has nine lives, a wild cat must have a
dozen. Sometimes one of these animals will take up its residence at
no great distance from a house, and, entering the hen-roosts and
outbuildings, will carry off fowls in the most audacious manner, or
even lambs. Like other vermin, the wild cat haunts the shores of
lakes and rivers, and it is therefore easy to know where to set a trap
for them. Having caught and killed one of the colony, the rest of
them are sure to be taken if the body of their slain relative is left in
the same place not far from their usual hunting-ground and
surrounded with traps, as every wild cat passing that way will to a
certainty come to it."
The wild cat ranges from the far north of Scotland, across Europe
and Northern Asia, to the northern slopes of the Himalaya. It has
always been known as one of the fiercest and wildest of the cats,
large or small. The continual ill-temper of these creatures is
remarkable. In the experience of the keepers of menageries there is
no other so intractably savage. One presented to the Zoological
Gardens by Lord Lilford some eight years ago still snarls and spits at
any one who comes near it, even the keeper.
By permission of Percy Leigh Pemberton, Esq.

EUROPEAN WILD CAT.
The British representative of this species is
rapidly becoming extinct. The specimen whose
portrait is given here was caught in Argyllshire.
The food of the wild cat is grouse, mountain-hares, rabbits, small

birds, and probably fish caught in the shallow waters when chance
offers. It is wholly nocturnal; consequently no one ever sees it
hunting for prey. Though it has long been confined to the north and
north-west of Scotland, it is by no means on the verge of extinction.
The deer-forests are saving it to some extent, as they did the golden
eagle. Grouse and hares are rather in the way when deer are being
stalked; consequently the wild cat and the eagle are not trapped or
shot. The limits of its present fastnesses were recently fixed by
careful Scotch naturalists at the line of the Caledonian Canal. Mr.
Harvie Brown, in 1880, said that it only survived in Scotland north of
a line running from Oban to the junction of the three counties of
Perth, Forfar, and Aberdeen, and thence through Banffshire to
Inverness. But the conclusion of a writer in the Edinburgh Review of
July, 1898, in a very interesting article on the survival of British
mammals, has been happily contradicted. He believed that it only
survived in the deer-forests of Inverness and Sutherlandshire. The
wild cats shown in the illustrations of these pages were caught a
year later as far south as Argyllshire. The father and two kittens
were all secured, practically unhurt, and purchased by Mr. Percy
Leigh Pemberton for his collection of British mammals at Ashford, in
Kent. This gentleman has had great success in preserving his wild
cats. They, as well as others—martens, polecats, and other small
carnivora—are fed on fresh wild rabbits killed in a warren near;
consequently they are in splendid condition. The old "tom" wild cat,
snarling with characteristic ill-humour, was well supported by the
wild and savage little kittens, which exhibited all the family temper.
Shortly before the capture of these wild cats another family were
trapped in Aberdeenshire and brought to the Zoological Gardens.
Four kittens, beautiful little savages, with bright green eyes, and
uninjured, were safely taken to Regent's Park. But the quarters given
them were very small and cold, and they all died. Two other full-
grown wild cats brought there a few years earlier were so dreadfully
injured by the abominable steel traps in which they were caught that
they both died of blood-poisoning.
By permission of Percy Leigh Pemberton, Esq.

SCOTCH WILD CATS.
These wild cats, the property of Mr. P. Leigh
Pemberton, though regularly fed and well
treated, show their natural bad-temper in their
faces.
The real wild cats differ in their markings on the body, some being
more clearly striped, while others are only brindled. But they are all
alike in the squareness and thickness of head and body, and in the
short tail, ringed with black, and growing larger at the tip, which
ends off like a shaving-brush.
It may well be asked, Which of the many species of wild cats

mentioned above is the ancestor of our domestic cats? Probably
different species in different countries. The African Kaffir cat, the
Indian leopard-cat, the rusty-spotted cat of India, and the European
wild cat all breed with tame cats. It is therefore probable that the
spotted, striped, and brindled varieties of tame cats are descended
from wild species which had those markings. The so-called red tame
cats are doubtless descended from the tiger-coloured wild cats. But
it is a curious fact that, though the spotted grey-tabby wild varieties
are the least common, that colour is most frequent in the tame
species.
THE LYNXES.
In the Lynxes we seem to have a less specially cat-like form. They are
short-tailed, high in the leg, and broad-faced. Less active than the
leopards and tiger-cats, and able to live either in very hot or very
cold countries, they are found from the Persian deserts to the far
north of Siberia and Canada.
The Caracal is a southern, hot-country lynx. It has a longer tail than

the others, but the same tufted ears. It seems a link between the
lynxes and the jungle-cats. It is found in India, Palestine, Persia, and
Mesopotamia. In India it was trained, like the cheeta, to catch birds,
gazelles, and hares. The Common Lynx is probably the same animal,
whether found in Norway, Russia, the Carpathians, Turkestan, China,
or Tibet. The Canadian Lynx is also very probably the same, with local
differences of colour. The Northern Lynx is the largest feline animal
left in Europe, and kills sheep and goats equally with hares and
squirrels. The beautiful fur, of pale cinnamon and light grey, is much
admired. In some southern districts of America we have the Red
Lynx, or so-called "wild cat," which is distinct from the lynx of
Canada. The Mediterranean or Spanish Lynx seems likewise entitled to
rank as a distinct species.
Of the lynxes the Caracals are perhaps the most interesting, from
their capacity for domestication. They are found in Africa in the open
desert country, whereas the Serval is found in the thick bush. In
Africa it is believed to be the most savage and untamable of the
Cats. That is probably because the Negro and the Kaffir never
possessed the art of training animals, from the elephant downwards.
In India the caracal's natural prey are the fawns of deer and
antelope, pea-fowl, hares, and floricans. The caracal is the quickest
with its feet of any of the Cats. One of its best-known feats is to
spring up and catch birds passing over on the wing at a height of six
or eight feet from the ground. A writer, in the Naturalist's Library,
notes that, besides being tamed to catch deer, pea-fowl, and cranes,
the caracal was used in "pigeon matches." Two caracals were backed
one against the other to kill pigeons. The birds were fed on the
ground, and the caracals suddenly let loose among them, to strike
down as many as each could before the birds escaped. Each would
sometimes strike down with its fore paws ten or a dozen pigeons.
"Caracal" means in Turkish "Black Ear," in allusion to the colour of
the animal's organ of hearing.

LYNX.
This animal is a uniformly coloured specie
common to India and Africa.
The Common Lynx is a thick-set animal, high in the leg, with a square
head and very strong paws and forearms. It is found across the
whole northern region of Europe and Asia. Although never known in
Britain in historic times, it is still occasionally seen in parts of the
Alps and in the Carpathians; it is also common in the Caucasus. It is
mainly a forest animal, and very largely nocturnal; therefore it is
seldom seen, and not often hunted. If any enemy approaches, the
lynx lies perfectly still on some branch or rock, and generally
succeeds in avoiding notice. The lynx is extremely active; it can leap
great distances, and makes its attack usually in that way. When
travelling, it trots or gallops in a very dog-like fashion. Where sheep
graze at large on mountains, as in the Balkans and in Greece, the
lynx is a great enemy of the flocks. In Norway, where the animal is
now very rare, there is a tradition that it is more mischievous than
the wolf, and a high price is set on its head.
EUROPEAN LYNX.
The largest of the cat tribe left in
Europe.
In Siberia and North Russia most of the lynx-skins taken are sold to
the Chinese. The lynx-skins brought to London are mainly those of
the Canadian species. The fur is dyed, and used for the busbies of
the officers in our hussar regiments. These skins vary much in
colour, and in length and quality of fur. The price varies
correspondingly. The Canadian lynx lives mainly on the wood-hares
and on the wood-grouse of the North American forests. The flesh of
the lynx is said to be good and tender.
Brehm says of the Siberian lynx: "It is a forest animal in the strictest
sense of the word. But in Siberia it occurs only singly, and is rarely
captured. Its true home is in the thickest parts in the interior of the
woods, and these it probably never leaves except when scarcity of
food or the calls of love tempt it to wander to the outskirts. Both
immigrants and natives hold the hunting of the lynx in high esteem.
This proud cat's activity, caution and agility, and powers of defence
arouse the enthusiasm of every sportsman, and both skin and flesh
are valued, the latter not only by the Mongolian tribes, but also by
the Russian hunters. The lynx is seldom captured in fall-traps; he
often renders them useless by walking along the beam and stepping
on the lever, and he usually leaps over the spring-traps in his path.
So only the rifle and dogs are left."
By permission of Mr. S. B. Gundy] [Toronto.
CANADIAN LYNX.
Great numbers of these are trapped every year
for the sake of their fur.
The Red Lynx is a small American variety, the coat of which turns
tawny in summer, when it much resembles a large cat. It is called in
some parts of the United States the Mountain-cat. This lynx is 30
inches long in the body, with a tail 6 inches long. It is found on the
eastern or Atlantic side of the continent, and by no means shuns the
neighbourhood of settlements.
Photo by Ottomar Anschütz, Berlin.

WOLF FROM CENTRAL EUROPE.
The last persons recorded as killed
by these animals were an artist and
his wife travelling in Hungary.

[Berlin.
CHEETAS.
Cheetas can be distinguished at a
glance from ordinary leopards by the
solid black spots on the back instead
of the "rosettes."
THE CHEETA.
THE NON-RETRACTILE-CLAWED CAT.
The Cheeta, or Hunting-leopard, is the only example of this particular

group, though there was an extinct form, whose remains are found
in the Siwalik Hills, in the north of India. It is a very widely dispersed
animal, found in Persia, Turkestan, and the countries east of the
Caspian, and in India so far as the lower part of the centre of the
peninsula. It is also common in Africa, where until recent years it
was found in Cape Colony and Natal. Now it is banished to the
Kalahari Desert, the Northern Transvaal, and Bechuanaland.
Photo by York & Son]
[Notting Hill.
A CHEETA
HOODED.
The cheeta is not unhooded until
fairly near his quarry, when he is
given a sight of the game, and a
splendid race ensues.
The cheeta is more dog-like than any other cat. It stands high on
the leg, and has a short, rounded head. Its fur is short and rather
woolly, its feet rounded, and its claws, instead of slipping back into
sheaths like a lion's, are only partly retractile.
Mr. Lockwood Kipling gives the following account of the cheeta and
its keepers: "The only point where real skill comes into play in
dealing with the hunting-leopard is in catching the adult animal
when it has already learnt the swift, bounding onset, its one
accomplishment. The young cheeta is not worth catching, for it has
not yet learnt its trade, nor can it be taught in captivity.... There are
certain trees where these great dog-cats (for they have some oddly
canine characteristics) come to play and whet their claws. The
hunters find such a tree, and arrange nooses of deer-sinew round it,
and wait the event. The animal comes and is caught by the leg, and
it is at this point that the trouble begins. It is no small achievement
for two or three naked, ill-fed men to secure so fierce a capture and
carry it home tied on a cart. Then his training begins. He is tied in all
directions, principally from a thick rope round his loins, while a hood
fitted over his head effectually blinds him. He is fastened on a strong
cot-bedstead, and the keepers and their wives and families reduce
him to submission by starving him and keeping him awake. His head
is made to face the village street, and for an hour at a time, several
times a day, his keepers make pretended rushes at him, and wave
clothes, staves, and other articles in his face. He is talked to
continually, and the women's tongues are believed to be the most
effective of things to keep him awake. No created being could
withstand the effects of hunger, want of sleep, and feminine
scolding; and the poor cheeta becomes piteously, abjectly tame. He
is taken out for a walk occasionally—if a slow crawl between four
attendants, all holding hard, can be called a walk—and his
promenades are always through the crowded streets and bazaars,
where the keepers' friends are to be found; but the people are
rather pleased than otherwise to see the raja's cheetas amongst
them." Later, when the creature is tamed, "the cheeta's bedstead is
like that of the keeper, and leopard and man are often curled up
under the same blanket! When his bedfellow is restless, the keeper
lazily stretches out an arm from his end of the cot and dangles a
tassel over the animal's head, which seems to soothe him. In the
early morning I have seen a cheeta sitting up on his couch, a red
blanket half covering him, and his tasselled red hood awry, looking
exactly like an elderly gentleman in a nightcap, as he yawns with the
irresolute air of one who is in doubt whether to rise or to turn in for
another nap."
This charming and accurate description shows the cheeta at home.

In the field he is quite another creature. He is driven as near as
possible to the game, and then unhooded and given a sight of them.
Sir Samuel Baker thus describes a hunt in which a cheeta was used:
"The chase began after the right-hand buck, which had a start of
about 110 yards. It was a magnificent sight to see the extraordinary
speed of pursuer and pursued. The buck flew over the level surface,
followed by the cheeta, which was laying out at full stretch, with its
long, thick tail brandishing in the air. They had run 200 yards, when
the keeper gave the word, and away we went as fast as our horses
could carry us. The horses could go over this clear ground, where no
danger of a fall seemed possible. I never saw anything to equal the
speed of the buck and the cheeta; we were literally nowhere,
although we were going as hard as horseflesh could carry us; but we
had a glorious view. The cheeta was gaining in the course, while the
buck was exerting every muscle for life or death in its last race.
Presently, after a course of about a quarter of a mile, the buck
doubled like a hare, and the cheeta lost ground as it shot ahead,
instead of turning quickly, being only about thirty yards in rear of the
buck. Recovering itself, it turned on extra steam, and the race
appeared to recommence at increased speed. The cheeta was
determined to win, and at this moment the buck made another
double in the hope of shaking off its terrible pursuer; but this time
the cheeta ran cunning, and was aware of the former game. It
turned as sharply as the buck. Gathering itself together for a final
effort, it shot forward like an arrow, picked up the distance which
remained between them, and in a cloud of dust we could for one
moment distinguish two forms. The next instant the buck was on its
back, and the cheeta's fangs were fixed like an iron vice in its throat.
The course run was about 600 yards, and it was worth a special
voyage to India to see that hunt."

A CHEETA ON THE LOOK-OUT.
Cheetas are common to Africa and India. By the
native princes of the latter country they are
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Series Editor’s Preface vi

Introduction: Wilde and Politics 1

‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined con-

Since embarking on this project I have enjoyed the friendship of

Sondeep Kandola, Ross Dawson, Gerry Smyth, Joe Moran, Alice

Of this cult Oscar was admitted as the head [. . .] he preferred Radical

Oscar Wilde, Truth complained, was both radical and oppositional.

an opponent of the standards that had been established and carefully

Framing Aestheticism as a dangerously progressive movement that

What distinguishes Truth’s representation of Wilde as a danger-

the metropolis, equipped with a dangerous arsenal of ‘Knives, Nux

like these examples, validated imperial power while also justifying

Coercion and Culture

Oscar Wilde criticised imperialist violence in Ireland, where, he com-

race’ that Britain ‘essayed in vain to assimilate or subdue’. He also

Socialism and Radical Aestheticism

Wilde’s anticolonial beliefs were accompanied by a thoughtful and

aggrandisement of the bourgeoisie writ large and on a global scale,

Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of

Wilde’s declaration that ‘Criticism [. . .] makes us cosmopolitan’32

Radical Politics and Wilde’s Literary Practice

Radical political thought was central to Wilde’s creative conscious-

and identity.39 The political atmosphere in late Victorian Britain was

As Kevin Whelan has shown, the coding of unspeakable colonial

a range of works, including Vera, book reviews published in the Pall

Wilde and the Anarchists

of individualists’ who stood for ‘an affiliation in revolt between the

also a friend of Wilde’s, indicated in his 1892 review of The Picture

Art and Empire

As an Irish republican Wilde felt the impact of imperialism very

Of Mr. O’Neill’s practical influence we can give no better example than

Regarding the Victorian fixation with neoclassical decoration as artless

‘Civilization’, ‘Barbarism’ and Art for the Workers

In 1882, when a reporter from the Philadelphia Press asked,

two terms – civilization and barbarism; and I am on the side of

During his visit to Chicago, he described alienation as the funda-

Beauty was to be found in the products of skilled labour, and if

problem, Wilde explained; it was authority, with the prescriptive

Nature, culture, art and consciousness, he believed, were all suffering

Following a lecture in Philadelphia, one of Wilde’s admirers wrote

Halfway through Wilde’s US tour another reporter praised ‘the great

1. Max Nordau, Degeneration (originally published in 1893 as Entartung

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