Forthcoming — Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews

Coming soon — Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews.

I am excited to announce that I have been working on a collection of Oscar Wilde’s interviews.

Oscar Wilde was an interviewer’s dream because he rarely failed to provide good copy. He might announce that he had cut his hair in imitation of the Emperor Nero, glibly describe the Atlantic Ocean as disappointing, drop the name of a famous friend (or five), or fire off a carefully crafted epigram.

As impactful as they were at the time, Wilde’s interviews were always more likely to be forgotten than even the most minor of his own works. Newspapers are, by their nature, ephemeral objects. As the saying goes, today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.

Fortunately, some newspapers survived and were deposited in libraries. Over the years, many of Wilde’s interviews have been rediscovered. In 1979, E. H. Mikhail reprinted 30 (the number depends on how one defines an interview) in Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections. In 2010 Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst collected 48 of the more interesting American examples in Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews, and compiled a bibliography of 107 known interviews.

In the intervening decade, more interviews have come to light and been cited in new biographies. And thanks to the accelerating digitisation of newspaper archives, it is now possible to search through many newspapers that were previously accessible only to those who were willing and able to visit countless local libraries and spool through miles of microfilm. The pandemic has made it more difficult to consult newspaper archives in person, but over the past year many libraries have improved digital access.

I found my first “new” Oscar Wilde interview in 2012, and more followed. At first I would scribble the references in the back of my much-thumbed copy of Hofer and Scharnhorst’s book. After a while it became necessary to compile a rapidly expanding spreadsheet (I will take any excuse to make a spreadsheet). Other researchers, chief amongst whom has been the indefatigable John Cooper, kindly shared the interviews they had found. The total number of known interviews with Wilde is now approaching 200.

Many interviewers asked Wilde the same questions. What is aestheticism? Who are your favourite actors and actresses? Why do you love the lily and the sunflower? Wilde’s answers are necessarily repetitive. But these interviews feature many interesting insights that Wildean scholars have never been privy to before. For instance, Wilde’s visit to [what was then called] an asylum in Nebraska, his thoughts about the American “race question” shared in Scotland with a reporter from Alabama, and even what seems to be a genuine interview given on the eve of his release from prison.

I am currently waiting for certain libraries to re-open so that I can obtain copies of the final remaining interviews that are known to exist. I hope to publish Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews later this year.