Poster for ‘Magdalen’s Wilde’.
An exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s arrival at Oxford University opened on 16 October – Wilde’s 170th birthday – at Magdalen College. ‘Magdalen’s Wilde’ brings together a wealth of Wildeana in the evocative setting of the college’s Old Library.
Several cases, crammed with items that represent the entirety of Wilde’s brief life, are arranged around a table on which stands Melanie Le Brocquy’s bronze bust of the wit and dramatist in his early 1890s prime.
Highlights of the exhibition include a little-known portrait of Wilde’s mother as a young woman, Wilde’s death certificate, and a plaster cast of Wilde’s left hand made by a fortune teller. Photographs of Wilde often show him towering over his contemporaries, but seeing the cast of his hand close up gives a better idea of why so many of those who knew him were impressed by his physical massiveness.
The four years that Wilde passed at Magdalen are well represented. There is a letter to his college friend William ‘Bouncer’ Ward that he illustrated with a smiling teapot.Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R. (eds., 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Fourth Estate, 14–15 There is the pane of glass taken from Ward’s former rooms on which Wilde etched with a diamond ring a drawing of ‘Little Mr. Bouncer’.Vernier, P. (2005) Oscar’s drawing of ‘Little Mr Bouncer’, The Wildean, 26, 2–10, view source And there is the gold friendship ring that Wilde presented to Ward in 1876, stolen from the college in 2002 and returned thirteen years later.‘Oscar Wilde's stolen friendship ring returned to Magdalen College’, BBC News, 4 Dec. 2019, view source
Wilde etched a cartoon of his friend William Ward on a pane of glass in Ward’s rooms.
It is a shame that Ward’s unpublished letters, about which Sophie Duncan spoke in her recent talk before the Oscar Wilde Society, could not be included. And I would have liked to see more photographs of Wilde as a student: there are several held in Oxford’s Bodleian library, some of which, I believe, have never been exhibited or published.Bodleian, MS. Walpole d. 18 And perhaps more could have been made of Wilde’s early poetry – it was at Magdalen that Wilde began his career as a writer, and mostly with poems. The sonnet that he would publish as ‘On Hearing the Dies Irae Sung in the Sistine Chapel’ he had earlier submitted with a title that indicated he had heard the hymn not in Rome but in Magdalen Chapel,Fong, B. & Beckson, K. (eds), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose (Oxford, 2000), No. 35. evidence that Wilde was inspired by his time at the college but also that he was willing from an early age to adjust the truth in search of the more beautiful lie.
‘Magdalen’s Wilde’ is curated by Dr Sophie Duncan and Ms Anne Chesher. It runs until 16 April 2025 and is well worth a visit.