This article has been published in Notes & Queries, by Oxford University Press. Marland, R. & Maier-Sigrist, W. (in press) Oscar Wilde’s submission of Poems and The Happy Prince and Other Tales to Chatto & Windus, Notes & Queries, doi:10.1093/notesj/gjaf024
The publisher Andrew Chatto. Image: Wikimedia.
Oscar Wilde, during the course of a twenty-five-year literary career (1875–1900), collaborated with many publishers. What has not been recognised by scholars is that he submitted two collections—one of poetry and another of short stories—to the publisher Chatto & Windus. The timing and nature of the submissions shed light on the pre-publication history of Poems and The Happy Prince and Other Tales, revealing how those works developed and the audiences for which Wilde intended them.
In May 1881, Wilde was anxious to capitalise on his increasing fame as a representative of the aesthetic movement, and wrote to the publisher David Bogue about a volume of poems he wished to bring to press ‘immediately’.Oscar Wilde to David Bogue, [May 1881], in Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (eds.), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London, 2000), 110. The letter is dated in another hand. Bogue and Wilde reached an agreement on 17 May; in June, Bogue published Poems at Wilde’s expense.Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (eds.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 1: Poems and Poems in Prose (Oxford, 2000), xxvii; William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS. Wilde W6721Z M533, Memorandum of agreement made between Wilde and David Bogue. But Bogue was not Wilde’s first choice of publisher. Wilde had previously submitted his volume to Chatto & Windus. A two-page letter from Wilde ‘to Mr. [Andrew] Chatto, asking him to publish a volume of poems’, was offered for sale in 1916 by Robson & Co. of Coventry Street, London.Oscar Wilde to [Andrew] Chatto in E. H. Courville (ed.), Autograph Prices Current (London, 1916), I, 178 (view source). The undated letter was addressed from ‘Keats’ House, Tite St., Chelsea’, where Wilde resided between summer 1880 and autumn 1881.Matthew Sturgis, Oscar: A Life (London, 2018), 164, 191. The letter is not included in Wilde’s collected correspondence and appears to be lost. Chatto & Windus’s reply is preserved in a book of outgoing letters now held at the University of Reading and is dated 13 April 1881.The date on the letter to Wilde is illegible, but the letters are preserved in chronological order and the letters either side of the letter to Wilde are dated to 13 April 1881. The date is significant because it shows that Wilde submitted his collection before the 23 April premiere of Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert’s Patience; or, Bunthorne’s Bride, the most successful theatrical satire of the aesthetes. His submission may have been motivated by the imminent production, which Wilde was anticipating with some relish,Oscar Wilde to George Grossmith, [April 1882], in Complete Letters, 109. or by two earlier aesthetic satires that lampooned him personally: Where’s the Cat? (opened 20 November 1880) and The Colonel (opened 2 February 1881).Devon Cox (ed.), Aesthetic Movement Satire: A Dramatic Anthology (London, 2024), 15, 18. Lambert Streyke, the aesthete character in The Colonel, has a volume of poems; Patience’s Bunthorne and Grosvenor are also poets. Chatto & Windus declined to publish Wilde’s Poems, stating that they already had many new books in preparation and there were few ‘purchasers to be found for new books of poetry unless by one or two popular favourites’.Chatto & Windus to Oscar Wilde, [March–October 1881], University of Reading, CW A/14 p. 80. Extract reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House Ltd and Penguin Random House Archive and Library. Wilde’s mother also submitted a book of poetry to Chatto & Windus, which the firm rejected: Chatto & Windus to Lady Wilde, 16 September 1884, University of Reading, CW A/18 p. 949. Chatto would complain in an 1887 interview: ‘Poets are the pests of publishers, and it is a golden rule that few poets pay for cost of paper alone’.‘The Mysteries of Publishing’, The Pall Mall Gazette (London, UK), 9 March 1887, 1–2.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (c. 1865). Image: NPG, London.
One of the few poets that made money for Chatto & Windus was Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose association with the house’s predecessor, John Camden Hotten, had begun in 1866 with the publication of his Poems and Ballads. Hotten’s unscrupulous business practices drove Swinburne away but, after the publisher’s death in 1873, his associate Andrew Chatto took over the firm and was so keen to represent Swinburne that he sent the poet large sums of money and performed additional tasks—procuring books and press clippings, checking references and quotations—that occupied substantial time.Beverly Schneller, ‘Chatto & Windus’, in Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880 (Detroit and London, 1991), 110–17. Swinburne was one of Wilde’s heroes, and Wilde had emulated the elder poet in both subject and style in many of his poems,Arnold T. Schwab, ‘Wilde and Swinburne: part 1’, The Wildean, xxix (2006), 12–27; Fong and Beckson, e.g., 219, 226, 231, 266. so much so that when Bogue eventually brought out Poems the reviewer for Punch dismissed it as ‘Swinburne and water’.‘Swinburne and Water’, Punch, lxxxi (1881), 26. Wilde appears to have wished to follow Swinburne even more closely by being published under the same imprint and courting the same audience. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, the editors of Wilde’s poetry for the OET Complete Works, note that Wilde’s early poems appeared in minor or provincial periodicals, and suggest that Wilde is likely to have overestimated his literary reputation.Fong and Beckson, xiii–xiv. This explains why he was sufficiently confident to submit his volume to Chatto & Windus, and why the house rejected it.
The Chatto & Windus letter books reveal that Wilde, undiscouraged by the first rejection, submitted one other volume to the house. Although Wilde’s submission letter is lost, Chatto & Windus’s reply of 27 April 1887 allows conclusions to be drawn about the nature of the submission and about Wilde’s writing in the mid- to late 1880s.
Dear Sir
We shall be pleased to undertake the publication of your three Fairy Stories in a very tastefully presented little volume to be published at 2s/6d upon condition that you will supply at your own cost for drawing and engraving three illustrations by Walter Crane, and we will pay a royalty of 3d upon every copy sold[.]
Yours very faithfully
Chatto & WindusChatto & Windus to Oscar Wilde, 27 April 1887, University of Reading, CW A/20 p. 982. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House Ltd. and Penguin Random House Archive and Library.
The cover of the first edition of Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), published by David Nutt.
The letter would appear to refer to an early iteration of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which was published by David Nutt in May 1888 with illustrations by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood.Stuart Mason (ed.), The Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London, 1914), 331–2. Ian Small, the editor of Wilde’s short fiction, observed in 2017 that it is ‘still not possible to be certain when all the stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales were composed’, although there are some clues.Ian Small (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 8: The Short Fiction (Oxford, 2017), xxv. Harry Marillier, in his unpublished memoirs, recalls that Wilde wrote ‘The Happy Prince’ during a visit to Cambridge University in late November or early December 1885.Jonathan Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the love of the impossible’, The Wildean, xxviii (2006), 2–9. Wilde was in Cambridge to see the Eumenides of Aeschylus, which was staged between 30 November and 5 December 1885. Wilde told his friend the publisher George Macmillan in January 1889 that the story had ‘languished in the manuscript chest’ of Macmillan’s English Illustrated Magazine ‘for eighteen months’ before he got it back.Oscar Wilde to George Macmillan, [January 1889], in Complete Letters, 385. If this account is accurate, Wilde must, as Small notes, have written the story by the end of 1886 for it to have been kept by Macmillan for eighteen months before David Nutt finally published it alongside ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, ‘The Selfish Giant’, ‘The Devoted Friend’, and ‘The Remarkable Rocket’.Small, xx–xxi. Wilde’s account also demonstrates that he originally envisaged ‘The Happy Prince’ as a story that could stand alone. The earliest evidence for the composition of ‘The Selfish Giant’ is a 1 July 1886 letter from Laura Troubridge to her fiancé Adrian Hope, in which she refers to Wilde’s request for her to illustrate the story.Laura Troubridge to Adrian Hope, 1 July 1886, in Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster, Letters of Engagement, 1884–1888: The Love Letters of Adrian Hope and Laura Troubridge (London, 2002), 247. In May 1885 Troubridge accepted Wilde’s request that she illustrate his poem ‘Les Jardin des Tuileries’ (Lancaster, 121–7). The poem shares an image with ‘The Selfish Giant’—a tree bursting into blossom when climbed by children—and may suggest that Wilde was developing story and poem at about the same time. The composition dates of the remaining stories are unknown.
The Chatto & Windus letter reveals that Wilde first proposed a book that would contain not five stories, as in the published collection, but three. These three stories are likely to have been ‘The Happy Prince’, ‘The Selfish Giant’, and ‘The Remarkable Rocket’—the three stories in the published collection that are illustrated by Walter Crane.Crane states in his memoirs that Wilde ‘got me to do some illustrations to a book of stories he published under the title of The Happy Prince and Other Stories [sic]’ (Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (London, 1907), 195). The letter therefore suggests that Wilde wrote these three stories first. Merlin Holland, contemplating the order in which the stories may have been written, has noted that ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’ have a strong Christian moral but that in the other stories Wilde appears to have abandoned this idea in favour of a darker tone that is closer to that of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).‘The Happy Prince’, Wilde Stories, 8 July 2016, rte.ie accessed 8 April 2024. As the Chatto & Windus letter suggests that ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’ were written before the darkest stories in the collection (‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and ‘The Devoted Friend’), it provides support for Holland’s hypothesised development of Wilde’s style.
The apparent composition order of the stories may also speak to Wilde’s shifting intentions for the collection. Scholars have debated whether the stories were meant for children or adults,Jarlath Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT, 2007), 9–10; Small, xxxii. but if the submission to Chatto & Windus included only the stories most appealing to children (particularly ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’) Wilde is likely to have begun by thinking of it as primarily for children, later arriving at the opinion that it was ‘not for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty’.Oscar Wilde to Amelie Rives Chanler, [January 1889], in Complete Letters, 388. His second collection of fairy tales, A House of Pomegranates (1891), which is more clearly aimed at an adult readership,Small, xxvi; Oscar Wilde to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, [early December 1891], in Complete Letters, 503. can be seen as the next stage of this development.
One of Walter Crane’s three illustrations for The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
Jacomb Hood’s head-piece for the Contents page of The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
The Triumph of Spring (1888) by Jacomb Hood. Click to enlarge.
The Chatto & Windus letter also suggests that by April 1887 Wilde intended to commission or had already commissioned Crane to illustrate three stories, that once he had written the other two stories in the collection he was unable or unwilling to commission Crane to provide further illustrations, and that Jacomb Hood was commissioned to provide head- and tail-pieces for all five stories at some time after April 1887—and presumably some months after, accounting for the time it would have taken Wilde to write the last two stories.Oscar Wilde to Jacomb Hood, [early 1888], in Complete Letters, 345. This letter, in which Wilde describes what he would like Hood to draw in the headpiece for ‘The Remarkable Rocket’, was presumably dated by the editors of Wilde’s letters to early 1888 based on the publication date of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, but it could have been written earlier. (The reviewer for The Pall Mall Gazette would note that the head-piece for the contents page was a sketch of the leading group of children in Hood’s painting The Triumph of Spring, exhibited earlier that year at the Grosvenor Gallery, so Hood may have produced his illustrations—which are more numerous but less detailed than Crane’s—under time pressure.)‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 4 June 1888, 3. Furthermore, if ‘The Happy Prince’ really had been held by The English Illustrated Magazine for as long as Wilde claimed, he must have written it not by the end of 1886 but by the end of 1885. This would have allowed eighteen months to elapse before the submission to Chatto & Windus. As Wilde had a tendency to exaggerate, little weight should be placed on his account in the absence of other evidence, though a composition date of late 1885 would be consistent with Marillier’s account.
That Chatto & Windus refer to Wilde’s stories as ‘fairy stories’ and offer to publish them in a ‘very tastefully presented little volume’ suggests that they are recapitulating the phrasing of Wilde’s lost submission letter. Wilde referred to the stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales as ‘fairy stories’.Oscar Wilde to John Ruskin, [?July 1888], in Complete Letters, 355. He also referred to them as ‘short stories’ (Oscar Wilde to W. E. Gladstone, [June 1888], in Complete Letters, 350) and ‘studies in prose’ (Oscar Wilde to Harry Melvill, [?June 1888], in Complete Letters, 352). He also told his American publisher, Roberts Bros of Boston, that the English volume would be ‘very daintily got up’,Oscar Wilde to [?Thomas Niles], rec. 26 March 1888, Columbia University, Roberts Brothers papers, MS#1071, quoted in Sturgis, 806 n2. and repeatedly described the published collection as his ‘little book’.Complete Letters, 350, 352, 354, 355; Oscar Wilde to Mortimer Menpes, [?June 1888], in Jissen Women’s University, Hisao Honma Collection, Scrapbook 15.171. In 1889, he would propose that William Blackwood publish another ‘dainty little volume’, containing his story ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’.Oscar Wilde to William Blackwood, [10 July 1889], in Complete Letters, 407. In that instance, as with his 174-line poem The Sphinx (1894), he expressed concern that the work as written might be too slight to fill a volume and offered to expand it.Oscar Wilde to Charles Ricketts, [?June 1893], in Complete Letters, 566. Guy and Small also see Wilde’s adding to the original, magazine version of The Picture of Dorian Gray for its book publication as commercially motivated (Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession (Oxford, 2000), 87, 59). He may, therefore, have added two stories to the three he submitted to Chatto & Windus to make the collection appear more substantial to other publishers. Although, as Small observes, the majority of Wilde’s short stories ‘were probably first written with only periodical publication in mind’,Small, xiii. Wilde now seems likely to have written the final two stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales—probably ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ and ‘The Devoted Friend’—expressly for inclusion in his volume of stories.
The cover of the first edition of Wilde’s Poems (1881), published by David Bogue.
Wilde must have declined Chatto & Windus’s offer. His only reason can be that he found their terms unattractive. Firstly, the royalty was low: in 1887 Chatto & Windus paid royalties from 2d to 1s 6d or more per copy sold.‘The Mysteries of Publishing’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 9 March 1887, 1–2. Secondly, Wilde may not have been convinced that retailing the volume at 2s 6d (the price of a cheap novel)Guy and Small, 61. would allow for it to be presented as ‘tastefully’ as he would have liked. Throughout his career, he took special care over the design of his books.Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 4–5. When he submitted his fairy stories to Chatto & Windus, his only previous book publication had been Poems. As he funded the publication himself, Poems represents Wilde’s own wishes as to how his books should be presented. It was printed on Dutch hand-made paper and its white parchment covers were stamped in gilt with a design of prunus blossom.Mason, 282. Priced at 10s 6d, it was aimed squarely at the connoisseur market.Guy and Small, 87. Wilde appears to have hoped that the book would herald his status as a literary figure (he offered signed copies to many artistic, political, and social celebrities). Josephine Guy and Ian Small have posited that Wilde’s collections of short fiction were instead motivated by a desire to earn money.Guy and Small, 53, 55. But Wilde’s rejection of Chatto & Windus’s offer suggests that he was not willing, at this time, for his stories to be targeted at the popular market before connoisseurs had been served with a quality first edition.
After Chatto & Windus, Wilde submitted the stories to Macmillan: the only record of this submission is a reader’s report dated 16 February 1888 that notes that ‘[t]wo or three of the stories are very pretty’, but the collection was unlikely ‘to rush into marked popularity’.Guy and Small, 69. The report confirms that the submission to Macmillan included more than three stories, and possibly all five of the stories in the published collection. Wilde therefore wrote the final two stories between April 1887 and February 1888. This period coincides with the beginning of his editorship of The Woman’s World, when his salary allowed him the freedom to work on writing projects that interested him more than journalism.Wilde commenced his editorship with the November 1887 number; he had begun soliciting contributions and devising the scheme of the magazine in May (Complete Letters, 297–301).
Wilde then approached David Nutt, perhaps because the house was known for its ‘choice and beautiful books for the bibliophile and scholar’Guy and Small, 54. or because Alfred Trübner Nutt (who had taken over his father’s firm in 1878) was interested in folklore and Irish literature.Crys Armbrust, ‘David Nutt’, in Anderson and Rose, 228–9. Wilde must have received an offer more attractive than that of Chatto & Windus. He informed Roberts Bros in March 1888 that there would be ‘a first edition probably at 10/– limited in number and a popular edition to follow’.Oscar Wilde to [?Thomas Niles], rec. 26 March 1888, Columbia University, Roberts Brothers papers, MS#1071, quoted in Sturgis, 806 n2. In May, Nutt issued The Happy Prince and Other Tales in a 21s edition (75 numbered copies on handmade paper, signed by the author and publisher) and, at the same time, in a 5s edition (1,000 copies with Japanese vellum boards).Mason, 331–2. A second edition, still with vellum boards, appeared in 1889 priced at 3s 6d.Mason, 336.
As no other letters to Wilde are preserved in the Chatto & Windus letter books, Wilde presumably made no further approaches to the publisher. This is hardly surprising given that he went on to publish many of his books for the same elite market he had sought for Poems. Even John Lane’s edition of The Sphinx—250 copies at £2 2s, plus twenty-five on large paper and priced at 5 guineas—was insufficiently exclusive for Wilde: he joked that he had hoped Lane would ‘print only three copies: one for myself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven’.Sturgis, 504. Wilde’s negotiations with Leonard Smithers over the publication of his last poetic work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), were fraught, with much debate over print quality and pricing. Eventually a compromise was reached. Wilde’s desire for ‘cachet’ was met by two pricey special editions, while the popular market was served by several editions priced at 2s 6d, with a royalty of 3d per copy—the same price and royalty that Chatto & Windus had offered for Wilde’s collection of fairy stories.Oscar Wilde to Leonard Smithers, [?10 December 1897], in Complete Letters, 1003–6, 1005; Mason, 407–8, 420. The sales during Wilde’s lifetime of The Ballad of Reading Gaol far exceeded those of any of his other books, including David Nutt’s moderately successful edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales.Guy and Small, 192–7; Small, xxxiii.