5 comments about Wilde Album: Public and Private Images of Oscar Wilde.

1. Mr. Oscar Wilde, the toast of all London for his successful plays revealing the immoral soft underbelly of the British aristocracy, received a slanderous calling card at his club from the Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Al was assisting Mr. Wilde in his investigations of the more corrupt and immoral and hypocritical aspects of those filthily wealthy imperialists.
   
   At Al's urgent request, Mr. Wilde filed suit for slander against Al's own father, serving as noted in this book in Mr. Wilde's own words, as the dice in a cruel and callous oedipal gamble between father and son. Mr. Wilde lost; the petit bourgeois father won and before the Crown brought charges against Mr. WIlde under a new immoral activities act, the father had Mr. Wilde's home ramsacked and auctioned, all of Mr. Wilde's treasured and expensive belongings, and those of his wife and two small sons, in order ostensibly to cover his own legal costs in defending himself against Mr. Wilde's charge of slander. The auction, staged as it was, brought only a very small percentage of its actual worth, yet destroyed all that the family owned.
   
   Mr. Wilde's grandson, in gathering this present album, mentions the fact of this destruction of his family heritage by alluding to the registry of six family albums which were sold and discarded beyond any recovery. Merlin mentions this fact cold, without further comment, but the skilled reader may read between the lines the deep and painful import of this action to Merlin personally. Thus this present effort grows immeasurably poignant and important.
   
   Though others praise the photographs here, it is the comprehensive and extensive and brilliant essay by Merlin here which makes this book as well. This book grows thereby essential for any reader of the English language, and for any reader of Irish resistance to English colonialist power, in particular that fatal power which was so coldly brought to bear against its most subtle and charming and astute and eloquent and Irish critic, greater even than GB Shaw, more subtle even than the great Mr. James Joyce.
   
   Never mind please my ramblings nor the effusiveness of other reviews which here appear upon this page. My one qualm regarding this book is that it is not BIG enough!
   
   Please see as well the excellent, if painfully abridged, production of An Ideal Husband in the BBC collection The Oscar Wilde Collection (The Importance of Being Earnest / The Picture of Dorian Gray / An Ideal Husband / Lady Windermere's Fan) if only to see younger and slimmer and in his prime he who would later play for them Sherlock Holmes. The Importance . . .in this collection is also tolerable if abridged and awkward; Lady Windermere's Fan begins slow with the mournful Lord, but grows inexorably to a heart wrenching finale without sentimentality.
   
   Read all of Mr. Wilde's published work (lacking of course the bulk his writings for Women's World, and lacking his original French text of Salome) in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics). The original French text of Salome you may find at Salome: Drame en un acte (Collected Works of Oscar Wilde) in order to perform your own translation into English which will undoubtedly replace Al's. It is also available in a Spanish translation at Salome - Bajo El Monte and a fine selection of his short stories at El Fantasma de Canterville y Otros Cuentos (Serie Roja Alfaguara) (Serie Roja Alfaguara).
   
   Please read this book and know the extent of the destructive power of an offended British aristocracy, a destiny, as Merlin here indicates, as inexorable as any ancient Greek drama. Merlin's assessments of his grandfather's oeuvre are also excellent and right on, although too brief! Find further critical work by himself as well as by his father Vyvyan Holland, whose photographs as a small boy are so telling here.



2. What a Gem! If you are a fan of Oscar Wilde then this book is indispensable.
   My only gripe is that it is too small. A larger format would have shown off the many Napoleon Sarony photos (the largest collection in one publication) If the publisher and Mr Holland ever read this....I'd gladly shell out for a large format edition. Other than that, I'm quite too utterly ecstatic about the book.......WELL DONE!



3. This volume is more touching and insightful than most
   works about Oscar Wilde tend to be. It is filled with
   the narrative commentary of Wilde's grandson,
   Merlin Holland, who gives honest opinions as well
   as factual detail about the various stages of
   Oscar Wilde's life.
   The treasures, however, are the multitudes of
   photographs, memorabilia, and paintings that are
   included -- as well as drawings, satirical cartoons
   (mostly lampooning Oscar, both at Oxford and later
   in life), and wonderful notations under the items.
   The most interesting photographs, for me, are
   the ones which were done by Napoleon Sarony. They
   seem to touch a more thoughtful, poetic, dreamy
   Oscar, rather than the posing bon vivant or the
   deliberately provocative aesthete/decadent.
   The volume does well to have one of those photos
   on the cover, as well as having a different photo
   beside the title page. The grotesque photos,
   that almost make one cringe, though, are of
   Oscar in a skirted Greek national costume
   (with boots!) from April 1877; Oscar in a
   checkered suit and bowler hat at Oxford in
   1878, and Oscar at age 2 in a blue velvet
   dress, a daguerreotype which has been color
   tinted. The weirdest photos are of the
   "blond tiger/panther" Lord Alfred Douglas,
   would-be "friend" and lover of Oscar. His
   eyes look vacant, haunted, cold in most of
   the photos , except for the one on page 147,
   in which he looks touchingly sensitive and
   lonely...the caption below the picture says
   it all: "Douglas aged 23. 'Your slim gilt
   soul walks between passion and poetry. I know
   Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you
   in Greek days,' Wilde wrote to him around that
   time."
   Truly a remarkable album of memories.



4. This is a sparkling gem for all fans of Oscar Wilde. It is a brilliant retelling of Oscar's life through pictures. Filled with everything from photographs of Wilde the aesthete to hilarious caricatures of him from Punch magazine to some of Wilde's own drawings and notes, this fabulous little book has it all. Many of the items I have not seen in any other volume. It goes wonderfully well coupled with Richard Ellman's gorgeous biography or it stands tall on its own. All and all, a marvelous book that I cannot possibly recommend highly enough.



5. Cutting to the chase, the real prize in this marvelous little book are the photographs. For once, we get something other than the usual lot that appear in books with a Wilde connection. Mr. Holland has achieved through his pictures (most seem to be from the family collection) something which most texts don't do..... a feel for the whole of Wilde the man. There is a human dimension to this slim volume that one does not find elsewhere. There are pictures of ancestors, parents, editorial cartoons, advertisements, all in relatively strict chronological order, from the child in a dress (as was customary for little boys in the period) to the student, the developing fop, the lampooned character, the ludicrous pairing with Bosie... who looks perpetually bored and thoroughly uninteresting... to the depressing denouement, death bed and funerary monuments.

   The text reveals nothing new but it is elegantly written. Both of Wilde's children were devoted to the memory of their father. It is evident that the grandson was raised in like manner.

   Of Wilde's two boys, Cyril died in WWI without issue. Mr. Holland is the grandson of the other, Vyvyan.

   If you are interested in the period, England and Ireland in late 19th century, Wilde, gay history, etc. buy this book. It is worth infinitely more than it costs.

1 comments about Daniel Defoe: His Life.

1. Paula Backscheider is widely regarded as Defoe's leading biographer on the strenghth of this book written eighteen years ago. It is both scholarly and contradictiory. Was Defoe the victim of religious persecution triumphing over adversity ot was he a man of poor character constantly on the run from the law? What we know now was that Defoe was illegitimate and brought up harshly on the margin of things.He was constantly on the run from the law. A homosexual, at a time when this was against the law, he sought the favours and protection of powerful men. He had eight children by three simultaneous wives and ended his life in poverty a refuge from the law. There is little of this in Backscheider's book. But what is there is scholarly and entertaining.

1 comments about Admiral Sir Henry Morgan: King Of The Buccaneers.

1. Welshman Henry Morgan began as a naval officer, but made his reputation as a fierce pirate - a reputation challenged in the first libel lawsuit brought into protect a book about him published in 1684 claiming he was a terror of the high seas. In fact, he'd been commissioned to help the British navy fighting enemies of the crown and proved his worth as a military strategist on the high seas, and Welsh history expert Terry Breverton provides this full account of Morgan's myths and realities in his lively biography ADMIRAL SIR HENRY MORGAN: KING OF THE BUCCANEERS. Chapters review his leadership, his heroic struggles, and his ability to plan attacks which would ensure British supremacy abroad. An unusual, lively read.

4 comments about The Singing Line: Tracking the Australian Adventures of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors.

1. This was truly an amazing book. The author involves you in the very foundations that build up the Australian telegraph system - you become part of the history as she takes you through the life of her great-great-grandmother and grandfather. It reveals, once again, how many people gave up so much so that we can have a secure foundation in our society. Well worth owning.



2. I bought this book because I am interested in the early explorers and travellers in to the Australian hinterland and because I was about to travel to some of the same areas the author had visited. I found the bits about Todd, the man who came to Australia to look at the stars and ended up connecting Australia to the outside world by a telegraph wire, quite interesting. Although I thought perhaps Alice Thomson was a bit confused as to whether the story was about Alice Todd (the great grandmother for whom she was named) or Charles Todd who laid the line. And I could see where she was coming from in trying to relate the story of her own travels with her husband in the same area and the Todds adventures. But again I'm not sure she pulled it off exactly. By exaggerating her own hardships, she underplayed the genuine difficulties the Todds endured and both stories lost credibility - for me, anyway. But what I really disliked about this book was its horrid comments about Australians and the way they live, in these so-called remote areas. She makes it sound as though one hour out of Adelaide she was alone in the world with people almost unrecognisable as human beings. Spare us the "don't come the raw prawn", "strewth cobber" cliches (which are always only used by the English, anyway). And I hope she feels ashamed at the way she treated people who went out of their way to help her, for a few cheap laughs. In great frustration (it was so nearly a good book) I eventually threw it on the campfire, unfinished, at Lake Eyre, halfway along the Singing Line.



3. I was fortunate enough to have the chance to live in Melbourne Australia for more than three years. I have experienced large parts of the journey Alice and her husband undertake in their quest to better understand her ancestor's experiences in creating the first telegraph line across Australia.

   I found the book to be very Alice Thomson-centric. She seems to glorify all aspects of her journey while continually placing Charles Todd higher and higher upon his pedestal. I was hoping she would rekindle some of my own memories of the Australia outback. However, Ms. Thomson invariably spends paragraph after paragraph describing her husband's illness or her own tiny adventures driving the Land Cruiser or walking around Coober Pedy. Her descriptions of the local towns and environs is terse, quick, and dull. I do not recommend this book to anyone except Alice Thomson and her immediate family.




4. An interesting effort by a distant, if not vague relation to an historically insignificant figure, albeit one from whom myths form with their customary accuracy. What bits of research and experience are fairly presented are harmed, in my view to no benefit, by gratuitous asides regarding her apparently long-suffering companion, family and (soon to be former?) friends. One must wonder what would have been the book had the author not worked for a newspaper, which one might suspect arranged its serialization gratis. The photos beg for the book guillotine.

No comments about Edmund Burke: Volume II: 1784-1797 (Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke).

No comments about If Love Were All...The Story of Frances Stevenson & David Lloyd George.

No comments about Three Storeys Up: Tales of Dublin Tenement Life.

No comments about Barbara Castle: Politics & Power.

No comments about Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Oxford Lives).

1 comments about A Welsh Childhood.

1. Perhaps not for all tastes this autobiographical series of set pieces is wonderfully reminiscent of life in small country areas not all so long ago. There is a sense of time lost folded into the scattered vignettes. I would suggest that it would be particualarly appealing to those of Welsh ancestry and/or those who have lived in small American towns. The photographs are very much in synthesis with the stories and point up the sense of enjoyable loss.