Wilde and Pater's Strange Appreciations

This essay explores the intertextuality of Oscar Wilde's ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, one of four essays collected in Wilde's 1891 Intentions. It argues that, while its obvious provocation is its subject – notorious nineteenth-century murder, forger, and aesthete, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, especially the seemingly sympathetic treatment Wilde gives that subject, the essay is also doing other significant things. It does not merely set out to shock its audience with a hyperbolic example of ‘art for art's sake’ (or, as he puts it here, ‘a man's being a murderer is nothing against his prose’) but also engages seriously with the principles of aestheticism. The essay, styled as an ‘appreciation’, models itself on (among other things) Walter Pater's Appreciations, a book Wilde reviewed with keen, high praise just months before publishing ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’. Pater's essay on William Wordsworth (‘Wordsworth’) in that volume seems to hold a particularly suggestive influence over Wilde's study of Wainewright, with enough textual similarities between the two ‘appreciations’ to suggest that Wilde had not just his minor aesthetic contributions (e.g. journalism, Wilde admits, is largely neither original nor terribly good) but also more serious aestheticist writing and ideas

Aestheticism · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Journalism · Literature · Nothing · Poetry · Praise · Sociology · Subject (documents · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy

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