
Luke Batterham
Senior Valuer
This auction has ended. View lot details
Sold for £5,625 inc. premium
Our Books & Manuscripts specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialist
Senior Valuer
WILDE SENDS FOR HIS EMERSON – Wilde was to make a similar request in 1896, but this time to the Home Secretary and not from Tite Street but Reading Gaol, asking he be sent 'Emerson's Essays (if possible in one volume)'. When asked in Philadelphia in 1882 which American poet he admired the most, he replied 'I think that Walt Whitman and Emerson have given the world more than anyone else' and on Emerson's death eulogising him as 'New England's Plato' (The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, 1988, p. 660, fn. 1; Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 1987, pp. 159 and 173).
Emerson was one of the authors who helped form Wilde's dazzling style: 'A fair number of Emerson's essays are quoted by Wilde, but it is "Self-Reliance", with its call for inconsistency and nonconformity in the interests of self-realization, that is outstandingly influential: it is echoed in many places, including of course The Critic as Artist, and I would argue is a major inspiration for Wilde's essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism. The "Individualism" Wilde puts forward there has considerable similarities to Emerson's notion of Self-Reliance. And above all, Emerson is free of the "earnestness" so prevalent in English Victorian essayists and prose-writers – and he writes with clarity, individuality, and style, coining epigrammatic phrases that Wilde relishes' (Isobel Murray, Oscar Wilde: The Major Works, Oxford World's Classics, 2008, p. xvi).
We have not been able to identify the Murphy at whose house the volume in question was left – although the letter implies their meeting was outside London, and the letter must have been written during Wilde's years at Tite Street, between 1885 and 1895. It is not printed in The Complete Letters.