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Oscar Wilde's lost letters on display in Manhattan

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The iconic Irishman Oscar Wilde

Expensively dressed, impeccably mannered and gifted with a voice so beguiling his contemporaries marveled at him, Oscar (Fingal O’Flaherty Wills) Wilde was also one of the wittiest men of his age. Even today, just to hear his name is to anticipate delight. That’s why his cult, which began in his own lifetime, shows no signs of ever diminishing.

This month, in an exhibition that seems calculated to attract every Oscar Wilde enthusiast in America, the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan will exhibit a selection of the Irish writer’s most important manuscripts and letters. But this isn’t just another stuffy museum piece featuring a more than usually compelling Irish writer. This time the Morgan can boast of a dramatic first: the whereabouts of this beautifully bound collection was unknown to scholars for over half a century.

Bequeathed to the library in December 2008, the current collection comprises nine manuscripts of Wilde’s poems and prose pieces and featuring four important letters that illuminate the life and work of the dramatist, aesthete, wit, and self-proclaimed “lord of language,” making the exhibition one of the most important illustrations of the breath and scope of Wilde’s artistic achievements to be seen in America this decade.

The Morgan Library, one of the most beautiful private libraries in the world, is the perfect venue to appreciate Wilde’s art and life. Totaling at just over fifty handwritten pages, the expertly crafted red-leather-bound volume of some of Wilde’s most important manuscripts and letters went on public exhibition on April 17, 2009 and can be seen until to August 9, 2009, as part of the Morgan’s exhibition Recent Acquisitions, which will highlight important additions to the institution’s holdings in the last five years.

Why does Wilde still matter? Because the sheer force of Wilde’s all-electric personality jolted Victorian society out of its complacency, a remarkable achievement, and each time they thought they had the measure of him he increased the voltage. Wilde was a depth charge, a modernist dressed like a romantic in a faux romantic age. The Morgan’s exhibition will demonstrate that there’s much more to Wilde’s legacy than fancy knee-britches and verbal pyrotechnics.

Of special note in the new exhibition is the earliest surviving letter from Wilde to his aristocratic lover Lord Alfred Douglas, known as “Bosie.” Written in Wilde’s distinctive rounded lettering, it shows how smitten he really was with the whey-faced, flaxen haired youth. “I should awfully like to go with you somewhere where it is hot and colored,” Wilde writes, in a blatant attempt to arouse Douglas, but for a modern reader it produces a burst of knowing laughter. The overheated prose demonstrates Wilde’s growing obsession; it is also a kind of unknowing dress rehearsal for what was to follow - Wilde set out to conquer but was himself harpooned.

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