![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.
Notes
1. This is the annotated transcript of the 2nd biennial Clark Lecture on Oscar Wilde delivered at the Clark Library, University of California at Los Angeles, 2 April 2011. The inaugural lecture was given by Merlin Holland.
2. Wilde, ‘Pen Pencil and Poison’, 121. (The serial comma is omitted in The Complete Works.)
3. CitationWilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 21.
4. CitationHarris, Oscar Wilde, 141, 142, 166, 192, 197–9, 201–4.
5. Wilde, ‘Pen Pencil and Poison’, 108.
6. CitationDoyle, Memories and Adventures, 73.
7. CitationOrwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, 98, 99.
8. CitationFlanders, The Invention of Murder, 248–52.
9. CitationYoung, Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, 114. Filson Young's contemporary account of the murder trial is the most reliable we have. Quotations from Thompson's letters are from this book except when indicated otherwise.
10. Cockburn, in CitationFoster, Irish Novels 1890–1940, 48.
11. CitationHichens, Bella Donna, 224.
12. CitationEden and Hill, Letters from a Suburban Housewife, 118.
13. Harris, Oscar Wilde, 129; CitationGaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure, 142. (In the light of its many detractors, I was delighted to come across Merlin Holland's vigorous appreciation of Harris's book in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 October 1997.)
14. I have several interests in Filson Young. He wrote the first book on RMS Titanic, which was in the bookshops three weeks after the disaster, and it is the best-written book on the ship. I excerpted this book in my Penguin anthology, Titanic (1999). As a boy, Filson Young summered with his family at their home in Portaferry, the County Down village where I now live. Curiously, the ‘Robert Hichens’ who pops up on Google first was Quartermaster on Titanic; many websites below, we find the once-popular novelist. Also curiously, there was an officer Wilde on the doomed liner.
15. CitationCooper, ‘Robert Hichens’, 473.
16. CitationHichens, Yesterday, 133.
17. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 139.
18. CitationWilde, De Profundis, 526.
19. Harris, Oscar Wilde, 85.
20. The Business of Life (1913) by CitationR.W. Chambers.
21. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 257.
22. This paradox is only one among several concerning the relationship between art and life that are discussed by CitationNeil Sammells (drawing on ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ among other works) in ‘Theorizing Style: The Essays’, chapter 2 of Wilde Style.
23. CitationWeis, Criminal Justice, 70.
24. Hichens, Bella Donna, 168. See also 193, 202.
25. Weis, Criminal Justice, 263–4.