Rediscovered II

Oscar Wilde, 1889. One of series by W & D Downey, Ebury Street, London, S.W.

You may recall the rediscovered photograph of Oscar Wilde (similar to the one above) that I featured in this post — where it was effectively published for the first time in almost 130 years.

The photograph had originally appeared in the March 10, 1893 issue of the Westminster Budget, in an article entitled “Mr. Wilde’s Forbidden Play” about Oscar’s French work Salomé.

At the time of that earlier post I expressed the hope is that an original print might come to light, and one has not done so yet. However, what has emerged is another copy of the newspaper, this time with a better quality image—now shown above.

So who do we have thank for this improved print?

You may also recall that in the earlier article I mentioned there had been a clue to this photograph’s existence in a footnote in the Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, London, T. Werner Laurie Ltd, [1914] edited by Stuart Mason (Christopher Sclater Millard).

So it is no surprise it is to Millard that we first turn.

FORTUNATELY FOR US

Fortunately for us, Millard kept a scrapbook filled with Wilde ephemera. In fact, Millard kept 17 or 18 scrapbooks filled with Wilde ephemera. Not a lot people know that.

And, fortunately for us, Millard pasted into one of the scrapbooks (as verification of that clue about the photograph), a copy of the very page of the Westminster Budget that contained the picture.

And, fortunately for us, a Japanese collector in the 1920s purchased those scrapbooks and carefully preserved them.

And, fortunately for us, the scrapbook collection was eventually and kindly, donated to the Jissen Women’s University, a private college in Hino, Tokyo, Japan.

And, fortunately for us, the Jissen Women’s University quite recently decided to digitize the entire contents of those scrapbooks and place them online for the public to view.

Scrap Heap

The archive contains hundreds of items of interest to the Wilde scholar. In addition to the image above, I have showcased two other items that caught my eye:

—One is a rarely, if ever, seen example of a theatre ticket from a Wilde play: this one from An Ideal Husband—an upper box on the first Saturday, no less.

—The other is an amusingly aesthetic pastiche of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man speech from As You Like It.

[All images Courtesy of Jissen Women’s University.]