Method and Sources
Documentary Archive
For many years I have worked on Oscar Wilde through the surviving record: newspapers, letters, books, photographs, catalogues, ephemera, official documents, and other scattered traces from which history must be reconstructed. This site brings together that work for general readers, students, collectors, and scholars.
Its purpose is to examine the evidence as carefully as possible and to present it clearly and in good faith. The site is written in a scholarly rather than journalistic spirit, with greater concern for accuracy, context, attribution, and proportion than for anecdote.
Where possible, the work presented here is grounded in primary sources: period newspapers, letters, manuscripts, photographs, theatre programmes, official records, advertisements, publisher material, catalogues, and other contemporaneous documents. From this rigor have emerged many discoveries.
Because research is never static, pages may be revised in light of new evidence.
Primary Sources
This web site intends to use only information based on Primary Sources, and particularly so when the information relates to Oscar Wilde. By a primary source we mean the contemporaneous, documented, and reliable viewpoint of an individual participant or observer usually in the form of:
- Newspapers, periodicals and other published materials reporting actual events, interviews, etc., by participants or observers.
- Journals, speeches, letters, memos, manuscripts, diaries and other papers in which individuals describe events in which they were participants or observers.
- Records of organizations. The minutes, reports, correspondence, etc. of an organization or agency.
- Primary accounts contained in memoirs, biography and autobiography although these may be less reliable if they were written well after the event especially if distorted by personal agenda, dimming memory, or a revised perspective that may come with hindsight.
- Period photographs.
The Blog and Features
For the more discursive Blog, and other feature writing, secondary scholarship is indispensable, and I draw upon it throughout, but chiefly for context, comparison, and critical conversation rather than as a substitute for documentary verification.
Oscar Wilde has attracted legend almost as readily as documentation. Often the legend is entertaining; sometimes it is even revealing. But the record is usually more interesting.
Contemporary newspaper source used in reconstructing Wilde's lecture tour..
