“The soul of man under socialism”: A (con)textual history

Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages 59-85

  Guy, Josephine M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84966728704     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (60)

1. Peter Raby, “Wilde’s Comedies of Society,” in Peter Raby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143.
2. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, eds., Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7
3. Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
4. Arranging versions of Wilde’s works into a chronological narrative of development is complicated by a number of factors. First, revisions were undertaken for a variety of reasons, which often conflicted with each other: a “purist” concern with refinement - the polishing of individual lexical items -coexists with a pragmatic, “cut-and-paste” mentality in which the need to expand material led to the incorporation of whole blocks of text which had their origins in other works. Secondly, Wilde often reincorporated material discarded from early drafts into later ones, and moved material between different works. Finally, works were revised in order to re-present (and resell) them to a different kind of reader: Wilde created different versions to perform different functions. In none of these cases is a concern with the integrity of the work paramount. These issues are discussed in Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxfo rd University Press, 2000).
5. A corrected autograph manuscript of ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism” was advertised in April 1920 as part of the Stetson sale; purchased by Maggs, it was exposed as a forgery by Fabian Lloyd. Intriguingly, two letters from Robert Ross to the publisher Grant Richards, held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, reveal that some years earlier, in the summer of 1912, Richards was enlisting Ross’s help to dispose of what Ross terms “the manuscript of ‘The Soul of Man’“ through a dealer called Robson. This may be a reference to the Lloyd forgery. See the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, uncataloged MSS. ALS, Robert Ross to Grant Richards, 16 August 1911; TLS Robert Ross to Grant Richards, 24 July 1912.
6. Wilde, The Compute Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth estate, 2000), 487; further page references appear in parentheses.
7. Eclectic Magazine 52 (1891), 465-83
8. “The Soul of Man under Socialism, the Socialist Ideal - Art and the Coming Solidarity. By Oscar Wilde, William Morris, W. C. Owen,” The Humboldt Library of Science 147 (1891). The Humboldt Library of Science was a periodical dedicated to publishing what its advertising termed “die foremost scientific writers of the age.” The number containing the essays by Wilde, Morris, and Owen was reissued in January 1892.
9. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 401.
10. Anne Clark Amor, Mrs. Oscar Wilde (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1983), 152.
11. This letter is discussed by Horst Schroeder, “A Printing Error in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism” Notes and Queries n.s. 43 (1996), 49-51.
12. In another letter (“To Charles Spurrier Mason,” August 1894), Wilde comments that the new play will bring him “a lot of red gold”: Complete Letters, 603.
13. The expensive edition was never produced in Wilde’s lifetime. Mason notes that some copies of such an edition were advertised for sale in 1903 but not by Humphreys: see Stuart Mason, Christopher Millard, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), 555-56; further page references appear in parentheses.
14. Wilde, Collected Works, 14 vols., Reviews, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen, 1908), 13: 90
15. Wilde, “To Arthur L. Humphreys,” late November 1894, Complete Letters, 623-24.
16. In addition, 250 copies of a pirated version of The Soul of Man (following the Fortnightly in the accidentals) was published in 1904.
17. Stokes, “Wilde the Journalist,” in Raby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, 69, 77, and 78; further page references appear in parentheses
18. Catherine Ksinan, “Wilde as Editor of Woman’s World: Fighting a Stale Slumber in Certitudes,” English Literature in Transition 41 (1998), 408-26.
19. The only surviving 105-page manuscript of the enlarged version of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” held at the Rosenbach Library, consists partly of full manuscript pages and partly of sheets from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine with manuscript corrections and editions. It should be noted that it is unclear whether the manuscript represents finished work. Its discoverer, Mitchell Kennerley, claimed that it had been given to Frederick Chapman, an officer manager of John Lane, to prepare for the printer. Horst Schroeder, however, has cast doubt on Kennerley’s account of the manuscript’s provenance, and it seems more likely that it represents merely a working draft
20. Schroeder, Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H” - Its Composition, Publication and Reception (Braunschweig: Technische Universitat Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, 1984), 36-39.
21. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 11.
22. Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 152; further page reference appears in parentheses.
23. Walter E. Houghton, ed., The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 1966-87), 4, where it is claimed that Harris’s editorship represented “an open flaunting of accepted standards of literary taste and political discussion” (181).
24. Frank Harris, “To Oscar Wilde,” 10 February 1890, in Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay and New Materials and Methods of Research (Greensboro, NC: ELTPress, 1993), 79.
25. Frank Harris, “To Oscar Wilde,” offered as item no. 1139 in Maggs Catalogue (1951), quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 309.
26. Danson, Wilde’s Intentions, and Wilde, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, ed. Murray
27. J.D. Thomas “‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’: An Essay in Context,” Rice University Studies 51 (1965), 83-95; further page references appear in parentheses.
28. W.E. Gladstone, “Mr. Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’: A Review and A Recommendation,” Nineteenth Century 28 (1890), 677-93
29. Henry Edward Manning, Card. Archbishop, Hermann Alder, Hugh Price Hughes, “Irresponsible Wealth,” Nineteenth Century 28 (1890), 876-900; further page reference appears in parentheses. The two essays that made up Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” originally appeared in the North American Review and were reprinted in die Pall Mall Gazette (for which Wilde reviewed regularly from 1884 to 1890). Carnegie’s reply, “The Advantages of Poverty,” appeared in the Nineteenth Century 29 (1891), 367-85. Carnegie singled out in particular the criticism of Hugh Price Hughes. Interestingly, the piece was reproduced the following month in the same issue of the Eclectic Magazine as the reprint of Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”
30. Philip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (London: John Murray, 1954), 384.
31. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review n.s. 49 (1891), 294; further page references appear in parentheses.
32. The implication of Danson’s comment is similar to A.E. Dyson’s claim that we can “take [Wilde’s] socialism for granted”: The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973), 148. It is worth noting that in the midtwentieth century it was fashionable to identify Wilde’s position with anarchism
33. George Woodcock, Anarchism (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962), 33-34, 305, 448.
34. Danson, quoting Steven Lukes’s comments about the term’s qualities, implies that it is too intractable to be worth worrying about: see Wilde’s Intentions, 161
35. Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).
36. The account of individualism which follows is indebted to M.W. Taylor, Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); further page references appear in parentheses. For reasons of space, I have had to simplify Taylor’s argument. It is important, though, to emphasize the distinction that he draws between the political individualism of the 1880s and the methodological individualism that underwrote the doctrines of the Manchester School or Philosophic Radicals in the earlier decades of the century. It was this latter kind of individualism that was transformed in the 1880s into what was termed “New Radicalism” or “New Liberalism.”
37. Edward J. Bristow, “The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism,” Historical Journal 18 (1975), 770; further page references appear in parentheses.
38. Taylor distinguishes between two broad kinds of Individualists: the “belligerent,” non-university polemicists, who tended to argue (like Spencer) from a priori methodological atomism; and the “empiricists” who claimed that “experience” should define the limits to state intervention. Although the latter group had a more lasting political influence, serving on numbers of royal commissions, it was the former and more extreme group - figures such as Wordsworth Donisthorpe and Auberon Herbert - who were the intellectual leaders and who attracted the strongest publicity. See Men versus the State, 16-31.
39. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1850), quoted in Taylor, Men versus the State, 3.
40. Bristow, “The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism,”
41. Norbert C. Soldon, “Individualist Periodicals: The Crisis of Late Victorian Liberalism,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 5 (1973), 22.
42. Herbert’s piece was serialized in the Fortnightly Review in six parts from March 1883 until March 1884. See “A Politician in Trouble about His Soul. Part I,” n.s. 33 (1883), 315-34
43. “Parts II and III,” n.s. 33 (1883), 667-90
44. “Part IV,” n.s. 34 (1883), 354-76
45. “Part V,” n.s. 34 (1883), 806-23
46. “Part VI,” n.s. 34 (1884), 354-76.
47. The first issues appeared under the cover of George Lane Fox’s Political World, a journal established in July 1888 which folded in August 1890. By May 1890 Free Life became an autonomous publication. It continued under Herbert’s editorship until August 1901; the price in the 1890s was Id., suggesting a large intended readership.
48. Josephine M. Guy, “Self-Plagiarism, Creativity and Craftsmanship in Oscar Wilde,” English Literature in Transition 41 (1998), 6-23. There is some evidence that Wilde might have known Herbert earlier than this, for in the mid-1880s both men were invited to speak to the Tyneside Sunday Lecture Society. (I am grateful to Peter Raby for this information.)
49. It is worth noting that Herbert continued to contribute to the Fortnightly in the late 1880s and early 1890s; indeed a piece by him appeared in the issue immediately preceding that of Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” See Herbert, “‘The Rake’s Progress’ in Irish Politics,” Fortnightly Review n.s. 49 (1891), 126-42.
50. Donisthorpe, ‘The Basis of Individualism,” Westminster Review 70 (1886), 118-56
51. T.H. Huxley, “Government: Anarchy or Regimentation,” Nineteenth Century 27 (1890), 843-66
52. Thomas Whittaker, “Individualism and State-Action,” Mind 49 (1888), 52-62.
53. Smith and Helfand, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, 80-86. Their narrow focus on the evidence from Wilde’s undergraduate notebooks leads them to concentrate on the biological aspects of Spencer’s sociology, with the result that they have little to say about Spencer’s politics and his (and Wilde’s) complex relationship with Individualist pressure groups.
54. M.D. O’Brien, The Natural Right to Freedom (London: Williams and Norgate, 1893), 323-4, quoted in Taylor, Men versus the State, 89.
55. Even then, Spencer was keen to distance himself from Darwin. For example, “The Study of Sociology. XIV. Preparation in Biology,” in the Contemporary Review 22 (1873), he states: “Probably most readers will conclude that… I am simply carrying out the views of Mr. Darwin in their applications to the human race. Under the circumstances, perhaps, I shall be excused for pointing out that the same beliefs, otherwise expressed, are contained in Chapters XXV and XXVIII of Social Statics, published in December, 1850”(339-40).
56. Taylor suggests that the contradiction worked in two ways: on the one hand, the endorsement of selfishness implicit in a Darwinian struggle for survival might actually retard the altruistic impulse; on the other hand, the active promotion of altruism might prolong the survival of the unfit (in Victorian terms, the undeserving poor). It is perhaps worth noting that the dilemma of how altruism can evolve when the motor of evolution is self-interest continues to occupy modern evolutionary biologists.
57. Wilde, Collected Works, 14 vols.,: 222.
58. Criticism of Individualist politics by New Radicals was widespread, particularly the contradictions implicit in their use of social Darwinism. Wilde was certainly aware of this body of work for he had reviewed David George Ritchie’s Darwinism and Politics (1889) in The Woman’s World. Ritchie, an Oxford philosopher, Fabian, and supporter of New Radicalism was a trenchant critic of Spencer. In 1889 Wilde commented that he wanted to see “a reconciliation of Socialism with Science,” but that he had found Ritchie’s book ‘Very slight and amateurish” (Wilde, ‘To Mrs. R.B. Cunninghame Graham,” c. 30 June 1889, in Complete Letters, 403-04).
59. Grant Allen, “Individualism and Socialism,” Contemporary Review 54 (1889), 738 and 731-2; further page references appear in parentheses.
60. Gissing, New Grub Street (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 43-44.