Ever since being overwhelmed by his first reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray at the age of sixteen, Thomas Wright has been a self-confessed Wildean. Wright’s appreciation for the life and works of Oscar Wilde was so great that he applied to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde’s alma mater, and while most students are content to squander their student loans on curry and booze, Wright blew his £5000 bursary on Wilde’s copy of Swinburne’s Essays and Studies. This devotion to Oscar Wilde led Wright to undertake an amazingly daunting literary challenge – in a moment of quixotic madness Wright decided to read every book that his hero had read. The results of Wright’s quest to uncover the story of Wilde’s life through his reading are collected together in Oscar’s Books, an unusual and fascinating biography of a voracious reader.

Wright contends that books were the single most important influence in Oscar Wilde’s life; that, in essence, Wilde built his character out of the books that he read and that his first reading of some of his favourite volumes was ‘as significant as his first meetings with friends and lovers’. Wright is certainly able to make a good case for the importance of books to Wilde by creating in Oscar’s Books a chronological account of the events of Wilde’s life that includes a detailed investigation of the kind of reading material that Wilde was drawn to at the time. Born in 1854, Oscar Wilde was raised in a book-filled house in Dublin by two precociously intellectual parents. Wilde’s poet mother Speranza had perhaps the greatest influence on him during his childhood and she raised Wilde on Celtic myths, Romantic poetry and Irish folklore. This love of myth and folklore would be reflected in Wilde’s later work, particularly in his short stories. When Wilde left home to attend boarding school he continued to be an avid reader and developed into an excellent linguist and classical scholar. After studying at Trinity College, Dublin Wilde attended Magdalen College, Oxford and continued to supplement his formal education with a self-directed investigation of the world through great works of literature. It was at Magdalen that Wilde first read Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the book that Wilde himself thought struck him with the greatest sense of revelation. So much so in fact that Wilde claimed never to travel without a copy of this book ‘which has had such a strange influence on my life’.

While he may have spent his whole life accompanied by books, perhaps the most persuasive, certainly the most poignant, example of the importance of literature to Wilde is seen in the moment that tragedy befell him. In April 1895, as Wilde was awaiting trial for charges of gross indecency, the entire contents of his house on Tite Street was put up for auction for £600 in order to pay the costs to the Marquess of Queensberry that Wilde had incurred when he unsuccessfully sued him for libel. Among all the possessions that were pawed over and bought for a song by gawkers, dealers and curiosity hunters, the material loss that caused Wilde the greatest pain was the destruction of the library that had taken him thirty years to compile. It was heartbreaking to see his lifelong passion broken down during the course of a single afternoon into so many cheap job lots. Indeed, while in prison, Wilde credited the maintenance of his sanity to the fact that the governor of the gaol permitted him to keep a limited stock of books with him in his cell.

With Oscar’s Books Wright has certainly managed to impress upon the reader the importance of the written word to the life and works of Oscar Wilde. Books seem very likely to have been the one true love of Wilde’s life and his later years after he left prison and was forced into ‘going out into the world without a single book’ were only made bearable by the fact that his friends helped him to begin to rebuild his library while he was exiled in Naples and Paris and left nearly destitute. Unfortunately, while Wright is able to portray the staggering range of Wilde’s reading, his is forced to rely quite heavily on conjecture. The exact moment that Wilde decided to dedicate his life to reading can never be known and, since Wilde never kept a journal or detailed personal record, a great deal has to be made of passing comments in letters and various scribbles in the margins of books. Further, given the massive volume of material that Wilde read during his lifetime, no complete list of all his books can be produced, leaving Wright to rely on the auctioneer’s catalogue from the Tite Street house sale and the request list that Wilde drew up whilst in gaol. Having said all that, Wright has done the very best job possible with the information available and has really gone above and beyond the work of most biographers when he travelled the globe to track down the exact volumes that had been owned by Wilde. Oscar’s Books is an almost unique biographical event and an excellent companion volume to the many conventional biographies of Wilde that are available.

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