For Oscar Wilde, as for many people, reading could be as powerful and transformative an experience as falling in love. He referred to the volumes that radically altered his vision of the world as his "golden books".
Thomas Wright, author of Oscar's Books, in which the character of Wilde is uniquely examined through the prism of the books he read, has compiled a list of Wilde's top five books.
1. J.W. Meinhold - Sidonia the Sorceress
J.W. Meinhold’s early nineteenth century Gothic historical novel Sidonia the Sorceress was Wilde‘s "favourite romantic reading when a boy". Sidonia is set in the 17th century land of Pomerania. Its heroine is the beautiful and eloquent witch Sidonia Von Bork, who, at the denouement, is burnt at the stake. Before her demise she enjoys a series of picaresque adventures involving grisly murders, accidental decapitations, several steamy erotic episodes and premature burials.
In the novel, humour follows hard upon the heels of horror. Reading it, the young Wilde must have been unsure whether to laugh or scream. Charles Dickens referred to this principle of narrative heterogeneity as the "streaky bacon" style. It was a style Wilde loved throughout his life and which he himself would master in Dorian Gray.
Buy Sidonia the Sorceress, by J.W. Meinhold, online now.
2. Algernon Swinburne – Poems and Ballads
This "golden book" of Wilde's youth was regarded as scandalous in Victorian England, because of the frankly pagan character of its 'fleshy' verse. It contains breathless poems sung with "lips full of lust and of laughter" in which the poet cries out to be filled with pleasure "till pain come in turn". Wilde was ravished by the book’s "very perfect and very poisonous" verses, the very first in English literature, he claimed, to "sing divinely the song of the flesh". The music of the verse, too, enchanted him, and he echoed it throughout his own poetry.
Buy Poems and Ballads, by Algernon Swinburne, online now.
3. Walter Pater - Studies in the History of the Renaissance
This miscellaneous collection of 'aesthetic' art essays on philosophers, poets and artists of the Renaissance caused a scandal on its publication in 1873. The Bishop of Oxford attacked its "neo-pagan" character. Wilde, in contrast, found Pater’s hedonistic exhortation to seek "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself" irresistible – it became one of his mottos. Pater was also perhaps the greatest single influence on Wilde‘s writings.
When he first read The Renaissance as an Oxonian it struck Wilde with the force of a revelation. It became for him ‘“the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty” and exercised "such a strange influence" on his life. Such, indeed, was Wilde’s love for the book that he claimed to never travel anywhere without it. "It is possible", he mused, "That I may exaggerate about [it]. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding".
Buy Studies in the History of the Renaissance, by Walter Pater, online now.
4. Anthony Hope – The Dolly Dialogues
Wilde had a genuine partiality for good, honest, popular literary trash. It may not, then, have been entirely with his tongue in his cheek that he once told a friend that he wished he’d written The Dolly Dialogues more than any other book. Anthony Hope’s best selling novella about the pretty young society girl Dolly Foster is almost entirely made up of delightfully inconsequential chit-chat: "I met him", Dolly says, apropos of a young man, "Three years ago. He was – oh, quite unpresentable. Everything he shouldn’t be. A tee-totaler, you know, and he didn’t smoke. Oh, and he wore his hair long, and his trousers short". Dolly’s effervescent conversation is reminiscent of the exquisitely trivial talk of the dowagers in many of Wilde’s own social comedies.
Buy The Dolly Dialogues, by Anthony Hope, online now.
5. Gustave Flaubert – The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Flaubert was the "sinless master" from whom Wilde learned to write fictional prose. He had a particular fondness for the Frenchman‘s fantastic masterpiece of proto-surrealist literature, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which vividly evokes the psychedelic visions of the hermit saint. Just before his release from prison in 1897, Wilde asked his friends to buy him a little library of books and The Temptation was the first item on his list of requests.
He told a friend that, on regaining his freedom, he hoped to rent a little apartment in "some French town, with some books about him, of course Flaubert’s Temptation among them". Wilde read and re-read the volume over the remaining three years of his life. "Whenever I enter a strange town", he said, "I always order The Temptation of Saint Anthony and a packet of cigarettes and I am happy".
Buy The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Gustave Flaubert, online now.
Read our interview with Thomas Wright and our review of Oscar's Books.
Oscar's Books, by Thomas Wright
Published by: Chatto & Windus, an imprint of The Random House Group
Released: 4 September 2008
ISBN: 0701180617
Buy Thomas Wright's Oscar's Books online. You'll save money to put towards his earlier book, Oscar Wilde's Table Talk.