{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03636363636363636, 'fraction_numerical': 0.015272727272727273, 'mean_word_length': 4.791578947368421, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (review)

WINTER 2004 Nevertheless, Fryer’s entertaining book has its value in showing us how Wilde and his drama were seen from other perspectives. We hear William Rothenstein, for instance, paying tribute to Ross’s loyalty to Wilde—specifically, the “labour of love” which was Ross’s edition of De Profundis (1905)—then going on to say, “Poor Oscar, how shallow was your artist imagination—you could not realise sorrow until you were shut up in a stone cage” (186). And from Fryer we learn that it was with Wilde’s own camera that the famous deathbed photograph was made by Maurice Gilbert, a last glimpse of the aesthete in his final recumbent position. For a more detailed portrait, the reader must go back to Margery Ross’s edition of letters to and from Ross, Robert Ross: Friend of Friends (1952) which provides revealing detail to the complex sequence of trials which followed Wilde’s death, as charted by both Fisher and Fryer, and in which Ross and Douglas fought for their reputations, and that of the man they loved. This series of lawsuits—in which Douglas was encouraged in 1913 by the editor of The Academy, T. H. Crosland, to sue Arthur Ransome over his biography of Wilde (which Ross had approved)—were also a symptom of the wider anxiety felt in Britain about Wilde’s legacy and continuing influence. The final courtroom drama is cited by Belford, Fisher, and Fryer as the posthumous denouement of Wilde’s story. In the infamous “Black Book” libel case of 1918, the extreme right-wing Member of Parliament Noel Pemberton Billing alleged that the “cult of Wilde” still persisted in England after his death. In 1917 and 1918, Billing claimed, in successive articles in his privately published newspaper, The Imperialist (later The Vigilante), that the German Secret Service had a blackmail list of 47,000 members of the British establishment who were addicted to sexual perversions. Sued for libel by the Canadian-born “Salome dancer” Maud Allan—who was implicated as a bisexual “femme fatale” member of this cult—Billing summoned Douglas to the Old Bailey as a witness for the defence. Douglas told the court that Wilde was “the greatest force for evil in Europe in the past 350 years,” and took the opportunity to besmirch Ross—now his hated enemy. For the forty-nine-year-old Ross, it was a final indignity to the memory of his friend. “Kicking the corpse of Wilde has . . . been a pleasure to the English people even if they disapprove of Billing’s methods” (335), as Margery Ross put it. Less than a generation after his death, it seemed Wilde’s claim that the English would not suffer his survival into the twentieth century had achieved a painful confirmation. Philip Hoare London, England