ABSTRACT
That the name “Oscar Wilde” still raises eyebrows after more than a century testifies to the longevity of Wilde’s notoriety. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and up to his conviction for gross indecency, Wilde was celebrated as an aesthete, artist, dandy, playwright, raconteur, savvy editor, and all around public personality. His success at meshing public persona and literary production is arguably unrivalled by any of his English literary peers. The net result of his self-promotion, so characteristic of celebrity culture, is that Wilde’s public persona assumed a life of its own, surpassing even his bodacious fashioning of self-image. As his career progressed, it became increasingly difficult to separate the artist, his work, and his persona. We get an early glimpse of the workings of this fame machinery alongside the orbit of Wilde’s rising status in the wry sketch that tracks the artist’s early career, “Days with Celebrities, Mr. Oscar Wilde,” published in 1882 in the weekly magazine Moonshine.1 As it comically records, Wilde was acclaimed and mocked, as he would be later castigated following his trials, imprisonment, and penurious death, as a celebrity in English society when the very category and term, as scholars and critics have shown, were just gaining traction in the popular vernacular. Indeed the scholarly community writing on celebrity has rightly come to regard him, along with a handful of his contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, as helping to inaugurate the phenomenon of celebrity culture that is one hallmark of twentieth-and twenty-first-century modernity.
