I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
On the birthday of Oscar Wilde, it should be noted that in 1882 the great Irish aesthete gave an extensive tour of Missouri and Kansas that included speaking engagements in Kansas City, St. Joseph, Leavenworth, Atchison and Topeka. His over-the-top appearances prompted accusations of “humbuggery” to admiring comparisons to Buffalo Bill. The Kansas City Journal, however, was scathing. It wrote that Wilde’s audience “carried away nothing that they did bring with them.” The lecture was “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and trash signifying nothing. People will, of course, continue to go and see him as they do to view sideshow curiosities and monstrosities. We can assure them that they will see the biggest fashionable fraud that has ever come to us from over the sea.”
Here you can read a detailed and delightful history of Wilde’s tour of Kansas.
This cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper’s Bazaar, June 10, 1882, depicted Oscar Wilde making his tribute to Western miners as the “only well dressed men I have seen in America.” On his tour of the United States in 1882, Wilde was attacked by the press for his outlandish dress and his arty and obtuse lectures. The cartoonists had a field day picturing him as a money-grabbing fake. In this example, the lily and sunflower, symbols connected with the aesthetic movement, are evident and Wilde is depicted in an effeminate pose with bags of money protruding from each pocket.
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
"Everything popular is wrong."
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
