1/17/2023 0 Comments Lord alfred douglas![]() Beardsley complained to Robbie Ross: "For one week the numbers of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous". This led to a hiatus in the relationship and a row between the two men, with angry messages being exchanged and even the involvement of the publisher John Lane and the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley when they themselves objected to Douglas’s work. Douglas’s temper would not accept Wilde’s criticism and he claimed that the errors were really in Wilde’s original play. Douglas’s French was very poor and his translation was highly criticised: a passage that goes " On ne doit regarder que dans les miroirs" (French for "One should only look in mirrors") was translated as "One must not look at mirrors". Wilde had originally written Salomé in French, and in 1893 he commissioned Douglas to translate it into English. They often argued and broke up, but would also always reconcile.ĭouglas had praised Wilde’s play Salome in the Oxford magazine, The Spirit Lamp, of which he was editor (and used as a covert means of gaining acceptance for homosexuality). ![]() He would spend money on boys and gambling and expected Wilde to contribute to his tastes. Said to be a roman a clef based on the relationship of Wilde and Douglas, it would be one of the texts used against Wilde during his trials in 1895.ĭouglas, known to his friends as ‘Bosie’, has been described as spoiled, reckless, insolent and extravagant. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared not Speak its Name p.144Ellmann (1988:98) In 1894, the Robert Hichens novel The Green Carnation was published. In 1891, Douglas met Oscar Wilde although the playwright was married with two sons, they soon began an affair.H. This struggle would preview the later litigations between the two former lovers of Oscar Wilde. Douglas served as chief mourner, although there reportedly was an altercation at the gravesite between him and Robbie Ross. When Wilde died in 1900, he was still officially bankrupt and relatively impoverished. When Douglas eventually did gain funds from his late father’s estate, he refused to grant Wilde a permanent allowance, although he did give him occasional handouts. Wilde claimed that Douglas had offered a home, but had no funds or ideas. The period when the two men lived in Rouen would later become quite controversial. Wilde lived the remainder of his life primarily in Paris, and Douglas returned to England in late 1898. During the later part of 1897, Wilde and Douglas lived together in Rouen, but for financial pressures and other personal reasons, they separated. This meeting was disapproved of by the friends and families of both men. They married on 4 March 1902 and had one son, Raymond Wilfred Sholto Douglas, born on 17 November 1902. Notes MarriageĪfter Wilde’s death, Douglas established a close friendship with Olive Eleanor Custance, an heiress and poet. Douglas added that he intensely regretted having met Wilde, and having helped him with the translation of Salome, which he described as "a most pernicious and abominable piece of work". During the trial he described Wilde as "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last three hundred and fifty years". He had written a poem referring to Margot Asquith "bound with Lesbian fillets" while her husband Herbert, the Prime Minister, gave money to Ross.Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century., Arcade Publishing, 1999, p.110. Douglas also contributed to Billing’s journal Vigilante as part of his campaign against Robbie Ross. Billing had accused Allan, who was performing Wilde’s play Salome, of being part of a homosexual conspiracy to undermine the war effort. ![]() He was a defence witness in the libel case brought by Maud Allan against Noel Pemberton Billing in 1918. More than a decade after Wilde’s death, with the release of suppressed portions of Wilde’s De Profundis letter in 1912, Douglas turned against his former friend, whose homosexuality he grew to condemn. Much of his early poetry was Uranian in theme, though he tended, later in life, to distance himself from both Wilde’s influence and his own role as a Uranian poet. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 187020 March 1945), nicknamed Bosie, was a British author, poet and translator, better known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde. ![]()
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