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Books

Oscar Wilde and the marvellous boy

Oscar Wilde had a fixation with Thomas Chatterton’s early promise and lonely death — which eerily mirrored his own, says Richard Davenport-Hines

9 May 2015

9:00 AM

9 May 2015

9:00 AM

Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism and the Art of Forgery Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell

Yale, pp.470, £25, ISBN: 9780300208306

The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The facts have been rehashed in numerous biographies, and dramatised by such actors as Robert Morley, Peter Finch, Rupert Everett and Stephen Fry. The only way to attack the subject with any hope of surprise is by an oblique sideways move from an unexpected angle.

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