The Final Hours of Oscar Wilde: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death”

Date/Time
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Location
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
2520 Cimarron Street

William Andrews Clark Oscar Wilde Lecture

Lecture by Joseph Bristow, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles

This lecture sheds fresh light on the forty-six-year-old Oscar Wilde’s early death from encephalomeningitis at the shabby Hôtel d’Alsace on Friday, November 30, 1900, in the Latin Quarter of Paris. By drawing on documents held at the Clark Library that have seldom been consulted before, Professor Bristow will look closely at the rapid turns of events that impacted Wilde’s final hours. The Clark Library has recently catalogued the extensive papers of the Irish Passionist priest Father Cuthbert Dunne, who converted Wilde on his deathbed to the Church of Rome. The library also houses many letters by Reginald Turner, the loyal friend who remained at the incapacitated Wilde’s bedside for several weeks. These items reveal the urgent financial, legal, and religious matters that attended Wilde’s demise. The talk will also discuss Wilde’s indebtedness to the hotel proprietor Jean Dupoirier, who soon after Wilde’s death turned his former guest’s insalubrious bedroom into a shrine for the writer’s most devoted acolytes.

Joseph Bristow is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent books are Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment (Yale University Press, 2022) and an edited collection, Extraordinary Aesthetes: Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2023). He is currently co-editing (with Yvonne Ivory and Rebecca N. Mitchell) the Oxford English Texts edition of Wilde’s uncollected, unfinished, and miscellaneous writings. His current book project is “Queer Blackmail: English Cultures of Extortion, 1776–1967.”

Registration for the lecture has reached capacity. Please fill out the form below to be added to the wait list; individuals will be notified on a first-come, first-served basis if space becomes available due to cancellations. The lecture will be held in-person at the Clark Library and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. No registration is required to watch the livestream. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.