Before the plays and Dorian Gray, Wilde earned his living as a reviewer, chiefly for the Pall Mall Gazette. E. V. Lucas gathered the best of that journalism here: a visit to the tomb of Keats in Rome, notes on Shakespeare’s scenery, an Oxford Henry IV, Balzac in translation, Symonds on the Renaissance, and brisk demolitions of cookery books, etiquette guides and handbooks to marriage.
Wilde’s epigrammatic voice already fully formed, turned on whatever book landed on his desk. Download the free EPUB.