Wednesday, January 11, 2023

597. Ricketts, Shannon and Wilde's Manuscripts

A new research source on Oscar Wilde came online in April last year: 'Oscar Wilde. An Annotated Bibliography of Manuscripts and Their Provenances' [see: wilde.manuscripts]. The website is the work of Wolfgang Maier-Sigrist, a German Oscar Wilde aficionado, who writes: 

The present platform is an attempt to provide a table of manuscripts, typescripts and provenances of major works of Oscar Wilde from as many reliable sources as possible. Because of the great number of extant manuscripts (and the many manuscripts that cannot be located), I am obliged to restrict this table for the present to specific works by Wilde.

The site contains information about Wilde's plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his long poem The Sphinx, and his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism.

All of these works and their manuscripts are listed with their histories and provenances in full detail. They are augmented with dealers’ catalogue entries and other informative notes on each item.
Search result for 'Ricketts' on Wolfgang Maier-Sigrist's Oscar Wilde site

The site includes lists of auction houses and catalogues. It also lists dealers, managers, publishers, collectors and others involved in Wilde's work. The names of his designers (Beardsley, Ricketts and Shannon) are missing from this Index of Names. Nevertheless, they do feature which is easy to discover by using the excellent search function.