Wednesday, December 18, 2019

438. A Ricketts Quote on YouTube

Videos on YouTube featuring Charles Ricketts are rare, but there are a few. Relatively new is a quote from Ricketts in a short movie about Oscar Wilde, part of a series of Daily Quotes.

Charles Ricketts in Best 20 Quotes about Oscar Wilde (2019)

The video is called Best 20 Quotes about Oscar Wilde and was posted in August 2019. Against a backdrop of meaningless and royalty-free music, we see a procession of quotations appear on screen, one after the other, most of Wilde's own by the way, while the images are incomprehensible and unrelated to the content. First we see the head of a woman with long brown hair, then a landscape with farms and trees, a purple field, snow on the side of a road, a slope on the shore of a lake and finally a cloudy sky above the sea.

A number of Wilde's wisdoms are followed by statements by others about him. This is a colourful company: G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Parker, Gyles Brandreth, Robbie Ross, David Levithan, and Charles Ricketts. His quote about Wilde comes into the picture after 3 minutes 44 seconds before disappearing at 4.04.

When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words: 'Mr. Wilde, did you have prayers in your house?' 'I am sorry... I fear not.' 'You see where you are now![']


Charles Ricketts, Oscar Wilde. Recollections (1932)
The quote comes from Oscar Wilde. Recollections by Jean Paul Raymond & Charles Ricketts (1932), a posthumous publication in which the passage is presented as a conversation (on page 22). Ricketts said about Wilde that he was 'the kindest and most childlike nature' he had ever met.