[WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)] - photo 1
[WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)] - photo 2
[WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)] - photo 3
[WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)] - photo 4

[WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)]

Lot 183
10.07.2024 10:30UTC +00:00
Classic
Sold
£ 5 292
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1249724
Lot 183 | [WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)]
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
[WILDE, Oscar (1854-1900)]
The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson and William Shenstone. London: G. Routledge, 1858.
From the library of Oscar Wilde as a schoolboy: a book of eighteenth-century English poetry inscribed ‘Oscar Wilde March 18th 1868’ and ‘Oscar Wilde / Portora Royal School’. A further annotation in Wilde’s hand, on p.13, records Dr Johnson as the source of a line in Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Traveller’. In 1864, Wilde left his home in Merrion Square, Dublin, for the Portora Royal School around a hundred miles north-west in Enniskillen. ‘Portora Royal, which was known as “The Eton of Ireland”, had a distinctly English ethos. It was one of the ‘Royal Schools of Ulster’, founded at the time of the British plantation of the seventeenth century, and it catered exclusively for the children of elite Anglo-Irish Protestants like the Wildes’ (Wright). Oscar excelled in his studies of the classics and read widely across English and European literature, developing a love for the book as a physical object and spending in his final year at the school a sum roughly equivalent to a quarter of his year’s board and tuition on books. We are able to trace just one earlier example of Wilde’s schoolboy ownership inscription at auction, in a French book by Voltaire inscribed by Wilde in 1865 which sold at Sotheby’s in 1921 and again at Bloomsbury in 2013. Wright, Oscar's Books: A Journey Around the Library of Oscar Wilde, 2008.

Octavo (162 x 101mm). Frontispiece and 7 engraved plates, 12pp. ads at rear (occasional marginal thumbing and staining). Original blue cloth gilt (spine panel detached, boards very tender and front free endpaper just holding, cloth somewhat marked). Provenance: Oscar Wilde (1854-1900; inscriptions on front free endpaper and title) – J. Oswald Jones (inscription on half-title) – J. Harding (bookplate on front pastedown).
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
Preview
10.07.2024 – 10.07.2024
Phone +44 (0)20 7839 9060
Email
4FQ.AYGKAGLUQ@FO3G@
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