Image: Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony, albumen cabinet card, 1883
Reproduced courtesy of and © National Portrait Gallery, London
One autumn evening in 1883 Sutton Coldfield was visited by a rising figure in the literary world. He had been born in Dublin. His father was a solicitor and his mother was a poet and translator. He was educated at a boarding school in Enniskillen and at Magdalen College, Oxford. His Poems were published in 1881, all four editions selling out within a year. He was the author of two plays, Vera and (1882) The Duchess of Padua (1883). He had spent all of 1882 on a lecture tour of America. He then spent several months living in Paris. He was just a few weeks away from his thirtieth birthday when he arrived in Sutton. He was, of course, Oscar Wilde.
It was the Sutton Coldfield Institute – which I wrote about in my last contribution to this website – which invited Wilde to speak in the town. Wilde had a reputation for dressing flamboyantly, favouring a velvet jacket, knee breeches and large bow ties. If this was the man the people of Sutton were expecting to see that night, they were to be disappointed. Wilde appeared on the platform dressed soberly in a dress coat, proper trousers and a black cravat. He’d even had his long, curly hair cut! Wilde was in Sutton to talk about his impressions of America. It was a lecture he had given in many towns across Britain.
During his lecture Wilde ranged across the states of America, with some general reflections on the customs and attitudes of the country. He described Chinatown, near San Francisco, as ‘a beautiful little place.’ In New Orleans, he observed, French ‘was not spoken as one heard it now in Paris but as it used to be spoken a century of two ago.’ The names of towns taken from French or Spanish ‘were usually elegant and beautiful’ whereas those with an English derivation were ‘abominable.’ He cited Griggsville in Illinois, ‘named after a prominent citizen … The name created in him (Wilde) such a feeling of abhorrence that he decided not to lecture there unless it was altered. The inhabitants, he might tell them, preferred the old name of their town to his lecture.’ He told of his visit to the mining town of Leadsville in Colorado, where a notice over the orchestra in the music room observed, ‘Please don’t shoot at the pianist; he’s doing his best.’ It was far from Wilde’s best joke, but the people of Sutton laughed all the same.
Wilde’s remarks about the American way-of-life reflected on how people dressed and the railways. His journeys on the railways had been spoilt by the ‘excruciating discords of the steam whistles’ and the news boys constantly hawking their wares. The Americans seemed always to be in a hurry, he observed, but were very comfortably dressed.  On the subject of dress, he made clear his dislike of tight-lacing on females. It was ‘deplorable’ and proof clothes should be designed by artists not milliners. Wilde also offered some thoughts on how to bring up children – he was to marry in 1884 and become a father the following year – and, just for good measure, informed Suttonians that they really should decorate their breakfast rooms in yellows and blues.
The journalists present described the lecture as ‘decidedly interesting … the reverse of dull … (Wilde’s) descriptive power is occasionally of a very high order.’  Few of the inhabitants of Sutton had visited America or were ever likely to.  They laughed in all the right places, but seemed more interested in his remarks about women’s dresses than about the piano players of Colorado. It was reported that they showed ‘somewhat cold curiosity ‘during the lecture and at the end Wilde was ‘rather coldly received.’
Oscar Wilde may never have returned to Sutton. His plays have, though – many times.
Stephen Roberts, January 2021