The Philadelphia Inquirer - Monday, May 6, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
SALE OF WILDE'S EFFECTS.
Rowdy Vulgarity Abundantly Present at the Tite Street Auction.
Special Cable to the Inquirer, Copyright 1895.
LONDON, May 5. — Not the least tragic, though the least revolting of the stages in the fall of Oscar Wilde, was the sale of his effects in his deserted house in Tite street.
Tite street is one of the new streets of upper-class houses in Chelsea. Back of it is a narrow slum lane of the worst description. On the day of the sale there was a crowd, largely drawn from this Paradise lane. The house is not large, but such as might be kept by a well-to-do artist, and the appointments have the aesthetic stamp all over. Wall papers and ceilings exhibited a curious and usually palatial taste.
The imprisoned man's books were sold in lots. Many were French, and as one noted an odd volume of Memiek's great selection of the fragments of the Greek comic writers one remembered Wilde's avowal to another literary man that there were only two languages that he really enjoyed—French and Greek. And he was indeed a first-rate classic and wrote French, if not as perfectly as he did English, well enough for an average Frenchman.
The specialties of the sale were Whistler pictures and—most perfect of Oscarian paradoxes—Carlyle's writing table, which fetched a fair relic price, sixteen guineas. An autograph letter of Keats did not bring as many shillings.
Rowdy vulgarity was abundantly present. One person raised some laughter by offensive remarks.