Fair Copy Manuscript of Oscar Wilde's 'The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue'

Abstract

AS recently as 2007, the whereabouts of a fair copy manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’ remained unknown. In the introduction to the Oxford English Texts edition of Wilde’s published criticism, editor Josephine M. Guy writes: ‘it must be presumed that’ the manuscript ‘has either been destroyed or (more likely) that it remains in private hands’; she bemoans the ‘paucity of manuscript evidence’ for the essay.1 Little information has emerged about the composition of ‘The Decay of Lying’, which appeared in the January 1889 issue of the Nineteenth Century and then was reprinted, in revised form, in the essay collection Intentions (1891). The essay is mentioned in passing in several of Wilde’s letters, and then only after its completion. In his autobiography, William Butler Yeats recalls hearing Wilde read from the proofs at a December 1888 dinner.2 A fragmented manuscript is held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, but dating or even ordering the disparate sections definitively has proved challenging. As Guy observes, the ‘incomplete twenty-page holograph entitled “On the Decay of Lying” contains some discontinuous sheets’; even though the first six folios ‘are continuous with each other, they appear to derive from two different drafts’.3 The same problems recur in other areas of the document. Guy proposes a stemma that results in the conclusion that some folios belong to the ‘earliest known draft’, some are associated with a ‘revised and expanded draft’, and others are linked with a ‘later draft’.4 Especially noteworthy here is her speculation that whereas the first two drafts take the form of a continuous critical essay, the ‘later draft’ assigns text to speakers, thus creating a dialogue between two interlocutors, Cyril and Vivian, the form in which ‘The Decay of Lying’ was published in 1889.