Oscar Wilde’s Reading of Popular Science

Abstract

It was Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand who, in their edition of Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks in 1989, helped to illuminate the breadth and depth of Wilde’s reading of contemporary scientific literature while an undergraduate.1 Noting his interest in the work of the scientists Clifford, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall, Smith and Helfand’s editorial apparatus has been supplemented in the years since publication by further discoveries, including Wilde’s reading of the scientists Justus von Liebig and Eduard Oscar Schmidt, amongst others.2 But a number of Wilde’s entries remain unattributed. This note will address some of these entries and, in so doing, establish Wilde’s familiarity with figures such as George James Allman and Emil du Bois-Reymond, insights new to Wilde studies. Wilde’s reading of Spencer was significant: from Smith and Helfand, we know that he had read The Study of Sociology (1873) and was aware of the argument of First Principles (1862), as well as, through Clifford, quoting from the Principles of Psychology (1855). One entry, under the title ‘Thought’, which escaped the editors, however, was culled from Spencer’s essay on ‘Mental Science and Sociology’, first published in the Popular Science Monthly in October 1873 and reprinted in The Study of Sociology: A wave of opinion[,] reaching a certain height[,] cannot be changed by any evidence or argument·[,] but has to spend itself in the gradual course of things before a reaction takes place· (CB 2)