Daniel A. Novak

Picturing Wilde: Christopher Millard’s “Iconography of Oscar Wilde”

The Wilde family album [...] if only it had been so simple. Oh, it existed—three of them in fact—alongside the three volumes of press cuttings, caricatures of him and parodies of his work: you would have expected no less from the master self-publicist. The sherrif’s men sold all six for twenty-five shillings along with everything else in his Tite Street home the day before the Crown took him to court the first time... But the dispersal of those volumes is part of our family story. It had to be so; there was something Greek and inevitable about his downfall... —Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album 5

If Re-Collecting Were Forgetting: Forged Bodies and Forgotten Labor in "Little Dorrit"

In a word, it was represented ... that many people select their models, much as the painters, just now mentioned, select theirs; and that, whereas in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a Dog-stealer will annually be found embodying the cardinal virtues, on account of his eyelashes, or his chin, or his legs (thereby planting thorns of confusion in the breast of the more observant students of nature), so, in the great social Exhibition, accessories are often accepted in lieu of the internal character. (Little Dorrit 190-91)