Oscar Wilde

Weird Tales printed Oscar Wilde once. The November 1925 issue ran The Young King on page 690 under the heading “Weird Story Reprints, No. 5,” with the byline “By OSCAR WILDE.” ISFDB lists no other Wilde work in the original magazine, and “The Canterville Ghost” is not among its reprints.

The story first ran in the Christmas number of The Lady’s Pictorial in December 1888, illustrated by Bernard Partridge, and Wilde collected it in A House of Pomegranates in 1891. A boy raised by a goatherd is brought to court as the old king’s heir. On the night before his coronation he dreams of the weavers, the pearl diver, and the ruby miners whose labor made his robe, his scepter, and his crown, and in the morning he goes to the cathedral in his goatherd’s clothes. The pearl-diver dream uses period racial language, and the Library’s copy carries a note to that effect.

Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin. His mother, Jane, wrote poetry as “Speranza,” and his great-uncle was Charles Maturin, author of the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer. In exile after prison he called himself “Sebastian Melmoth,” after Saint Sebastian and Maturin’s wanderer. He died in Paris on 30 November 1900 and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.