The products of a stormy summer at Villa Diodati in 1816 have been well documented. Less well-known, but of no less literary interest, are the products of a stormy exchange of letters in the spring and summer of 1877. In correspondence with Arturo Michel Tafani, a don of Italian descent with a short-lived career in England before returning to his home country, a young Oscar Wilde thrashed out his youthful ideas about religion and mooted a possible conversion to Catholicism. That conversion was later realised shortly before his death in 1900, almost at the very turn of the nineteenth century. 

The correspondence between Tafani and Wilde, in so far as it has been recovered, centres largely on Wilde’s rewriting, seemingly on a whim, of Nathanial Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, first published in 1860. The last of Hawthorne’s four major romances, the novel was apparently casual reading for the young Wilde, but in his travels around Italy, he struck upon the idea of how the novel might be more rewritten in a style more sympathetic to the Old World and its religious heritage. Further explanation for the project and how it proceeded is given amply by Wilde in his letters to Tafani, which I will allow to speak for themselves. 

The novel could be considered juvenilia, as its beginning precedes Wilde’s ‘Ravenna’, written during the same trip to Italy. While Wilde won the Newdigate prize in 1878 with ‘Ravenna’, The Faun of Rome was buried by Wilde. Wilde was not so proud of his youthful work as Leigh Hunt or Lord Byron, and he was clearly not taken with the novel genre, as The Faun was succeeded only by The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Faun did, however, provide fodder for Wilde when seeking inspiration in some of his other writings; there are clear echoes in the language and characterisation of several of his plays, as well as Dorian Gray itself. This edition publishes the novel in full for the first time. Some small snatches of it, which made it into Wilde’s later works and into history as his aphorisms, will resonate with the close reader, but I hope that it will otherwise present a fresh experience to even the most studied Wilde scholar. In the interest of providing context to Wilde’s project, the correspondence between Wilde and Tafani correspondence is reproduced, such as it has been recovered. This edition’s, as the first broad introduction to the novel, contains also a bloom of footnotes that, I hope, will illustrate to the reader the important foundational position of this text in Wilde’s œuvre. The text also sheds light on narratives about Wilde that insist that his literary achievements came to him later in life, more by chance than concerted effort. The novel also invites us to reconsider some of the narratives around Wilde’s conversion, his engagement with the major American novelists of the nineteenth-century, and his generic preferences. The possibility that Wilde avoided the novel form for much of his career because The Faun had suggested it was a perilous form that risked showing too much of the author—unlike, for example, drama, poetry, or short fiction—is tantalising in the light of the devastating consequences for Wilde of the publication of his second and last effort in the genre.

The Wilde manuscripts and correspondence

By way of introduction to the process of recovering Wilde’s writings and producing this edition, a word should be said about Wilde’s correspondent. Although space does not allow an extensive examination of Arturo Michel Tafani’s life and work, he is a fascinating figure who has by and large been erased from discussions of nineteenth-century Aestheticism at Oxford, in favour of a focus on Walter Pater et al. Tafani appears not at all in some of the major biographies of Wilde’s life, and although only speculation, it seems likely that the relationship between the two ended abruptly and perhaps acrimoniously.

Tafani was the sole offspring resulting from a bigamous marriage between a wealthy Italian Count and the only daughter of a minor Irish Lord, Anna Bourke. Arturo was still an infant when his grandfather succeeded to the title of 5th Earl of the County of Mayo in 1849, and did not meet his grandfather until after his mother’s death in 1859, when the Bourke family agreed to acknowledge the child. At that time, the young Arturo was removed to Ireland, and then sent on to boarding school, first in the Connemara, in the neighbouring county, then in Dublin, and finally in the south of England. Tafani spent several years at the University of Oxford as a classical scholar, combining his teaching of Latin with research in the vernacular Italian writings of the Renaissance. The cultural commonalities that he shared with Wilde led to their forming a firm friendship that apparently sprung up in early 1875, at the end of Wilde’s first year of study, and ended abruptly with Tafani’s departure from Oxford in October 1878. 

The manuscript of Wilde’s retelling of The Marble Faun, it seems, left Oxford with Tafani. It was left, along with the rest of Tafani’s papers and his library, to Sapienza, Università di Roma, upon Tafani’s death in January 1901, only a few months after Wilde’s. Tafani never married, and had no children, and his archive was left mostly undisturbed, and without comprehensive cataloguing, until October 2000, when Ginevra Salvadori, then a graduate student, determined to devote their time to making sense of the tangle of papers there. Salvadori hit upon the correspondence between Tafani and Wilde in the spring of 2001, and at first set it to one side. When portions of the manuscript of Wilde’s first novel were also located amongst the papers, the University extended an invitation to me to collaborate on finishing the cataloguing of Tafani’s papers and reconstructing the novel, as far as was possible.

That the novel remains in its complete form suggests that Tafani valued Wilde’s creative efforts, although he initially disapproved of the project. That these manuscripts bear only minor amendments in the hand of Wilde, suggests that Tafani was Wilde’s first and only reader. Wilde’s own copy of the first two chapters, referenced in his letters, has never been found, and may be entirely lost to us. The correspondence between Tafani and Wilde is in a less complete state. 

Finally, one more word more, this time about this edition’s digital presentation. The state of the field of English Literature is such that digital tools supplement and complement our texts more with each passing year. With an entirely new text, such as this one, it behooves us to attempt a ‘digital first’ presentation of the text that Wilde produced in fragmentary form across the period of several months, and never fully drew together. The greater possibilities for interweaving text, commentary, and supplementary material offered by a digital edition is such that adopting the traditional printed form of an appendix of letters seemed unfair to the material. The letters between Wilde and Tafani are thus connected to the portions of Wilde’s text which were produced contemporaneously, such as that may be established. Much of Wilde’s text is not dated, although it was written over the course of almost two months. 

Acknowledgments

My debt to Ginevra for her discovery and to La Sapienza for their generous support of me while working on the Tafani archive is immeasurable. In completing this study, I have also benefited greatly from the curators and holders of the various collections of Wilde’s papers, in particular at the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Bodleian. Scholars of Wilde’s work will do well to immerse themselves in these archives. I am indebted to those who have dedicated their lives’ work to the curation, examination and careful study of Wilde’s texts, personal and professional.

Nate Maturin, Magdalen College, Oxford, 17 January 2017