In fall 2008, The Morgan Library & Museum received the gift of a highly important bound collection of Oscar Wilde's letters and manuscripts, the whereabouts of which has been unknown to scholars for over half a century. This digital facsimile provides images and transcriptions of all the items housed in the volume.

The red-leather-bound volume, totaling just over fifty handwritten pages, comprises nine manuscripts of poems and prose pieces and four important letters that illuminate the life and work of the celebrated writer, dramatist, aesthete, wit, and self-proclaimed "lord of language." Of special note are the earliest surviving letter from Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (called "Bosie,"); a manuscript of the story "The Selfish Giant" in the hand of Wilde's wife, Constance; the only surviving autograph manuscripts of Wilde's Poems in Prose; and a letter in which Wilde reiterated his famous claim that art is "useless."

When this photograph was taken in January 1882, Oscar Wilde had not yet written "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) and the plays that would make him famous in the next decade. Twenty-seven years old, he had to his credit only an unproduced melodrama, "Vera," and a controversial book of verse. He had, however, created a position for himself in London society as a wit and a dandy, promoting the cause of the English aesthetic movement through his dazzling conversation.

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