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From Primedia Publications
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Wilde about Nebraska
Young Irishman Oscar Wilde passed through Lincoln, Nebraska, in April, 1882, lecturing on aesthetics and criticizing the architecture of the University of Nebraska
By Elizabeth Parker
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The good people of Lincoln had certainly never seen the like. The intrepid Oscar romped about the dusty streets in his good-humored way while farmers halted to stare at the young man in embroidered velvet knee britches, silk stockings and a bottle-green coat trimmed in fur. (He'd brought the fur "to throw over the ugliness of American sofas.") His strapping 6'3" frame contrasted with his ardent, expressive eyes and long, sweeping hair.
Why had he come? Young Oscar was a celebrity in England. He had won Oxford scholarship prizes and published poetry, and his witty conversation made him a much-sought-after dinner guest. The aesthetic movement, with Wilde as its leader, had swept over England. Dreamy youths in knee breeches languished, their soulful eyes on books of poetry. Crying for sensitivity, their motto was "art for art's sake." Their favorite expressions were "too too," "how utterly utter" and "too preciously sublime."
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The idea of a lecture tour had been proposed to Oscar by a friend: "I was asked how the American public could be brought to understand the aesthetic craze, and I suggested you be hired to give a course of lectures in the costume of an aesthete, with a sunflower in your buttonhole and a poppy or lily in your medieval hand."
Oscar Wilde delivered his lecture on the aesthetic movement in 33 states and central and eastern Canada. In the middle of it all was Nebraska. Lincolnites were ripe for diversion. They'd struggled through droughts, prairie fires, insect plagues, and loneliness. Now they wanted more than mere survival; they craved entertainment. Between 1880 and 1920, "opera houses" on main streets throughout the land booked musical programs, minstrel shows, melodramas, and lecture tours by traveling celebrity speakers.
If Nebraskans craved lectures of this sort, Oscar was only too happy to oblige. Besides, he needed money, and his promoter, Richard D'Oyly Carte, offered to pay all travel expenses and give him half the net receipts.
Wilde arrived in New York City on January 2, 1882, aboard the Arizona. (When he passed through customs the next day and was asked if he had anything to declare, he's said to have replied, "I have nothing to declare except my genius.") By the time he arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 23rd, he'd visited some 60 cities, a few of them more than once. In Lincoln he stayed at the Arlington Hotel, on the corner of 9th and Q Streets, at the site of the north entrance to what is now Barry's Cafe. He thought the hotel admirable, reporting "it was not only one of the best he had stopped at, but was decidedly the best one west of the Mississippi, not excepting San Francisco."
Elizabeth Parker is an occassional contributor to Historic Traveler.
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