[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Robert Carson: this is the Virtual Jewel Box, the podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. I'm Robert Carson, associate Director of the Tanner, and today I'm talking with Randall Hoffman about Oscar Wilde's tour of the United States, including his stops in Utah. Tell us a little bit about yourself, about your work and how you came to this particular historical event as an object of interest.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah. I am currently an independent historian of LGBTQ plus Utah. All eras, all of it. I was actually bored one day. My father was sick out in Nevada and I was there in the summer helping him, and I had recently decided to subscribe to newspapers.com and I was just, I knew Oscar Wilde came to Utah and where he lectured and that was it.

So I typed in Oscar Wilde and I was curious what they were saying about Oscar Wildes when he came here and I started reading some of the news articles that people were writing during his tour around the United States. Then in 1882, and it was a really great Victorian homophobia and gender analysis that some of these newspapers were putting out there.

And I found it. Incredibly fascinating and adding a whole new depth to understanding Utah and this brief visit of Oscar Wilde.

Robert Carson: Can you just can you situate the tour in Oscar Wilde's career and in the history of Utah? Just give us the context for the tour when it happened, why it happened, and how long he was here for.

Randell Hoffman: Oscar Wild, that side of it first he was recently graduated from Oxford and was really trying to make a name for himself and push himself out there. He had the attitude that greatness should have already been given to him. He should have already been wildly successful. I always love sneaking and wild Sure.

Into the, it just happens. And this tour, it actually wasn't super uncommon. There were a lot of people, Americans and Europeans who would do these kinds of nationwide lecture tours. That was the thing to do in the eighties and nineties was go to America and you do a lecture tour or a performance tour.

Robert Carson: And this would be an evenings entertainment for people also, to go to a, to go to a lecture and hear someone talk about something. Yeah. For an hour. Absolutely

Randell Hoffman: imagine. It's hard to imagine now, but a world, there's no tv, there's not even radio in people's homes. People went out to things like this and, everyone knows of Oscar Wilde, so let's go check him out for an hour.

Or knowing him, it was probably him talking for three hours. I don't remember how long it was. But yeah, I guess transitioning to what was happening nationally there was, this is late Victorian era in retrospect, it's the Victorian era is starting to wrap up. And there's a lot of, I don't want say confusion or even conversation, but a lot of people socially trying to figure out what.

Is gender in the United States. And how does race configure into that? This is several decades after the Civil War. Americans, white Americans have figured out how to put Jim Crow in place how to exclude the Irish, how to exclude the Chinese. So a lot of those systems are pretty well in place.

And that's what Oscar Wilde is coming into. The United States is also still expanding, California and the Gold Rush has breached its peak, and California has become a state. We finally achieved Manifest Destiny, and Utah has already applied for statehood several times and has gone through the Utah war and Federal occupation and is really trying to.

Manage a landscape and create a settlement here.

Robert Carson: Can you say a little bit more specifically, in 1882, what was the status of I don't know anything. Oh, I don't know anything about Utah history. I just moved here six months ago. So yeah. Could you, 1882 in Utah. What is the

Randell Hoffman: political

Robert Carson: situation?

Randell Hoffman: We are a territory.

It's the territory of Utah. Utah becomes a state in 1896. And so there is still a lot of vying. It's still similar that Mormonism in Utah are conflated together, and so both Utah and Mormonism are trying to vie for national attention or national acceptance rather. And getting over polygamy, leaving the country when it was Mexico and trying to show their patriotism and, yeah. Okay great. And I should say that's why there were multiple applications for statehood was a lot of the time the issue was polygamy. We just didn't have the attention or even the economy that like California, Nevada, Oregon had. And so it was more of social, political trying to get into the mainstream.

Robert Carson: I see. Anything you wanna say about I hope this is being picked up, right? Is there anything you wanna say about the word Victorian and what it means? It names the rate of a particular monarch, but it means so much more than that. Is there anything you want to, can you help flesh out the term Victorian for to us to understand the kind of intellectual, ideological, social context that we're talking about here?

Randell Hoffman: Absolutely. That's a really great question. You can talk about Victorian in so many other ways. I'm on the Board of Preservation Utah, and we talk about Victorian architectural styles a lot, which we have a lot of here in Salt Lake City. The Victorian era is generally when Salt Lake City and much of Utah is settled.

So you do see that in a lot of the cultural foundings and foundations architecture. Yes, it's Queen Victoria in England. And it's, there is also Edwardian who is after her, these British monarchial reigns that also do help define American culture because we still are linked to a lot of Anglo American relations there.

In terms of Oscar Wild, aesthetically and artistically Wild is trying to push against Victorian norms, which lent a lot to industry. Know wallpapers are being mass produced, so everyone has the same wallpaper. Everyone has to dress the same. Conformity was a big thing, and this is when you get of course it existed before, but more than ever before you have people, lower and middle class people aspiring to what the wealthy people are doing.

So they're trying to dress like the wealthy people talk, like the wealthy people act like the wealthy people. If the wealthy people are Republicans, we're Republicans, stuff like that. When it comes to. Queerness, which of course comes up a lot in Oscar Wilde or rather gender expression. It was still the same thing.

There was a lot of conformity. Part of what I also love about reading some stuff from the Victorian era is this way of talking about homosexuality without actually talking about it. Or talking about sodomy as the crime which shall not be spoken or all these euphemisms. After wild's 1896 trial they start referring to other people are comparing other people to wild making that subtle reference that, they're like him.

And

Robert Carson: one of the things that comes to mind when thinking about the Victorian era in the United States is you have. Industry. Yeah. Wage labor. And then you have an intensified scrutiny of and worry about the proper roles that people should play in the home, proper roles for men and women. And it seems interesting to me that the settlement of the American West often included social and political advancements for women far in advance of what was going on in the more industrialized East coast, simply by necessity.

Like everyone had to be able to pull their own weight industrially or economically. And so is there anything about that, about Yeah, the role of, is it too late in 1882 to talk about pioneers? It's too late for that,

Randell Hoffman: right? Yeah. I would say the pioneer era by the eighties is done, especially with 18, I believe it was 76.

I always get the year wrong, 79. I always get the year when the Transcontinental Railroad come, that's the official end. It was the late seventies. I don't have the year in front of me. That's the end of the pioneer era. No longer do you have people, walking across the planes, they're taking the railroad at least part of the way.

Robert Carson: And so this would be a moment in which this region would be seen in a sense to be catching up with the sort of more modern, leading edge of Victorian institutions practices.

Randell Hoffman: That I think that's a good way to put it and to think about it. 1882, that's when Wild comes to visit and setting the context pioneers, air quotes had been here since 1847, right?

Mormon pioneers. People had been coming through previously. That's, a good 50, almost 50 years that people have been here.

Robert Carson: Okay. So while is doing this lecture tour all across the United States, he's still in his twenties. I think this, he's published, I think some poems, a few essays, book reviews.

This is before picture of Dorian Gray, which is in 18 90, 91. Yeah. So at this point he's more of a personality Yeah. Than anything. Yeah. And in fact, there's a lot of people who think about the history of celebrity and the history of celebrity culture. Think of wild, a kind of inaugural figure for a certain type of fame, just for being a particular kind of person.

Absolutely. In a way. And so that's the, that's the marketing context for lack of a better term, that's at stake here with Wild's Tour. So he comes to Utah on, I think. He comes to Utah on his journey out west and then stops again on his way back, if I have that right.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah.

Where does he stop? So he first comes in, I believe it's March, early March into Ogden, which is where the Transcontinental Railroad went through. Didn't officially meet in Ogden, but and that was pretty typical. On either side of Ogden, on the railroad, there weren't a lot of stops, especially coming from the east, you're going through a lot of mountains and it's pretty windy, so they come into Ogden and take a break so passengers would have enough time to, it wasn't just a quick five minute stop people on and off.

I don't know how long it was, but it was long enough for people to go into town, get a meal, walk about, and then get back on the train. So maybe 30, 45 minutes. And that's when we first see Wild in Utah. Newspapers at being mentioned that he's coming to Utah, people the whole year of 1882. He is all over Utah.

Newspapers, where he is at and what he's doing. There's some confusion. The first, some of the first reports, like in the standard examiner report that Oscar Wilde is coming to Utah, everyone's excited. Then it turns out, oh, he is just stopping in Octa. He's not actually coming to Utah. And then that is some of the question that some of the reporters ask.

I believe it was the Salt Lake Tribune asked him are you going to ever come back to Utah? Are you gonna, do you have plans to lecture in Utah? And Wild's response is essentially we'll see. I'm on my way out to Nevada and California maybe on my way back. So I, it was a combination of, I don't know if they were planning on Utah.

'cause it wasn't necessarily a big metropolis that people wanted to stop in. And it was also far enough out in the lecture that they just, or the lecture tour that they just didn't really want to. Plan that far ahead. It did seem, as I looked at some of the other stops, they planned about a few weeks, a month ahead out and they just weren't there yet.

So

Robert Carson: he does return. He does. Stop it. Stop. And do some talking on his way back. Tell us about that.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah, so after he lectures in Nevada, California, he mostly Northern California Bay Area. So he does leave Ogden. And it's actually interesting out in some of these other camps I believe Eureka, CCA and Elko, I believe Reno as well, when he gets off the train, he's mobbed by that's the word.

The newspapers u use mobbed by impersonators, which in Victorian culture is incredibly offensive and lowly and oh, it's just disgusting. These people, these low lives doing

Robert Carson: that is dressing up as Oscar Wild as Oscar Wilde, right? Yeah. They're

Randell Hoffman: in

Robert Carson: like the frock coat, the velvet breaches a sunflower and a sunflower.

Yes.

Randell Hoffman: And he just loves it. He thinks it's hilarious. He is very flattered by it. And of course that means he's famous because people know him and they're dressing up like him and he's made it.

Robert Carson: Somewhere in one of his plays or somewhere he says, if there's one thing worse than being talked about, it's not being talked about.

Yeah. And this would be an achievement of a, he just loves that. He loves it. And you talk about sensitive young men who would show up to see Oscar Wilde dressed up as him. Can you speculate at all about the kind of motivations going on there that is one could imagine people impersonating someone to mock them.

And that's the sense in which you earlier referred to. Could there have been something else going on?

Randell Hoffman: And this is partly me inserting myself, as a queer person, reading the words of another queer person, Oscar Wilde. I. See Oscar Wilde advocating for a world where anyone can be what they want, wear what they want, do what they want, which is the complete opposite of Victorian culture.

If you're a man, you go off and you do X, Y, and Z. If you're a woman, you go do this in America, which was different than England. Women stayed at home, men went off and tilled the fields and made a difference. And were, that patriotic, nationalist figure. In between some of those lines, I feel like I see wild, slowly coming out and I'm, I do wonder if some other young men also saw that there are also lots of photographs and depictions of wild going around as very luxurious.

He deliberately, when during the lecture tour, when. Press come into his hotel rooms to interview. He is deliberately in a dimly lit room wearing furs lounging on the couch, probably smoking or drinking. And I mean from any movie, if you've seen Down Abbey I recently watched Gentleman Jack this that's more regency, but you went and you saw sat proper properly on these chairs and couches and conversed face to face.

You were not lounging and you were not casual. And even his long hair was provocative. So I do wonder in some ways if some other young men were. Excited by seeing that in newspapers. And then he comes and they're so excited to see him.

Robert Carson: So it's a very e So for wild, it's a very energetic, deliberate expression of a kind of looseness or a kind of, or a kind of casualness.

Yeah. It's a very cultivated slaws. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And that, that, that appears. Easy and careless, but which is actually the result of considerable aesthetic reflection, decision making scrutiny of different styles and materials that one could use. Yeah. So there's an interesting interplay between, everyone just being themselves on one hand, but then on the other hand, thinking about your own appearance or your own personality as a work of art.

Yes. Which you can and should cultivate in a very deliberate way. Yeah. And so that, that interest on developing oneself in, not just in Victorian moral terms, but in aesthetic terms, it's also a kind of a different way of thinking about what it means to be a person. Yeah. That wild is demonstrating or asserting or offering.

Randell Hoffman: And again, that is the complete opposite of Victorian culture and he's made fun for that. Or of that.

Robert Carson: So you're looking through newspaper archives. One thing I noticed in looking, whenever you look at newspapers from that era, broadly speaking, first of all, I'm always struck by just the sheer number of newspapers there are in any given city.

Oh yeah. Compared to today. Yeah. And the and the length and vigor of the writing in a way. There's something if you can get access to newspaper archives from the 19th century, I would encourage anyone to look at them to just discover, oh, what there are different ways in which a culture can be literate.

And so this is an intensely print based culture. People just spend a lot of time reading about things because there's really no other way to find out, not a lot of what's going on. Pictures. And so tell us about the newspaper coverage of the lectures when he comes back.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah, so he goes out to California, comes back and he ultimately lectures in Salt Lake City.

I believe he stays here for three days. He typically would enter the women's entrance to the hotels. I partly, so it was more secretive, but partly also just to like gender bend the whole thing. People find out, and it's reported in the newspaper that, several women were following him. He gets in the afternoon, I believe, stays at his hotel and he just stays in his hotel and drinks.

That is a big pattern. He is drinking a lot. He's very unhappy. This tour is beneath himself and he doesn't really want to do this, and he copes with that, with expensive wine. There

Robert Carson: are worse, there are better

Randell Hoffman: and worse ways to cope with that kind of feeling. Yeah sure. But also a queer man in the Victorian era who can't fully be himself, who's advocating for people to be themselves.

This is very complicated and I imagine taxing on him. Sure. He takes a tour with the president of the church at the time and checks out Temple Square and they go into the tabernacle and look at things. It seems like a few of his wives might be with him. And it's very famous. You can look it up online.

He writes back home about these ugly dowdy wives and how dumb the Mormons are. He is not impressed at all and he thinks the city is ugly. And he, when they're in the tabernacle, he draws a picture of the, the domed building. I think he compares it to a tea kettle. And then he draws this little doodle of the man sitting in a pew, and then all his wives next to him.

Three or four women sitting next to him. Those are the wives. And then,

Robert Carson: first of all, what a fascinating juxtaposition of two different Yes. Non-normative kinds of sexual or reproductive life, right? Yeah. On one hand we have Oscar Wilde, right? And then on the other hand we have polygamy, which was also scorned by mainstream Victorian society, right?

And rather rigorously persecuted, but

Randell Hoffman: morally, at the times, Mormons are, textbook Victorian. Yeah. Very prudish chaste aligned with a lot of those Victorian Christian morals,

Robert Carson: But with an interesting little exception Yes. Carved out. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Part of the tour was also occasioned by of a Gilbert and Sullivan play Patience.

Yeah. Which was a parody of the aesthetic movement. And I think I'm gonna look up the big song from that. Yeah. If you're anxious for, to shine in the high aesthetic line. That, that I think I

Randell Hoffman: have that in my, in the paper. Yeah. Yeah. So this post Civil War United States is incredibly structured by race and gender.

Again, Irish and Chinese are being prejudiced against. There are certain Europeans who are not considered white. Irish is one of those any Eastern European, Southern European is not white. You. Yugo Slobin, you are Sicilian, you're Italian, you're not white. As well as the Chinese. And then of course Jim Crow laws being prejudiced against black Americans at the time.

What's fascinating and Melanie Mendelssohn has done a really good job at analyzing. This is across the nation. There are depictions of Oscar Wild. These are cartoons of Oscar Wild as a black man or in black face. And you can tell these are, his characters because of some of the clothes, like you mentioned, the breaches that he liked to wore.

He liked that 15th century, 16th century fashion. And then there's a sunflower in the lapel. And so that's supposed to be wild.

Robert Carson: It's a, this is, this taps into the tradition of minstrelsy.

Randell Hoffman: Minstrelsy is incredibly connected to this. This is when entertainment at circuses and putting, quote unquote putting freaks on the pedestal is, people are going to the circus or shows to see these kinds of people.

And in these cartoons, they're essentially saying that Oscar Wilde is no better than that. He's Irish, which the English are willing to look past because of his upbringing. And he's able to fake a British accent. And he comes from an Anglo settler family. Yeah. He's wealthy pro Anglo in America though, they're saying, we know what you are, we know you're Irish, we know that you're no good.

And. While they're doing that, they're able to poke fun at his effeminacy and how incredibly eccentric he is, which eccentric is one of those Victorian ways of talking about queer people without actually calling them or describing what they do. Oh, he's eccentric. He's just that way.

Sensitive. Yeah,

Robert Carson: exactly. So that's a real, so that's worth just pausing on for a moment there. Yeah. In these cartoon depictions of Oscar Wilde as. Black. Yeah. We have a number of different kinds of ideological categories coming together. Oh, there's so much crossing right there.

We have, minstrelsy is a massively influential cultural trope in American culture in the 19th century. So there's that. There's also just flagging his race itself as something to scrutinize, something to think about. So it's also a kind of indirect pointing at his Irishness.

Yeah. And then, and all of that is itself a demonstration of a kind of artificiality or a kind of putting on of appearances. Which is also part of what people have a problem with. Yeah. With wild. Yeah. Is that you're pretending to be something.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah. And so that and that part, they're a little bit more deliberate.

I've seen that in articles that he is a fake, he's a phony. He's putting on appearances.

Robert Carson: Yeah. So yeah, get us, take us through what the responses were to him specifically. We've talked about how he is been depicted about his celebrity status and the peculiarity of that. What do people actually have to say about him and what he is offering on this lecture tour?

Randell Hoffman: My approach to looking at it, I wanted to see how Utahans were reacting as I was looking at this. I wondered if others had also done some similar research how other states or territories reacted to him. There was a similar reaction when he went to it was either in Nebraska or Kansas which was.

Way less developed than the Wasatch front was. And the reaction was quite similar. These people are busy trying to make something out of nothing. You they're out in the plains mining, digging up mud, living in inside of hills. And here comes Oscar Wilde who wants to talk about decorating homes.

They're like, who the heck are you get outta here. You're a fake, you're a phony. Bye. We don't want you. And it was very similar here in Utah. It's dry, it's barren. There wasn't much to do. They're actually also trying to move into central and southern Utah at the time. There was a quote unquote recent article talking about the development of irrigation in Washington County.

In the Utah Historical quarterly, several months ago, a few issues ago. And it helped me understand that these, the masculine character in this region was doing exactly that. You were tilling the fields. You are trying to make a difference in expanding God's kingdom in Zion following the prophet's orders to develop irrigation and build homes and eradicate the natives.

And that was intrinsically tied to masculine identity here,

Robert Carson: And it's a sensibility that has a problem with leisure. Leisure causes anxiety. How do you have too much free time? Yeah. How are you using it? Are you using it usefully? Are you using it productively, morally? So there's a real, which is very

Randell Hoffman: Victorian.

Robert Carson: Exactly. Exactly. And so there's a real problem with or let me start over. So you have a population of people who have certain religious and moral commitments to certain ways of life, and who also by virtue of where they are, life is tough in a certain way. In a way that it, that is not tough in more urbanized settings.

Yeah. Yeah. And so you have an audience here that would be particularly sensitive to demonstrations of luxury leisure over refinement at the same time as the same community is feeling as though it's finally catching up with Yeah. A certain kind of modern development, which tends towards leisure time, consumer goods.

Things like that. Yeah. So there's a real kind of interesting ambivalence in, in these, in this people saying that wild is a fake, a phony, pretentious. That shows a certain kind of ambivalence on the part of the culture here. Yes. About how you should be using your time and wealth.

Yes. And what counts as a legitimate or an illegitimate use of your time and resources and what counts as a legitimate or illegitimate way of presenting yourself to the world. Yes.

Yeah.

Robert Carson: So there's a lot of anxiety or, that was the sense I had and read this. There's a lot of anxieties about different aspects of modernity that get expressed in this mockery of wild, it isn't just a problem with him, but that something about his way of presenting himself.

Sort of he's pressing on something. Yeah. That people are actually thinking about, and worried about. Yeah. And that is, once you have a certain amount of leisure and resources, what are you supposed to do with it?

Randell Hoffman: And who are you? Yeah. Yeah. Also that also, who are you? It's not a man working in the field 24 7.

Oh my goodness. The panic and anxiety sets in.

Robert Carson: So also, in addition to a kind of effeminacy, laziness is a big thing. The two are put together. Exactly. And

Randell Hoffman: wild is absolutely that embodied. Yes. And what I love about this very brief moment, the title of my paper, I changed it a few times and I finally settled on that one time Oscar Wild came to Utah.

'cause I love putting this in context or at least looking at the, he was here for two and a half days. However we can talk about so much.

Robert Carson: There, how many articles about wild? Easily. A couple dozen I imagine. Yes, and

Randell Hoffman: that's the great thing I love about it is for someone so many Utahans, specifically LDS Utahans hated, they could not stop talking about him.

They loved to talk about him and how bad he is. I'm like, okay, then stop talking about it. Move

Robert Carson: on. No, he's, yeah. And then in that sense, there's something a, there's something triggering about him. There's something triggering about it And also it's a kind of function of celebrity also, right?

Plays that is celebrities. Yeah. He plays that well. Yeah. Yeah. Celebrities are figures about whom. You or against whom you can define yourself against a celebrity in addition to identifying with them. Yeah. And so they're clearly opting to dis-identify with this celebrity figure in order to shore up a particular image of themself.

Randell Hoffman: And that's where we're able to understand this era of Utah so much better, without wild coming here. Sure. We would've known what men and women were doing. However wild coming here provides this excellent backdrop or foil, just like you're saying. He's pushing a button that normally would not have been pushed.

And it provides this great gender and queer analysis that helps us understand where Utah was. But also in some ways, a lot of this hasn't changed and we're able to understand Utah today from what we've inherited. I still feel like a lot of LDS morals and values still circulate around some of these Victorian norms, like we mentioned earlier.

And in order to understand a lot of that, it's important to know where this came from. Later on, 1896 is when, Oscar Wilde is tried in London for sodomy and found guilty, and that changes everything across at least the Western hemisphere. Sodomy laws and reactions to it become much more severe and there are actually general conference talks that same October calling for at least the eradication of what we would call homosexuals or gay people as long ago as that was.

We still operate on a lot of those norms. A lot of those things that we've inherited.

Robert Carson: Tell us about the lecture itself

Randell Hoffman: he gave. Yes. Yeah. I meant to come to that and, yeah.

Robert Carson: Yeah. It's, it's, in a way, it's perfectly symptomatic that we spent all this time talking about the context of the lecture, the celebrity pub.

Yeah. The publicity around the lecture. Yeah. Without actually getting to what he was actually talking about. Yeah. So what was he talking

Randell Hoffman: about? So he lectured at the salt Lake Theater, and by this time he had two lectures. Originally he only had one lecture on what he was calling the English Renaissance which of course he was a part of this, new era of poetry and literature and fashion.

However, he gave his newer lecture that he wrote while traveling on, home design, aesthetics, art, and a lot of it was about, again, counter Victorian culture. He said, everyone dresses the same, talks the same, has the same interest. All the women do needle point or make lace. All the men go work and never think about if anything.

And he was trying to push for individuality, uniqueness. People should consider what they find to be beautiful and then decorate their homes and their bodies with the clothes, with the art that they want. And so that was what his lecture was generally about. And it was mostly a non LDS audience that came to see him here in Salt Lake.

And that is the divide here. The more LDS leaning newspapers were incredibly, critical of him, whereas some of the more progressive, non-denominational or more secular newspapers or sources tended to write. More neutrally about him.

Robert Carson: Yeah. I think it's important to situate this in a kind of larger intellectual context that wild is working in, which is the movement of aestheticism.

Yeah. He wasn't the only one, there were others. And this is a complicated. About the importance of art and it gets complex,

Randell Hoffman: especially for an era when most people weren't even finishing middle school.

Robert Carson: Sure. But you have the incredible anxiety about the relationship between morality and beauty and ugliness, right?

Is there a reliable connection there, isn't there? What does it mean for something that is beautiful to be bad, right? Yeah. You have a disarticulation of the good, the true, the beautiful. And aestheticism says we're gonna go with this category of beauty or the beautiful or aesthetic experience, and we're going to invest in aesthetic experience as a source of meaning in one's life.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah.

Robert Carson: Yeah. And that has a, there are some major consequences that come from that, that I think, that I think have some, even some enduring relevance today. If you're in the aesthetic movement, you not only think that the fine arts are important. Yeah. You think that the role of art in your life is important for your own development almost as a religion?

Almost as a religion or even as a kind of substitute for religion In the dec decline of religious belief art comes into to take

Randell Hoffman: its place and there is deep meaning. You can really find yourself in that, and that's where I find the queerness Oscar Wilde. As he is going around to different cities, he has to read the audience and sometimes he makes the decision to be brave.

Sometimes he makes the decision to play it safe, depending on the lecture he's giving. There are some audiences. He comes out in a black suit and white tie, evening wear, as was the case in Salt Lake City, I guess he felt brave. He had a few too many drinks. Both are probably true. He decided to come out in his, calf length breaches with buttons and he had some buckle shoes, which, by that era was fashioned from like 200, 300 years prior.

For some audiences, he would get laughed off the stage in Salt Lake City. I think the crowd he attracted was fine with that. They're like, oh, that's what he wants to wear. But again, that's where I see the queerness is when and where am I gonna decide to be myself? When and where can I express myself and when do I need to retreat.

And I'm sure he didn't see it, but I can, having experienced that growing up, LDS going to BYU Idaho. I can personally relate to, having to play that game of, okay, what kind of space is this? How can I talk? Do I need to butch it up? Do I need to not talk about certain things, or is this a space where I can be more relaxed?

That's what wild is doing on his lecture tour.

Robert Carson: And in that kind of self fashioning Yeah he's also demonstrating or modeling certain principles, as you say for people to take up for their own consideration.

Randell Hoffman: It's very admirable. I see in this as well. He's being, not only that celebrity and influencer, but he's trying to make a difference.

He's trying to change things.

Robert Carson: I wanna talk a little bit. I have so he modified the lecture. Yeah. The lectures as the tour went on. Yeah. But we do have a kind of final published version of the lecture called Decorative Art in America. And I want to just go through some of the main ideas of this, because this is fascinating and it's not what you think it's going to be.

Yeah. When you actually read what he has to say. For aestheticism art is important, and if art is important in the development of your life, then your environment becomes incredibly important because your environment affects you, it affects your development. And this is an idea that hasn't gone away at all.

That as we think about the kinds of colors and toys that children should be exposed to, right? Sure. We think about the effects of d of lighting and temperature on thought, things like that. So for the aesthetic movement in the late 19th century, this question about your environment affecting you really takes on a kind of a, urgency. And he says, and I'll just go through a couple ideas from this lecture. He's commenting on his tour of America and he says, I find what your people need is not so much high imaginative art, but that which hallows the vessels of everyday use. Yeah. So he is not talking about, oil paintings.

Yeah. Go on your wall, buy your

Randell Hoffman: $5,000. He Yeah, he's not talking about that.

Robert Carson: No, he's not talking, he is not talking about museum art. Although I wanna talk about museums in a minute. Yeah. He's not talking about what we would call now the fine arts. He's talking about what we would call the applied arts that is the objects and textures of daily life.

And he says, this is where this is where work needs to be done.

Yeah.

Robert Carson: And he says, and he talks a lot in this lecture about the workmen and the handy craftsmen. That is people who make things that people use every day and. His intervention is to say that this matters in a big way for your own, for the quality of your life and for your own development.

And he says, you don't honor your ha you don't honor your workmen. You don't honor your craftsmen. Yes. You look down on people who make stuff. Yeah. When in fact, making objects of everyday use actually shapes the whole course of your life. Yeah. And so there's a, that's just a really fascinating shift of emphasis from from say religion or religious belief to the material world and its ability to influence you and of there being actually really high stakes to that.

So it's, so on one hand he's playful and flamboyant. On the other hand, there is a kind of seriousness Oh yeah. To what he's

Randell Hoffman: doing here. And he makes an economic argument that we make today of. Where to spend your money locally, or do you want to spend it at Target? Like it's the same thing.

Robert Carson: Yeah.

Yeah. He says, I cannot impress the point too frequently that beautiful and rational designs are necessary in all work. I did not imagine until I went to some of your simpler cities that there was so much bad work done. So he like Salt Lake City. He's he's reading, popular taste and but he's not saying, oh, you need to study, high European art.

He's saying, yeah. The objects you use every day need to reflect a certain concern for a value and design and

Randell Hoffman: thoughtfulness. And this is where I'm just so incredibly impressed by how progressive he is and how he's able to live outside of incredibly, mundane. Everything's the same conformist society for me, this reminds me of, I, I love modern architecture and styles.

It reminds me of Bauhaus, which marries aestheticism and practicality. It makes it, the teapot, the lamp, they serve their purpose, but they also look interesting. And he's here making that same argument a few decades prior.

Robert Carson: Yes. Yes. And he says if you he says what you must do is bring artists and handy craftsmen together, separate the two.

And you rob Art of all spiritual motive. Everything's mass produced. Everything's mass produced or done. Thoughtlessly. Yeah. Yeah. The workman. And he says that the. He says, artists don't, people who make fine art are not dependent on the visible world. They invent things in their mind, but he says, the workman, that is the person who makes stuff, quote, must see lovely forms and beautiful forms as he goes to work in his mourning and returns at even tide.

I want to assure you that noble and beautiful designs are never the result of idle fancy or pur purposeless daydreaming. Yeah. They only come as the accumulation of habits of long and delightful observation. So it's thinking about your e, the everyday texture of your life as having an effect on.

On hand, craftsmen on workmen. Yeah. That they that the people who make stuff need to be in environments which stimulate creativity and excellence in design. Yeah. Rather than thinking about a totally different world. Yeah. That's an interesting way of thinking about the, we think of decoration as being that which is, which could be taken away easily.

Frivolous. Yeah. It's an ornament. Whatever. It's something that's on top of something else. Yeah. And he's saying no, actually the surfaces and textures and forms you deal with every day have profound consequences. Your own development, even on your own body especially.

Yeah. Especially, he likes c Can we talk just he likes let's see. He has some bad things to say about. About fashion, about men's fashion. It's very critical

Randell Hoffman: of the men, which shows what he's paying attention to well,

Robert Carson: and what he identifies as being really worthwhile. He says here, in all my journeys through the country, the only well-dressed men that I saw, and in saying this, I earnestly deprecate the Polish indignation of your fifth Avenue Danes.

Yeah. Were the western miners, their wide brimmed hats, which shaded their faces from the sun and protected them from the rain and the cloak, which is by far the most beautiful piece of d drapery ever invented. May well be dwelt on with admiration. Their high boots too, were sensible and practical. They only wore what was comfortable and therefore beautiful.

Like that, that, to my mind, that's just a fascinating way of looking at what it means to judge the style of something. Yeah. In a way. And so there's this interesting connection on one hand between his own sort of antique dress right. Dressing of the fashion of a, a few hundred years earlier.

Yeah. Between that and the kind of practical, comfortable clothes that miners wear. Yeah. You bringing these together and you're saying, who's missing the point here is aspirational, high fashion. Yeah. That they're missing

Randell Hoffman: the point. And you can, that's the way we've gone is, I want to be comfortable and look nice.

And that wasn't

Robert Carson: Victorian fashion was not comfortable. No. It, those, it was designed for

Randell Hoffman: discomfort were completely separate options. You either wore your nightgown to bed or you were strung up in a corset or had a tie around your neck.

Robert Carson: With a stiff, high starched collar Yes.

Sort of star to high heavens. Yes. Yes.

Randell Hoffman: When you look at images of Oscar Wilde, that is something I've also noticed is his, that some of his clothes are slightly looser or he has more of an open collar, which was very unusual at the time. So he was also about being a little bit more comfortable. And wearing the colors that he wanted, even though they were effeminate or out of

Robert Carson: fashion.

Somewhere, he has so many wonderful aphorisms. You forget where they come from, but somewhere he says, style is being yourself, but on purpose. Yes. In a way which, which sums up a lot of things. He says, and so he, here he is talking about his tour of. All the United States he does visit some art schools.

He says, yeah, in your art schools, I found no attempt to decorate such things as the vessels for water. I know of nothing uglier than the ordinary jug or picture. So even in art schools, you're focusing on the wrong thing.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah. We, that's simple to see in ceramic art of appreciating how handmade it is and the craft that goes into creating a water jug, a pot.

Robert Carson: By hand. He says, when I was in San Francisco, I used to visit the Chinese quarter. Frequently there I used to watch a great hulking Chinese workman at his task of digging and used to see him every day drink his tea from a little cup as delicate in texture as the petal of a flower. Whereas in all the grand hotels of the land where thousands of dollars have been lavished on great guilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my coffee or my chocolate in cups an inch and a quarter thick.

So they're just wonderful. Jux sturdy, yeah. You this wonderful juxtaposition of he's actually saying that. It's in a scene in which people are actually working that you can find beautiful objects being used Yeah. And being appreciated properly. And that in a place of considerable wealth and luxury, it's actually not, people are getting not that nice.

Yeah. They're getting it all wrong. Because they're putting up guilt mirrors everywhere and not thinking about the actual objects that they're drinking from. But Yeah. You drink out of a cheap mug. Or a Stanley

Randell Hoffman: as I do right now. And, conformist fashion.

Robert Carson: And then there's also a moment in this lecture, who knows if he did this in Utah or not.

Where he holds, where he visits a school where children are taught different kinds of handcraft is making things, he holds up examples of what they've made and said, this is better Yeah. Than the most expensive, prestigious stuff. That's being produced here. Yeah. So there's a kind of a sort of personal freedom that he's espousing, but also taking aesthetics really seriously.

Yeah. And investing. And investing what we would call the decorative arts. Yeah. With a great deal of moral importance, especially, and especially for for environments effects on young people. This comes out in picture of Dorian Gray. Yeah. Where a certain kind of environment can influence someone's development.

And that whole idea of being influenced by your environment. Yeah. A, it's a delicate, it's a tricky concept and it's very against kind of Victorian norms of explicit moral instruction.

Randell Hoffman: Yeah. You have to do this end of conversation. He's more about exploring that and realizing it for yourself.

And a lot of those ideas really do not land in Utah like we've talked about. They're not ready for it. They don't want to hear it. New York, Chicago, even some of the more established areas like Houston, Dallas, where he lectures, it goes incredibly well. There's a, an older paper similar to the one I wrote about Utah Reactions to Wild It's Texas Reactions to Wild.

It's actually marketed or recorded that fabrics with sunflower prints became incredibly popular before and after when Wild was lecturing in the Texas area. What he's saying in other regions lands really well here in Utah, the Midwest frontier, it doesn't land well and people don't take it up.

There were two reviews that I found, one by someone who attended, a reporter who attended the lecture. And it seemed, it was written same day as a lecture, so I assume it was speedily written and then sent off to print for the evening paper or the morning paper. It went along the same tropes and stereotypes that we've been talking about.

It's calling it frivolous, eccentric, making fun of his old style clothes that he came out in the next day, the day after his lecture. There's a longer review by a different reporter different newspaper. I don't recall which one. And. It's actually quite lengthy and does, everything we just talked about, he summarizes quite perfectly, quite well neutrally, but then goes off on this kind of tangent, this, little soap box moment of how he like wild's actually.

And we have to do our patriotic duty to support our artisans and our handy workers. And really it seems shocking and I wonder if he was shocked to agree with wild and actually love the lecture and say, ah, wild's actually onto something. This is really great.

Robert Carson: I was looking at actually, before getting to that I think part of what your research is identifying is, in any community, there's the class of people who write columns for newspapers. Sort of official opinion makers. Yeah. Yeah. Who reflect a certain kind of establishment view,

Randell Hoffman: or people just love to read it and gobble it up.

Robert Carson: But whereas, for all of the mockery, he received the lecture who was incredibly successful. Yeah. Packed houses. Yeah. I looking usually I'm looking at one one article. You've you've identified a pleasant chat with an s the Yeah. This one. So this is in this is in Utah.

I forget which exact paper it is. Yeah. But I have a long someone interviewing while, and they just give a long quote of him talking. Yeah. There was an interview. Yeah. I'll just share this. He says. I am more and more astonished and pleased every time I lecture at the courtesy with which I am received by my audiences.

Everybody they say laughs at me and says I'm a fraud. Yet not only do they fill any place I choose to lecture in, but they sit out. All I have to say, with surprising, good humor and patience, I am quite conscious that much of what I say may be annoying, but after all, I came to America to say it. And so long as audiences with such forbearance and good breeding allow me to strut my brief hour upon the stage, I should be singularly stupid not to take advantage of the opportunities given me of trotting out my hobbies.

Randell Hoffman: He knew what he was doing. He knew what he was doing. Fabulous. And he was very open. He is you wanna make fun of me, but you're here and I'm making money off of you. You, he would say that in his speeches like, you paid for this, right? I'm making money.

Robert Carson: And he, but he does notice something interesting is that, at least in the way he describes it here.

People stay and listen to the whole thing, right? Which is a kind of tribute that he acknowledges. I have no doubt that tonight there will be many people present, perhaps even most of them, who after they've seen me and satisfied their curiosity as to my costume and long hair, would be glad to go get.

I have no doubt that tonight there will be many people present. Perhaps even most of them who after they have seen me and satisfied their curiosity as to my costume and my long hair, would be glad to go away again without sitting through a lecture on a subject that does not interest them. Yeah. But at the same time, I have no doubt, whatever, that they will out of pure courtesy, sit it out to the bitter end.

Sometimes I'm inclined to laugh at this kindness knowing that my audiences often laugh at me, but I really consider my opportunity so splendid of one for saying what I wish to say that I only wish my delivery and my language were better than they are. I think that's another key point is

Randell Hoffman: he was a terrible public speaker.

That was something I've seen a lot is I, it was actually in Utah that his lecture was given with this like the same doll cadence as a school boy reciting. Something from memory. It, he wasn't good at, he was a, an amazing writer, thinker philosopher, playwright, public speaking wasn't his thing.

But yeah, that is the, under the foundational irony of his whole lecture tour and maybe even the success of his career is people love to hate him and hated to love him. And he was incredibly successful.

Robert Carson: And I think, yes. And I think there's also a kind of we've talked about it as a lecture tour, but it's also a kind of theater.

For sure as well. He knew that. Yeah. Yeah. And what he, I what he just talked about there about people being annoyed with him, but sitting out the whole thing, it's an idea. He comes back to later in the critic as artist, where he talks about different art forms. And he says, what's so compelling about drama is that you have to give it time.

You have to sit through it. A painting you can look at and grasp all in a single moment, give it 10 minutes and move on. But in, in watch if 10 minutes, 10 minutes is by the, by today's standards, a long time to look at a painting. But that a play hold must hold your attention over a duration of time.

And it seems to me like in this kind of early in this early lecture, maybe about 10, nine or 10 years earlier, he's working out that idea of spectatorship. Yielding a certain kind of aesthetic benefit. Even if you don't, even if you think you don't like it, it still does something to you.

Randell Hoffman: And I will say part of what was also in all over Utah newspapers was later on his sodomy trial. And there's a journalist at the DT News who wrote a column in the 1990s, pretty recently. So this journalist, she calls it the, I told ya sos. So Oscar Weil comes out he doesn't come out the trial comes out and it is incredibly well covered here in Utah.

Day by day they're getting snippets probably a day late as they get telegrams from New York City, which came from London. But it has this tone of, see. He is not what he used, what he said he was. This whole idea of this, I told you so I told you something wasn't right. And it's this feeling across the Wasatch front of feeling that he got his comeuppance, he got it, he had it coming, and it came back and got him.

Robert Carson: They, yeah. In light of hearing this, and after listening to this episode, someone wants to read something by Oscar Wild. What should they read and why?

Randell Hoffman: I am still editing my own paper, but hopefully that'll be out somewhere soon. My favorite book that talks about all of this is making Oscar Wilde by Melanie Mendelssohn and all the footnotes therein.

She covers the. This whole lecture tour and different regional reactions.

Robert Carson: Great. I'll include a, I'll include a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. Anything else I should link to in the show notes?

Randell Hoffman: I have my own website, rrhoffman.com. I'm also working on starting a nonprofit fort or LGBT Utah called the Mildred Berryman Institute. Full name is the Mildred Berryman Institute for LGBTQ plus Utah History.

Robert Carson: Thank you Randall for coming on the podcast. Oscar Wilde's tour of the United States was initially planned as a promotion for the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan Comic Opera Patience. The opera itself was a satire of the aesthetic movement. To close out this episode here is a song from patients performed by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1930 under the baton of Malcolm Sargent singing the role of Bunthorne is George Baker.