0.1 Afterword  (Page 9/25)

But in summer 1892, as we have already seen, plans for publishing the poem with decorations by Ricketts were already well advanced.In the same letter in which he returned the signed publishing agreement for The Sphinx , Wilde asked John Lane to “have a type-written copy made for me, so that I can correct the text before Rickettswrites it out” ( Complete Letters , 534). Wilde frequently made arrangements for his manuscripts to be typewritten aroundthis time (see Frankel, Masking the Text , 83-100) and the typescript of The Sphinx that Wilde requested survives today with Wilde’s handwritten corrections on it.Shortly prior to this, Wilde had written out a fair copy draft of the entire poem, as it then existed, shorn of the thirteen additional stanzas composed inParis in 1883. This draft survives, along with accompanying sketches revealing Ricketts’s first ideas for visualizing the poem. Crucially, both these survivingtexts from 1892 present the poem in couplets, the two-line stanza form in which it was eventually printed, whereas all previous drafts had been written out inquatrains, or four-line stanzas, reminiscent technically of Tennyson’s so-called “ In Memoriam stanza.” This “stretching” of the Tennysonian stanza was understood in 1894 by one reviewer as “proof… of thecynical humour which distinguishes Mr. Wilde” (“Unsigned Review,” 170). But it is an important, in-built indicator of Wilde’s intentions for publishing thepoem—for the poem to be seen —and, as Henley perceived, it was almost certainly dictated by Wilde’s and Ricketts’simagining of how the poem would appear on the printed page, as well as their “aesthetic” concern with foregrounding the poem’s artistry. As Henley was towrite, “the couplets…are really quatrains, as the staves of In Memoriam , but by a special stroke of art they are printed as something else” (Henley, 168).

Although Wilde’s poem was essentially complete in the summer of 1892, it still lacked three features crucial to publication. Wehave already seen that—as with all of Wilde’s recent books—Ricketts’s visual designs were integral to Wilde’s own concept of the poem at the moment ofpublication. Ricketts labored over his designs in fall 1892/winter 1893, painstakingly producing a series of studies and finished drawings in pen and inkfor the covers, title page, and illustrations, as well as the series of illuminated capitals that is such a conspicuous feature of the resulting book.With the exception of those for the cover designs, Ricketts’s drawings would be reproduced photomechanically, by line-blocking or “process” printing, in theprinted book, though Ricketts’s original drawings “have an even greater nervous quality of line than the process blocks” (Calloway, 16), owing to subtle changesintroduced by the exigencies of photomechanical printing. Ricketts began this work in June 1892 (Delaney, 82); according to his contract with Mathews andLane, it was to be completed by October 1, 1892, and Ricketts was to be paid a total of £45 in monthly installments beginning on July 18. Two of Ricketts’sdrawings were published separately from Wilde’s poem in 1893, within months of Ricketts completing them. Ricketts’s pen and ink drawing of the crucifixion, printed as an illustration to the closing lines of the poemin the 1894 text, was published separately in 1893, untitled and uncaptioned, in the Dutch avant-garde magazine, Van Nu en Straks , 5 (1893), interleaved between pages 30 and 31; and the drawing eventually printed in the 1894 text illustrating “the labyrinth in whichthe twy-formed bull was stalled” was published in October 1893 in The Dial , no. 3, under the title “’In The Thebiad’: An Illustration to A Poem By Oscar Wilde To Be Published at the Sign of theBodley Head.” Ricketts later gave the following memorable account of his intentions in producing these pictures: