Wilde reduces the original Kenyon’s worship of Hilda’s hands at work into a practical exchange between friends. In turn, this also reduces Miriam’s condescension to her American friend as a “maiden”, elevating Hilda instead to a more mutual friendship.

The person named in Hawthorne’s novel is Powers. This may be a tongue-in-cheek reference to Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, who when Wilde was at Trinity had just been made professor of Latin there, at the age of 25. It is as though Wilde imagines for Miriam a slightly different tour of classical Italy and Greece than the one that Mahaffy was leading him on.

Wilde’s additional detail situates Kenyon’s studio on Via Antonio Canova, a neoclassical artist famous for his marble sculptures, more implicitly than Hawthorne’s original novel, which highlights the presence of the marble tablet indicating the former occupation of Canova. This situates

In Hawthorne’s original (as the visualisations show), Kenyon is the least-referred to of the four friends, and is often referred to as “the sculptor” instead of by his Christian name. Wilde puts greater priority on Kenyon as a character than Hawthorne, but continues the habit of referring to the character more or less equally as “the sculptor” or “Kenyon”. This duality of cognomens allies Kenyon with “the model” and “the Faun”, Miriam’s other male attendants.

Based on length, at 48,000 words or so, it is not clear whether Wilde’s novel strictly required a second volume. Hawthorne’s second volume exceeds by 30,000 Wilde’s entire piece. Still, the mimicry of Hawthorne’s structure seems to have provided Wilde with an imaginative construct in which to work, and the second volume deviates far more significantly from Hawthorne’s original than the first.

There is an increase in the dialogic quality of the novel as Wilde retells it. This remark echoes one by him to Beatrice Allhusen that Dorian Gray was “like [his] own life—all conversation and no action” because he “can’t describe action”. Interestingly, however, many of the visualisations of Hawthorne’s novels and their treatment of the Christian names of the characters indicate a dialogic focus, with the names most often associated with speech tags or punctuation relating to direct address.

It is worth noting that Wilde’s first volume is rather significantly shorter than Hawthorne’s, but his completion of those eleven chapters while travelling is still something of an achievement.

Tafani never responds to this point, perhaps because of the overlapping correspondence that follows. The remark that he jotted onto this letter after he received it (recorded at the end of the paragraph) indicates he may have had something to say about Wilde’s caricaturing of him.

Wilde hits upon the resurgence of the name ‘Hilda’, which had all but died out by the 14th century but was revived in the 19th.

Tafani’s motivations are here unclear. Although a concern for Wilde’s academic progress is certainly plausible, Wilde’s subsequent double first suggests that the risk to his academic career was slight. The preceding paragraph speaks of Tafani’s jealousy at Wilde’s visit to Rome, and perhaps to the amusement that, implicitly, Wilde and his young friends were enjoying. The stricter tones of “My dear student” and this closing paragraph run counter to the unusual sign-off, “Tafi”, used but rarely elsewhere amongst Tafani’s correspondence, either by the man himself or by his correspondents.

The French appears to be intended, rather than a typographical error within the letter.

Wilde changes Hawthorne’s “wretch” to “shade” here, emphasising the supernatural element of the guide’s story, as well as creating a starker contrast between the supposedly lost fellow and the sunshine that penetrates only the shallowest regions of the catacombs.

Wilde in this chapter bundles up two separate episodes of Hawthorne’s text. As the text proceeds, the direct structural linkages between Wilde’s novel and Hawthorne’s fall away, revealing a pattern entirely of Wilde’s own making. Here, his decision creates a greater link between Kenyon’s attitudes towards Miriam and her model, and the scene in the catacomb, than existed in Hawthorne’s work, strengthening the attachment between Miriam and Kenyon. The change also defers contemplation of Miriam’s “ambiguity” until after the events in the catacomb, increasing our sympathy with her.

There is a certain banal facticity about the changing appearance of painted figures as paints dry, both oil or watercolour. Miriam’s remark, Wilde’s addition, is suggestive of his only other novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the idea seems prioritised by Wilde’s decision to remove the remainder of Miriam’s remarks and attribute them to Hilda, leaving the comment as a conversational road not taken.

There is a Paterian element to this assertion that, although echoing Hawthorne’s Kenyon, is suggestive of Wilde’s emerging theories of aestheticism, and the role of art and spectator.

In this passage, Wilde takes various sections of dialogue and transfers them from one character’s mouth to another’s. This begins a long chain of authorial decisions in which Hawthrone’s characters are blended and transfigured, culminating in a fascinating character-switch towards the end of the novel.

Wilde changes the addressee here from Hilda to Kenyon, again suggestive of the reorientation of relations to come.

Hawthorne writes “dog”. The change is insignificant and whimsical, but also suggestive of Wilde’s different attitude to his characters.

This additional sentence is the first hint at the different relations that Wilde imagines for the four friends, which become clearer as his version of the novel progresses.

Wilde’s rendition of the original opening paragraph here re-orders the sculptures that are available to the viewer, demoting the Amazon to the end of this list.

The French appears to be intended, rather than a typographical error within the letter.

Wilde’s letter appears to have been rather hastily written, as the lack of any form of address suggests. The letter rollicks at times as a stream of consciousness, encapsulating Wilde’s enthusiasm for his new project notwithstanding his correspondent’s gentle disapproval. Wilde makes no mention of the thoughts of his fellow travelling companions on the project, which we can only assume did not go unnoticed, as the writing and rewriting of the first two chapters must surely have taken a good deal of time.

Wilde here mistakes the accent, á, for the Italian à.

The word “relic” retains an important significance in Oxford Aestheticism.

It is difficult to know quite what to make of this correction by Wilde, or what it signifies regarding their relationship. Their prior correspondence, to which Wilde refers further on, may have shed light on this, but without that additional data, any interpretation would be only speculative.

The chapter ends rather abruptly here. It is unclear quite whether Wilde intended this, or whether he simply forgot to return to the end of this chapter after an interruption while travelling.

The introduction of Kenyon into this scene presents Miriam and Kenyon as the worldly figures of Donatello’s initiation into adulthood, changing the dynamic quite significantly.

Wilde omits Hawthorne’s paean to the “feminine task” of needlework and places Miriam instead within the tradition of artists whose concern with their materials extends to all aspects of the artistic production.

Wilde places Kenyon in Donatello’s place here in this visit to Miriam’s studio. The painting of Donatello’s portrait—with Kenyon present—occupies a latter position in the chapter, but the interposition of Kenyon both of the shifting relationships between the characters in Wilde’s novel and of a long-standing fascination for Wilde in the moment of production of art.

In this passage, Wilde removes some of Hawthorne’s more hyperbolic descriptions, such as of an Egyptian sarcophagus holding “the rubbish of the courtyard”. In doing so, he blurs the supposedly generic description of an archetypal Roman palazzo with an actual description of Miriam’s home.

Wilde begins to develop here a different model of relations between Miriam, Hilda and Kenyon. There is something chaismic in the description of the triangular relationships, somehow aligning Miriam and Hilda with “improper Bohemian relations” and Miriam and Kenyon with “fervency of friendship”, when the reverse might be expected. This suggests Wilde thinking through the potential freedoms of creative relationships, and may be seen as prefiguring some of his interest in women’s position in aesthetic circles, such as expressed through his work on The Lady.

It is odd that the almost perfect triangulation that Wilde describes in the previous sentence, holding the various friendships in a sort of necessary suspension, must immediately be supplemented by the addition of another.