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It is surprising that Wilde’s story concludes without seeking to incorporate some of the more flamboyant elements of Hawthorne’s novel, such as Donatello and Miriam’s disguised travels, or the carnival along the Corso. It may be that he had left behind his source material, although there is sufficient resonance in these last few chapters to suggest that he was referring to at least the earlier portions of Volume 2, although perhaps he was simply relying upon his own excellent memory.

The story of Miriam/Maria and Antonio’s relation is never fully told by Wilde. The remark here suggests something of the reason why Maria may have taken on the pseudonym of Miriam, who was the elder sister of Moses and who watched as he was discovered and adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter, intervening so that his nurse would be of Jewish blood. Imagining Antonio as the lost son, we can begin to sense their connection, although this does not suggest why they were exiled from their native Spain or from each other.

The Virgin de Pilar stands above the altar in the third chapel on the right, and it seems that this description by Wilde is substantially accurate, although it is not clear whether he recalled it from memory or from some written reference, either of his own or his friends’ account of their time in Rome.

The sculpture by Carlo Mondaldi puns on the name ‘Montserrat’, which means ‘saw mountain’.

This description of Kenyon’s travels resembles, particularly in this phrase, William Morris’ description of Launcelot’s quest to reach Guenevere in Glastonbury in King Arthur’s Tomb (1858). In his ‘Garden of Eros’ of 1881, Wilde paid tribute to Morris as a poet who “with soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled / The weary soul of man in troublous need”.

The address here suggests what Wilde has already hinted: that Miriam and Brother Antonio are of Spanish origin, and that they have some significant connection to the Catholic Church.

Kenyon omits Hilda here. It may be that this is a deliberate choice on his part, or it may be that the omission is simply for the author’s benefit, keeping the sentence neater.

Wilde chooses a different spelling here, omitting the ligature ‘æ’ that figures in Donatello’s earlier description of the sculptures that he will encounter.

Kenyon here appeals to the beauty of Tuscany as the healing balm for Hilda’s disdain for Donatello. The idea of natural beauty, and more generally beauty, as a curative for negative experience is a common one.

It is somewhat unusual that Miriam continues to have this stipulation despite knowing that Donatello will be travelling. Chapter 13 is vague about the instructions given by Miriam to Donatello, and about the changes that she makes to the package from the one that Hilda offers her.

Although we are given no surname earlier in the novel, it is safe to assume that this Arthur is the same as the one who formed part of the midnight walking group in Chapter 10.

Wilde uses “inquired” and “enquired” apparently interchangeably in this manuscript, suggesting that little or no editing took place.

It is generally thought that the suckling twins beneath the wolf are an addition to the original she-wolf, as they are made in a wholly different style.

Kenyon has likely walked the length of Via del Coros, from his studio.

Wilde wrote his one-act play Salomé much later, in 1891. The subject began to fascinate Wilde, it seems, after Pater introduced him to Hérodias (one of Flaubert’s Trois Contes) in late 1877. The mention here thus seems to be, by and large, following Hawthorne’s own description of Donatello considering some of Miriam’s sketches, which Wilde had omitted from his Chapter 4 but perhaps did not wish to abandon entirely. It is worth noting that Hawthorne does not name Salomé, but refers to her through her father and the story. Wilde’s reframing of the description shows a sensitivity to the tale that was later to show in his play.

The portrait seems to be in a state of convenient limbo. In Chapter 4, it appeared that Donatello was doing his final sitting, as perhaps intended by Miriam, but the portrait was not quite concluded.

All three of the artists in Wilde’s novel are at the height of their powers, it seems, and this feature is more pronounced than in Hawthorne’s novel. Wilde sharpens the contrast between the three artistic friends, achieving great aesthetic feats, and Donatello and Miriam’s still-nameless model, who both lack such skills or outlet, and so wreak change in the world instead.

The phrase “that was all” is used by Dorian Gray as he attempts to reason with the supernatural nature of his picture. There are many echoes between how Miriam reconciles herself to her past acquaintance’s death and how Dorian behaves. It may be that Wilde had in mind, consciously or unconsciously, some of the phrases and ideas expressed in this work when writing the only novel he published during his lifetime.

Donatello’s crime, such as it may have been, is enlarged here and seems to become fixed in Kenyon’s mind not from his own observation of it, but from the conversation here with Donatello. “I saw but little” becomes a deed that (presumably) both he and Hilda were “forced to witness”.

Donatello seeks here the approval of Kenyon, rather than of Miriam. The knowledge of the murder, if it is such, becomes momentarily a homosocial affair.

A similar line is spoken by Hawthorne’s Miriam to the corpse. The continued blurring of her persecutor and her friend, begun with Hilda’s rendition of the Guido sketch, is an important facet of the remainder of Wilde’s novel.

The church contains, in the first chapel, Gherado delle Notti’s Christ Mocked alongside the St Michael of Guido, which is not mentioned in the narrative. In the second chapel, which Miriam and Donatello have apparently passed over. is a Transfiguration (Mario Balassi) and a Nativity scene (Lanfranco). It is to Domenichino’s Saint Francis receives stigmata that Donatello turns. There is a certain similarity to the structure of the two paintings, which feature an upright principal figure and a secondary figure in the bottom-right corner, but while St Francis turns his face upwards to the heavens, St Michael’s face is turned downwards at the devil whom he tackles. St Francis, the first to receive the stigmata, died while reciting Psalm 142, which has as its closing lines “In the path where I walk people have hidden a snare for me”. One may speculate about whether Donatello recollects this fact, as the innocent ensnared by people around him is a facet of the Donatello character in both Hawthorne and Wilde’s novels (although Hawthorne makes it more explicit by blaming Miriam’s look for Donatello’s murder of the model). On the other hand, the turn to St Francis may be a commentary by Wilde on Donatello-as-Faun, as St Francis was known for preaching sermons to animals.

This is the third chapter title that refers to Miriam’s old acquaintance, after “The Model” and “The Demon”. This layers yet another parable of development upon Wilde’s novel, which like Hawthorne’s focuses on the development of Donatello and Hilda in particular, as the novel’s two figures of innocence transfigured by the real world.

Wilde’s insistence on the distinction between fauns and satyrs is evident throughout the novel, and reflects his interest in distinguishing Greek and Roman mythology, as it was in the latter that the satyr and faun became conflated. Broadly, one can distinguish between followers of Dionysus (satyrs) and followers of Pan (fauns). The satyr is primal, lustful, and drunken, and they were often more horse-like than fauns, who were distinctly goat-like in their representations, and who were associated more with the rural wilderness and mountainous regions. The sexual nature of the satyr lends the dark spectre of Wilde’s novel a particularly threatening air.

The word is slightly misused, but is an amusing reference to Wilde’s own circumstances.

In the novel Corinne, Or Italy by Madame de Staël.

Giovanni Battista Pamphili became Pope Innocent X in 1644. The rivalry between him and Cardinal Antonio Barberini is well documented.

The Church of the Capuchins, originally of St Mary of the Conception, stands next to Piazza Barberini at the end of Via Veneto.

Wilde leaves it to the reader to infer from Kenyon’s description, or their prior knowledge, that the Archangel is Michael, setting his foot upon the demon.

Hawthorne waxes about the “delightful” nature of believing in these drawings’ “authenticity”, as such sketches “make the spectator more vividly sensible of a great painter’s power” than the completed work. Wilde attributes less import, as well he might, in the circumstances, to provenance; Donatello’s enjoyment is, instead, purely of the form.

This echoes Wilde’s later epigram, in An Ideal Husband.

Hilda’s description mirrors that of the man himself in the previous chapter, suggesting her keenness of insight and objectivity, in contrast to Kenyon’s hasty judgment and uncertainty.

Given Wilde’s rapid acquisition of such an accent, we may detect a hint of irony in Kenyon’s remark that such elocution tells little of the person.

The repetition of “freely”, here and in the first paragraph, to describe somatic motion is suggestive of the bodily freedoms that might be derived through art and aestheticism.

There is a certain echo with the method of art-viewing described by Michael Field in the Preface to their volume of ekphrastic verse, ‘Sight and Song’, published in 1892. Wilde would not have met Michael Field (Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley) at this stage, and they did not develop their keen interest in ekphrasising art until much later in their careers. However, the resonance between Hilda’s approach to Guido Reni’s Beatrice and Michael Field’s approach to, for example, Botticelli’s Venus, invites some interesting comparisons about women looking at women and the female gaze. We know that Wilde had many a conversation with Cooper and Bradley, about many topics, and it is interesting to speculate about whether he may have, at one point or another, mentioned The Faun of Rome and its dedicated copyist.

This chapter replaces a walk on Pincian Hill, from where Kenyon and Hilda observe Donatello, Miriam and her model, with narrative felicity. Wilde instead encloses Kenyon and Hilda, in contrast to the long walk that Kenyon and Miriam make to visit Hilda, and the similar walk that Miriam and Donatello make in the grounds of Villa Borghese.

Indeed, the pun on the Italian for ‘bad air’ should not be lost on Donatello.

Hawthorne’s original makes a passing reference to “persons with overburdened hearts” making confessions to “holes in the earth”, an oblique reference to the fable of the king with a donkey’s ears, whose barber tells the secret to a hole that is later discovered by children. In an Irish variant, the king’s barber tells a tree, which is then chopped down and turned into a harp, which retells the king’s secret in its first melody in front of him. Wilde renders more explicit the danger that Miriam might invite upon herself by warning Donatello of her own unsuitability.

It is not quite clear what Wilde wishes to imply here. It may be a case of labouring the metaphor, or to suggest that Donatello is perhaps not as young as his character implies. There is a greater air of ambiguity about Wilde’s Donatello than Hawthorne’s gently besotted soul.

Palazzo Cenci is only a short distance from Via di Tor Millina, on the other side of Piazza Navona. The Borghese Gardens, however, are much further away, in much the same direction as Kenyon’s studio. The suggestion is that Miriam has been delaying her meeting with Donatello, perhaps for the purposes of avoiding the model who haunts her step.

Beatrice Cenci became legendary after plotting with her brothers and mother to murder her father, Francesco Cenci, along with some of their servants. The plot to poison him failed, and so he was beaten and thrown from a high window in order to conceal the crime. The crime was discovered, and the conspirators were executed, Beatrice being beheaded. She is believed to haunt the bridge where she was executed, and has become a symbol of the people’s resistance against aristocratic arrogance.

Beatrice Cenci was a figure of much interest in the mid-nineteenth century. Juliet Margaret Cameron produced a set of photographs, not of Reni’s picture, but of contemporary women portraying Cenci in various poses.

Wilde expounded on this idea in his lecture to art students from the Royal Academy in June 1883, as part of his argument that artists have to deal with the effects of nature, appearance, rather than the real conditions of an object.

Wilde uses the word in the sense of ‘key-bearer’ here. It is most commonly recognised as part of the title of John Ruskin’s series of letters to working men, Fors Clavigera, in which he provides three definitions, ‘key-bearer’ being the third.

Wilde abandons Hawthorne’s “confraternity”, a religious and gendered term, in favour of an Aesthetic one. Although Hilda remains associated with the Virgin Mary, her religiosity, and in particular her Puritanism, is all but washed away in Wilde’s new version.

Wilde’s directions are more explicit than Hawthorne’s, tracing a course from Kenyon’s apartment near the Piazza del Popolo towards what must be Tor Millina, just west of Piazza Navona.

Wilde chooses to use the Greek name for Neptune, perhaps with his mind still partly full of his short trip to Athens, which preceded his stay in Rome.

In Wilde’s story, Hilda has no actual doves. The naming of Hilda’s home thus seems to suggest an ironic jab at Hawthorne’s original, although Wilde does go on to associate Hilda with doves elsewhere throughout the novel.

Wilde removes all of Kenyon’s doubts about his capacity to understand and sympathise with Miriam, instead figuring this moment of missed understanding—in reality a moment for Wilde to signal a secret—as one of uncertainty in Miriam.

Alma-Tadema was to paint Antony and Cleopatra a few years later, although with little of the attention to authentic Egyptian dress that Kenyon shows here.

Chauncey Bradley Ives had not yet completed ‘Undine Rising from the Waters’, but Strazza’s ‘Veiled Virgin’ was completed at least two decades prior, and may be what Wilde had in mind here, as a Carrara marble sculpture produced in Rome.

Wilde retains the wry amusement of Hawthorne’s idea of a sculpture wearing a hoop-petticoat,

Wilde takes part of a line from Kenyon—lamenting that Hilda will never be his wife—and grants it here to Miriam instead, as a reflection on Hilda’s unavailability as a model. This condenses Miriam’s speech in Hawthorne about women who “have other objects in life” and so “are not apt to fall in love”. Love features nowhere in this chapter; rather, the feminine behaviour that Hilda and Miriam avoid is the “mere projection” of their beauty.

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 flight of fancy links Kenyon to Cheapside in London. In the previous chapter, Kenyon’s home in England was described as strewn with repurposed ruins. This could indicate London, or perhaps that Kenyon was born in one place and grew up in another. York would be an obvious example for the description in Chapter 4.

Wilde omits Hawthorne’s cutting commentary regarding whether sculptors’ renown—oft based on their fashionable appearance—would survive the widespread knowledge of the means of production of such sculptures.

Wilde uses many of the elements of Hawthorne’s generic description of a sculptor’s studio and concretises it in this description of Kenyon’s studio before he arrives. Kenyon’s studio appears in the first instance a homosocial space, unlike Miriam’s solitary studio.

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

That Wilde follows “Miriam’s Studio” with “The Sculptor’s Studio” seems to distinguish between the two characters and their creative spaces, but also of course draws them into dialogue, a key feature of his bringing together of Kenyon and Miriam in a way that Hawthorne did not.

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.

Again, we see the same sign-off that caused Walter Pater so much trouble. It is somewhat surprising that Wilde seems to have made no response to this letter. There is a possibility that it was written but never sent, as the only record of it is in Tafani’s own collection of correspondence, separated from the correspondence with Wilde of earlier in 1877.

It appears that this meeting never took place. Tafani’s departure from Oxford took place at the very beginning of October, and it is unclear from any of the documents at Jesus College, or in Tafani’s archive, quite why he did so. It certainly left the College rather understaffed for the first term.

It is unclear whether a bundle of letters has simply been lost, or whether the large gap between Tafani’s previous letter and this is simply a product of an inconstancy between the two correspondents. It is clear that there must have been at least one letter from Wilde containing the manuscript pages of his novel, in order for Tafani to have read and annotated them. In any events, Tafani makes no reproaches of Wilde for not having responded to him, but the former seemed to forgive a great deal, and it is also possible that they saw each other briefly, or communicated through friends, during the intervening weeks.

Wilde sent such a copy of the Dublin University Magazine to Pater. It is not clear whether he ever sent a copy to Tafani, as apparently promised. He was, in other regards, an ardent promoter of the magazine, however, by way of self-promotion. A few weeks earlier, around 20 June, he had written to Keningale Cook to suggest some ways in which the magazine could be promoted to booksellers, and so boost its circulation.

It is unclear whom Tafani was travelling with, and whether they travelled together from London or Tafani met his friend in Paris.

The suggestion here is that Tafani may have visited, or wanted to visit, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then occupying 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea.

Wilde wrote to the Rev. Matthew Russell SJ, editor of the Irish Monthly, on either this day or the day before about these proofs.

This poem about Keats was accompanied by a short article regarding Keats’ grave, which Wilde drew to the attention of several literary figures, including WM Rossetti, with a view to improving the memorials to Keats by way of a statue. That scheme was not encouraged by Wilde’s correspondents.

Wilde does not own Henry as a half-brother, although he was. In a letter to Harding in mid-June, he described Henry as “a cousin of ours to whom we were all very much attached”.

Wilde was later to persuade his brother Willie to give up this reversionary interest for the sum of £10.

Dr Henry Wilson, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, and Wilde’s half-brother, passed away on 13 June 1877. He was aged 39.

Tafani does not mention explicitly any criticism of or difficulties with his translations, but the shift in tone here from his previous letter suggests that he has lost confidence in the work he had just completed.

Mahaffy was censured by his colleagues at Trinity for a similar offence—extending a trip to Greece into term-time—in 1876.

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.

In ‘London Models’, Wilde argued that “Italian models are the best” because of “the natural grace of their attitudes”.

This appraisal of the status of artistic models Wilde expounds in his essay on ‘London Models’, published in the English Illustrated Magazine in January 1889.

Hunter Blair records Wilde’s tendency to host gatherings in his rooms after coffee was served in the Common Room each Sunday.

It has not proven possible to identify this “prospective new Demy”. It is possible that he never took up or was offered a Demyship, although the ranks of Eton are sufficiently small that it might prove possible to theorise one or two candidates for this minor character in Wilde and Tafani’s correspondence.

Wilde’s catty remark here unsurprisingly does not make it into the letter he sends by way of reply.

A collection of Petrarchan sonnets translated into English by Tafani was published in Italy in 1879. It is likely these poems to which Tafani here refers. It seems that Tafani shared Wilde’s own interest in dictating the manner in which his works were presented.

Wilde had read Swinburne’s Essays and Studies when it was first published in 1875, and the combination of personality and perfection was one that stuck with him throughout his life and career.

Wilde’s reputation for plagiarism, or at least highly creative borrowing, was in its early phases during this period, but there is a point of amusement

The reference is to Wilde’s much-disliked tutor, Allen. It is not clear whether the nickname was one in common use, or is something that Wilde conjured on the spot in this letter. It does not appear elsewhere. Alternatively, it may be that I have mistook Wilde’s notoriously sprawling hand in this instance, as context provides no assistance.

Whether this is teasing or sympathetic is difficult to determine. Wilde’s reply reads nothing into it.

Indeed, Wilde did not, and the review was published in the Dublin University Magazine in due course. It is probable that Wilde had already had the idea himself before receiving this note of encouragement.

It is difficult to know quite what Tafani would have had Wilde work upon instead (aside from academics), but he was consistently against Wilde’s project. As an Italian, it may have been Rome which he sought to defend from caricature, although Wilde’s retelling is rather more sensitive to that Empire and culture than Hawthorne’s.

This flourishing of initials, from Wilde’s full name, suggests his pride was piqued by the rustication, and although Wilde does not seem to blame “dear” Tafani, it may be that he wishes to reassert himself in this letter back up to Oxford. The deferral of any further correspondence by not giving Frank Miles’ address (which Tafani might have sought out himself, had he really wished), suggests Wilde felt some need for a cooling off period.

It seemed that Tafani’s enthusiasm for Wilde as a poet, which Wilde at this point shared, was not universal. Later in the year, when Wilde returned to Oxford, Pater noted that prose was the more difficult of the two arts to master and questioned why Wilde wrote so much poetry. It seems that the young Wilde could not win, but charmed everyone nonetheless.

Wilde refers here to the moonlight walk of a group of artists, including the four key characters, which takes place in Chapter 9 of his novel, and Chapters 16-18 of Hawthorne’s, including some artists yelling “Trajan! Trajan!” in the Forum in order to conjure the Emperor to life to see the Column that he did not see in his lifetime. The extensive nature of the walking tour, which Wilde truncates, often strikes readers as an excuse for Hawthorne to recount the appearance of each and every monument that he himself saw while in Rome, to little effect in the novel, as the atmosphere that it produces is less that of Rome itself and more that of a tedious correspondent who fills page after page of their self-indulgent reflections.

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.

That “some” included Ruskin and Henry James.

Wilde’s review of the opening for the Dublin University Magazine includes a curt response to Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket: “it is worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute”.

Whistler was commissioned to decorate the coved ceiling of the Grosvenor’s West Gallery, showing the moon in all its phases in silver, against a deep blue background.

Wilde’s eloquent letter was partly successful, and his fine was reduced by the Magdalen officers on 4 May, although this did not quite satisfy Wilde’s sense of justice.

It was precisely this sign-off that proved a stumbling block for Walter Pater in his correspondence with William Money Hardinge.

It is not clear whether Wilde had heard news from Tafani or others about the 26 April decision by the Magdalen officers to rusticate him. Tafani assumes that the information was known to Wilde.

Indeed, this letter did not reach Wilde until much later, having been returned from Paris and sent on to him from Oxford, as he had been rusticated. It can be expected that Arturo and Wilde spoke during the meantime.

This and Tafani’s preceding letter are brief and directed towards encouraging Wilde to return sensibly to his studies. Tafani was clearly waiting to respond personally to some of the points raised in Wilde’s letters, but Wilde continues to write expansively regardless.

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.

It seems that Wilde changed his mind about some of these interrelationships, as only a small portion of this rewriting actually makes it into his final narrative.

Of the novel by Henry James, published serially in 1875.

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.

Wilde may have begun feeling nervous about the consequences of his long delay in returning to Oxford, which was the subject of two letters from Tafani during a period in which their correspondence seemed to cross over.

It is unclear whether Tafani had, at this point, had the same experience of an audience with the Pope as Blair and now Wilde. Tafani had left Rome as a young child, and he did not return to Italy until later in 1877.

It seems unlikely that Wilde had received Tafani’s letter of 26 April in order to respond, so this seems to be a second writing, perhaps because Wilde had been on the move and felt that his letters might not reach him promptly, or perhaps because of the extent to which he was moved by his audience with the Pope.

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.

It was on this same day, 26 April, that the Magdalen officers lost patience with Wilde’s absence and resolved that he be rusticated and required to complete a portion of work to a required standard before the beginning of the October term, or else risk his Demyship.

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

Wilde made a similar remark in a letter to his mother, evidently pleased with his discriminating insight.

Ellmann’s biography of Wilde places the visit to Keats’ grave at the Protestant cemetery as occurring on the same day as Wilde’s audience with the Pope. The description of these two events in separate letters to Tafani suggests otherwise, however. Wilde may have visited the bust twice, or the two events become conflated in the retelling of them by others.

Wilde’s letters but rarely refer to the first-person plural, although he was of course travelling with several companions. That he does so here is suggestive that the visits to sites associated with British literary lions may have been at the prompting of one of his companions.

Without Tafani’s manuscript lament here, it would be impossible to know that Wilde’s letter arrived with an addendum on a separate sheet. The content or general tone of that addition can only be guessed at on the basis of Tafani’s reply.

Wilde’s friend, Hunter Blair, converted to Catholicism in 1875.

A professor of humanities from Glasgow, Ramsay met Wilde, Ward and Blair in Rome and acted as guide around the city.

This visit to San Lazzaro degli Armeni formed part of Wilde’s 1875 trip to Italy, also with Mahaffy, as well as with his friend William Goulding.

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.

Although it is difficult to date many of the chapters of Wilde’s novel, the beginning of this chapter happens to be on the verso of a sheet on which Wilde began a letter to his mother, dated 25 April, which he never sent owing to extensive blotting from his pen. This allows us to place the drafting of the chapter after Wilde’s letter to Tafani dated 22 April, but before Tafani’s reply dated 26 April.

Although it is difficult to date many of the chapters of Wilde’s novel, the beginning of this chapter happens to be on the verso of a sheet on which Wilde began a letter to his mother, dated 25 April, which he never sent owing to extensive blotting from his pen. This allows us to place the drafting of the chapter after Wilde’s letter to Tafani dated 22 April, but before Tafani’s reply dated 26 April.

It is amusing to speculate here as to whether Wilde may have in mind any of his contemporaries, although this chapter precedes by several months Ruskin’s criticism of Whistler (in his Fors Clavigera letter of July), and the subsequent libel case.

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.

It was on this same day, 26 April, that the Magdalen officers lost patience with Wilde’s absence and resolved that he be rusticated and required to complete a portion of work to a required standard before the beginning of the October term, or else risk his Demyship.

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.

A professor of humanities from Glasgow, Ramsay met Wilde, Ward and Blair in Rome and acted as guide around the city.

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

Wilde made a similar remark in a letter to his mother, evidently pleased with his discriminating insight.

Wilde’s letters but rarely refer to the first-person plural, although he was of course travelling with several companions. That he does so here is suggestive that the visits to sites associated with British literary lions may have been at the prompting of one of his companions.

Without Tafani’s manuscript lament here, it would be impossible to know that Wilde’s letter arrived with an addendum on a separate sheet. The content or general tone of that addition can only be guessed at on the basis of Tafani’s reply on 29 April.

Wilde’s friend, Hunter Blair, converted to Catholicism in 1875.

This visit to San Lazzaro degli Armeni formed part of Wilde’s 1875 trip to Italy, also with Mahaffy, as well as with his friend William Goulding.

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.

In 1875, after his first year at Oxford, Wilde undertook a trip to Italy with his former professor from Trinity College, Dublin, Rev John Pentland Mahaffy. Their tour included Florence, Bologna, Venice, Padua, and Milan. The tour that might have ended in Rome was cut short by Wilde’s dearth of funds. The idea, however, did not leave Wilde. Having contemplated visiting the “Scarlet Woman” in the company of Oxford friends, Wilde eventually undertook the journey in 1877, after a wide-ranging trip, again with Mahaffy, including visits in late March to Genoa, Ravenna, Brindisi and Corfu. Tafani’s absence is unsurprising, given that Wilde was already in company, and that this trip ran into the start of the next Oxford term, a transgression for which Wilde was fined and rusticated.

Wilde, somewhat inexplicably, uses the French rather than the Italian to name the hotel in which he, Hunter Blair and William Ward stayed.

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

This reference draws Wilde’s notice in his 24 April letter to Tafani, reproduced following this chapter.

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.

Again, Wilde’s merging of content from several of Hawthorne’s chapters leads to a structurally distinct way of understanding the tale; “The Model” combines “Subterranean Reminiscences” and “The Spectre of the Catacomb”.

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.

Miriam repeats Kenyon's metaphor of the Faun both unveiled—at the very edge of Nature—and restrained.

The metaphor of sculpture is muddled here. Praxiteles both imprisons and unveils, a combination not present in Hawthorne’s description of Praxiteles’ art.

Wilde here eschews Hawthorne’s apologetics regarding the inadequacy of ekphrasis to capture the “magic peculiarity” of the sculpture. What follows echoes the short commentary of Wilde’s first letter to Tafani.

Hilda echoes here the linkage between thoughts and appearances, of which Wilde was so fond, as mentioned in the notes to his first letter.

Wilde jabs here, we may deduce, at Hawthorne himself, born in Massachusetts, whose novel Wilde interprets as overly certain and lacking in the romance and mystery of the Old World.

Touch, rather than measurement, becomes “absolute” in Wilde’s version. It is the senses, rather than objective facts, that hold the final truth of any artefact.

Wilde again reorders, more than rewrites, Hawthorne’s original. Here, Miriam emphasises Kenyon’s self-image, as well as setting forth a strengthened theory of the mode of sculpture recovering, rather than producing, forms from marble.

Again, Wilde reorders the symbolism of Hawthorne’s rendition; the snake is here prioritised, and the dove of less importance. The insertion of a paragraph break here draws attention to the symbol of the Soul, inviting the reader to dwell on how it might “complete” the moment that the four friends inhabit.

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.

Wilde’s preferred title, for a chapter that blends material from Hawthorne’s “Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello” and “The Faun”, helps solidify the affiliation between Donatello and The Faun: both form one of the four friends.

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.

Hawthorne presented Miriam’s studio as always in a necessary sort of shadow, “the first requisite towards seeing objects pictorially”. Wilde rejects this description of artistic working conditions in favour of an implicit preference for light except where shadow may produce some particular effect in the expression of a sitter.

Wilde pokes here at the “tapestry effect” of the style of hanging paintings in many British galleries and museums of the early- and mid-nineteenth century. It was only with the work of Anna Jameson and Charles Lock Eastlake that the practices of such museums began to change, although Michael Field record in the 1890s still the ease with which a sought-out painting, such as a Giorgione, might be easily mistaken for another hung haphazardly near it in the National Gallery’s dimly lit chambers.

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.