Oscar Wilde – { feuilleton }

Raffles, the gentleman thief

The Raffles that concerns us here is the television incarnation as seen in a series of adventures made by Yorkshire TV in 1977. I recently bought a cheap DVD set of the series, not for reasons of nostalgia (a wretched condition) but out of curiosity and whim. I had a vague recollection of enjoying the few episodes I’d seen, and was hoping for another decent Victorian adventure series along the lines of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971/1973). Raffles proved to be better than I expected; not quite up to the standards of Granada TV’s peerless adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories but thoroughly enjoyable. The production values are better than those in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, a well-written series with an impressive cast that was nevertheless compromised by a restricted budget. I’m not really reviewing the Raffles series here, this piece is intended to note a couple of points of interest which, for me, added to its pleasures.

Raffles and Bunny as they were originally. An illustration by FC Yohn from Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman (1901).

Arthur J. Raffles was invented by EW Hornung, a writer who was, among other things, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. Raffles, like Sherlock Holmes, is a resolute bachelor with a devoted friend and accomplice, but the two men share few other characteristics beyond a talent for outwitting the dogged inhabitants of Scotland Yard. Raffles’ indulgent lifestyle in the bachelor enclave of (the) Albany, Piccadilly, is financed by his burglaries which invariably target aristocrats and the homes of the wealthy. To the general public he’s known as one of the nation’s leading cricket players, a position which gives him access to upper-class social circles from which he would otherwise by excluded. His former school-friend, “Bunny” Manders, is also his partner-in-crime, a position that Bunny is happy to fill after Raffles saves him from bankruptcy and suicide. Conan Doyle disapproved of the immoral nature of the Raffles stories but they were very popular in their day, and they’ve been revived in a number of adaptations for film, TV and radio. George Orwell admired the stories, and writes about them with his usual perceptiveness here, noting the importance of cricket to Raffles’ gentlemanly philosophy of criminal behaviour. I’ve not read any of the stories myself, and I’m not sure that I want now, not when the television adaptations succeed so well on their own terms.

Anthony Valentine and Christopher Strauli.

The TV series was preceded by a pilot episode made in 1975 which saw the first appearances of Anthony Valentine as the dashing Raffles and Christopher Strauli as the fresh-faced Bunny. Valentine and Strauli fit their roles so well it’s difficult to imagine anyone else improving on them, Valentine especially. In the series the pair are supported by many familiar faces from British drama: Graham Crowden, Charles Dance, Brian Glover, Robert Hardy, Alfred Marks, and, in a rare piece of TV acting, Bruce Robinson. Pilot and series were all written by Philip Mackie, and here we have the first noteworthy element since Mackie had earlier adapted six stories for The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, including the one that features Donald Pleasence as William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective, Thomas Carnacki. Raffles is another rival of Sherlock Holmes, of course, albeit a criminal one, and much more of a mirror image of Holmes than the thoroughly villainous Professor Moriarty. Raffles only breaks the law to improve his bank balance, or as an occasional, daring challenge; he regards theft and evasion from the police as a form of sport, and generally deplores other types of crime. Some of his thefts are intended to punish the victim following an infraction, as with the belligerent South African diamond miner who causes a scene at Raffles’ club, and the Home Secretary who makes a speech in Parliament demanding stiffer penalties for burglary. In one conversation about the morality of their activities Bunny suggests to Raffles that his friend is a kind of Robin Hood figure; Raffles agrees before admitting that he never gives his spoils to the poor.

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Elliott Dold’s Night

Looking for artwork by Elliott Dold turned up this remarkable set of illustrations for an unremarkable collection of poetry, Night, by a friend of the artist, Harold Hersey. Elliott Dold (1889–1957) was an American illustrator during the early days of the pulp magazines, best known today for drawings of huge machines which are a match for those by his more prolific contemporary, Frank R. Paul. The pulp magazines are so often filled with mediocre illustration that it’s a pleasure to find another talent lurking in their pages. But Dold was more than an illustrator of big science, as these illustrations for Hersey’s dubious poetry demonstrate.

Night is a collection of vaguely erotic poems, all of which Hersey labels “Nocturnes”. The collection was published in 1923 in a privately-printed subscriber-only edition, and every description I’ve read of it agrees that the illustrations are the best thing about it. The drawings are also radically different to Dold’s science-fiction art, to a degree that they could easily be taken for the work of a different illustrator. “What a pity the artist has to waste his time grinding out art for the pulps,” said HP Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith. A pity, indeed. Dold’s illustrations are on a par with those that Wallace Smith was producing in the same year, and are close enough to Smith’s style that’s it’s tempting to accuse him of imitation. Smith’s style wasn’t unique, however; Ray Frederick Coyle was another American artist at work in the 1920s who favoured the same combination of strict black-and-white, careful linework and stylised figures. It’s curious that three books with somewhat controversial contents should have been published in the USA in 1922/23, all of them illustrated in a very similar manner: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Malare (illustrated by Wallace Smith), James Branch Cabell’s new edition of Jurgen (illustrated by Ray Frederick Coyle), and Hersey’s Night. Rather than look for spurious influence I’d guess that this was a combination of coincidence and American literature acquiring a belated taste for Decadence which required suitably Beardsleyesque illustration. Similar trends were evident in cinema, especially in Alla Nazimova’s 1923 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, where the costumes and settings were all based on Beardsley’s illustrations.

The images here are from a copy of the book at HathiTrust that’s another poor Google scan. The Hathi website isn’t as convenient for reading as the Internet Archive so I’ve downloaded all of the illustrations and, when necessary, cleaned the grey tone left by the scanner’s camera.

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Weekend links 737

The Massed Gadgets of Auximines – Pink Floyd – in stereo concert with the “Azimuth Co-ordinator”. Design by Hipgnosis, 1969.

• At Rond1900: Sander Bink explores the life of another obscure Dutch Symbolist, Léonard Sarluis (1874–1949): artist, friend of Oscar Wilde and lover of Alfred Jarry.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Manga artist Hirohiko Araki pays tribute to Osaka station’s history and culture with new public art sculpture.

• At Public Domain Review: Scenes of reading on the early portrait postcard by Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 33 films that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Bandcamp: Blissful Noise, Bad Vibes: A Doomgaze Primer.

• Mix of the week: Azimuth Coordinator by Tarotplane.

• New music: Global Transport by Monolake.

• The Strange World of…Gay Disco.

• Speak & Glitch

• Postcard From Jamaica (1967) by Sopwith Camel | Postcards Of Scarborough (1970) by Michael Chapman | An Unsigned Postcard (1991) by Tuxedomoon

Weekend links 730

Cover Design for ‘The Yellow Book’ Vol.I (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley.

• “[Dorian Gray’s] version of Decadence filled the popular imagination when Decadence became an ostentatiously stylish zeitgeist—stylish being the operative word. For Decadent style encapsulated the attitude of being hellbent on thrilling experiences.” The danger of Decadence is also its value. We need more of it, says Kate Hext.

• At Swan River Press: Of Wraiths, Spooks and Spectres. Robert Lloyd Parry, in an interview with John Kenny, talks about the researches that led to the compiling of his latest ghost-story collection, Friends and Spectres.

• The latest pictorial accumulation from DJ Food is a collection of late-60s concert posters by Jim Michaelson, an artist whose designs look like Mad magazine going fully psychedelic.

• Old music: Future Travel by David Rosenboom; new music: Taking Shasta Mountain (By Strategy) by John Von Seggern & Dean DeBenedictis.

• At Public Domain Review: Hunter Dukes on Rückenfiguren, views of the human back as a subject in the history of art.

• In a week when Adobe has been in the news for pissing off its users, a list of alternatives for Adobe software.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Hokusai-inspired erasers reveal Mt. Fuji the more they get used.

• At Unquiet Things: A celebration of Annie Stegg Gerard’s enchanting worlds.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2024 by Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Diamanda Galás.

• Wraith (2002) by Redshift | El Wraith (2002) by Amon Tobin | Wraith (2015) by John Carpenter

Weirdsly Daubery and friends

You think you’ve seen all of the Aubrey Beardsley parodies then another one turns up… This poster by James Hearn dates from 1894, the year that Beardsley’s art became a succès de scandale thanks to his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome and his covers for The Yellow Book. Beardsley’s art was so original that the parodies arrived swiftly and continued into the following year, until the downfall of Oscar Wilde affected the artist’s position at The Yellow Book and rendered his person, as well as his drawings, even less palatable to the general public. Hearn’s piece is rather poor in comparison to the jibes in Punch magazine, and unusual for being part of a functional design rather than a satirical item.

The Punch parodies, several of which worked their own transformations of the artist’s name, used to be available for viewing on a university website, but as I was saying in the previous post, these places have a tendency to vanish when you go to revisit them. The Hearn poster is part of the V&A’s collection but everything else here is from scans of Punch at the Internet Archive. Back issues of the magazine, even those from the 19th century, haven’t always been easy to find online. Punch only gave up the ghost in 2002, and it seems that the restriction on publishing its more recent contents has affected even the older issues, so that the copies at the University of Heidelberg, for example, can only be seen by visiting the university library. It was worth looking for all of these, however. In addition to the drawings you can also see whatever text came with them, while one of the volumes for 1894 also includes a parody of Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, together with an illustration that lampoons the poem’s illustrations by Charles Ricketts. The Beardsley parodies are by ET Reed and Linley Sambourne for the most part, although none are credited as such.

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