Why did Oscar Wilde Travel to the USA? | Michèle Mendelssohn

After Oscar Wilde graduated from Oxford, he moved to London and fell into unemployment and although he tried his hand at different jobs he couldn’t find any stable source of income. However, he did become friends with some of the celebrities of the day and eventually attracted the attention of theatre promoter Richard D’Oyly Carte. In 1881, D’Oyly Carte offered Wilde the opportunity to travel to the US as the advertisement of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride, which was the sensation of the day, and later that year Wilde set off on a tour of the US.

Michèle Mendelssohn is a literary critic and cultural historian. She is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She earned her doctorate from Cambridge University and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. Her previous books include Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture and two co-edited collections of literary criticism, Alan Hollinghurst and Late Victorian Into Modern (shortlisted for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize). She has published in The New York Times, The Guardian, African American Review, Journal of American Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and Victorian Literature and Culture.

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