The Toast's literary pilgrimages archive can be found here. When you live across the ocean from where your favourite stories are set, Europe can seem nearly as imaginary as Middle Earth. London and Paris are real, but in my mind they exist as an amalgam of stories. Pure text doesn’t provide the sensory cues of visual media, so it demands that readers participate in creating the world of the story. It’s an intimate act of collaboration, a…

Previously in this series.  You are being talked about. It is very disagreeable. You are not being talked about. It is even more disagreeable. You have sinned, and sinned greatly in the eyes of the world, out of a most desperate love. No matter how dreadful the occasion, you manage to keep your cuffs un-buttered and your cravat un-spoilt. To be bankrupt of morals is forgivable, but to be bankrupt of style is not.

babe babe how much do you love me oh god are you in prison again? no what? no lol that was like one time in france it doesn't count as prison if you're in france anyhow what are you doing like right now I'm trying to finish The Importance of Being Earnest okay well stop doing that and sue my dad what? you should sue my dad why would I do that? he's been telling…

So. As you may or may not know, Wilde went on a speaking tour of America in 1882, and it was marvelous (Henry James didn't care for it; Henry James called him a "tenth-rate card" and an "unclean beast"; Henry James can go suck an egg). He lectured and gave interviews and he sold out concert halls and he very possibly had sex with Walt Whitman. If you have not already read Neil McKenna's nearly-perfect…