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I have just finished reading 'The Green Carnation' by Richard Hichens. This book is a satire on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. The latter was populary know by the nickname 'Bosie'. The Green Carnation was originally published anonymously causing much speculation as to who had written it. The chief suspects were Wilde himself and Ada Leverson (to whom Wilde gave the soubriquet 'Sphinx'), the British novelist Marie Corelli and Alfed Austin, who later became Poet Laureate. Although no-one seriously considered that Wilde had written a calumny against himself, he, nevertheless, sent the following letter to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. The letter appeared on October 2, 1894.

“Kindly allow me to contradict, in the most emphatic manner, the suggestion made in your issue of Thursday last, and since then copied into many other newspapers that I am the author of The Green Carnation. I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.”

Lord Alfred Douglas said The Green Carnation did him a lot of harm; he described the book as something that 'constituted a piece of perfidy…'. On discovering Hichens was the author, he sent him a telegram advising him to make good his escape from the retribution that was about to follow.

The main characters in The Green Carnation are Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reginald Hastings who are respectively parodies of Wilde and Douglas.

Hichens knew Douglas who introduced him to Wilde with whose work he was already familiar. He had seen Wilde's plays as they opened in London, and had attended one of his lectures. When Douglas was in Egypt he spent considerable time in the company of Reggie Turner, E.F. Benson and Hichens. Being in regular conversation with the members of this small exclusive coterie of Wilde's friends, Hichen gained much knowledge of Douglas and Wilde, knowledge which he put to good use in writing The Green Carnation.

The dialogue in The Green Carnation accurately mocks the paradoxical, epigrammatic wit for which Wilde was renowned. Hichens had studied his subjects well.

The Green Carnation was withdrawn in 1895, but not before it had damaged Wilde's reputation. The book was used against Wilde when he was tried for gross indecency.

Recommended Further Reading

• Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman
• The Secret World of Oscar Wilde by Neil Mckenna
• Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas by Douglas Murray