Oscar's Books, By Thomas Wright

If a late-Victorian reader were asked to imagine the contents of Oscar Wilde's library – perhaps for some 19th-century version of Family Fortunes – they would surely have conjured a precise picture in their mind: ranks of exquisite skinny volumes in Beardsleyan yellow, pressed between pairs of alabaster sphinxes, supported by shelves turned from the finest Japanese ebony. One of the chief delights of Oscar's Books – a charmingly eccentric attempt to tell Wilde's story through his reading – is that they would have been wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wilde's library was full of the kind of furniture that The House Beautiful suggested was best left out for the junk man. And as for the stuff on the shelves – well, along with the Greek and the Pater and the ghost-written memoir of Jack Saul, the most celebrated male prostitute in Victorian Soho, there lurked stacks of the kind of sentimental three-decker novel that Miss Prism might have left accidentally on a trolleybus.

The author, Thomas Wright, is a self-confessed Oscar fanboy. Having been "overwhelmed" by reading The Picture of Dorian Gray at the age of 16, he applied to Wilde's old college and settled into a room housing a fireplace that had once warmed the bottom of the novel's author. If Wright did not spend his undergraduate years in a purple silk chasuble, buttering muffins and reading aloud from the four-act version of The Importance of Being Earnest, then I don't want to know about it.

This ardour is the source of both the pleasures and the problems of this literary biography. Wright has an infectious delight in the physicality of the books that Oscar owned. A first edition of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, he enthuses, is printed on "'mock-ribbed' paper, which gives a pleasant tingling sensation as you run your fingers over it". But the desire to materialise the details of his idol's literary surroundings lead him to report banalities with wide-eyed wonder. "As it was considered important to have all books within easy reach, Wilde's bookcases would not have been particularly high," Wright reasons. "They were probably placed a little away from the wall, and well clear of the water pipes, in order to keep the books at just the right temperature." It left me wondering whether Arthur Conan Doyle preferred his reading matter to be kept entirely out of reach, or Eliza Lynn Linton stored hers in the oven.

I also wonder whether hero-worship discourages Wright from interrogating some of Wilde's unlikely claims about his literary life. Oscar, Wright asserts, stopped reading a book whenever he reached a sentence of unusual silliness, such as: "The Birds were singing on every twig and every twig-let." The same fate, we're told, befell any text that contained the word "magenta". As Wilde used it himself in The Picture of Dorian Gray, this can't be true.

I don't believe either of these stated objections say anything about Wilde's reading habits, but they will yield a minor biographical nugget that Wright appears to miss. The author of that line about "twig-lets" was the poet and critic W E Henley, who occasionally attacked Wilde's writing in print. In response, Wilde told his publisher that Henley was "too coarse, too offensive, too personal, to be sent any work of mine". Henley's review of The Sphinx in an 1894 number of the National Observer asked its readers to imagine its author "in a magenta chlamys, fleshings of mauve, and a yellow turban, an antic thing, whose first effect is that of a very bedlamitish bookie". This unflattering image may be the source of Wilde's snitty remark about a certain shade of shocking pink. If he was attempting to dissociate himself from Henley's parody of Aesthetic dress, he failed. Today, should you wish to buy a pair of Oscar Wilde Boyshorts, you can have them in any colour, as long as it's magenta. ("Nobody," trills the blurb, "will accuse you of gross indecency in these outrageous undies!")

So I suspect that the most important finding of Wright's study is one he seems to wish he hadn't discovered: the over-representation of trashy, middlebrow fiction in Wilde's literary diet: Alice Carr's Margaret Maliphant, S R Crockett's The Lilac Sunbonnet and Blanche Roosevelt's Hazel Fane. "It is almost impossible to imagine him perusing them for pleasure," he writes, wondering how such works washed up in Tite Street. I think this merits celebration, not excuse. Even Oscar Wilde required some refuge from the tyranny of good taste. And he found it in his library.