The Port Gibson Reveille was founded in 1851 and is now owned by a woman in her eighties named Emma, who composes the articles on a typewriter in a storefront downtown, where most of the other businesses have closed and kudzu is eating the empty buildings. Emma maintains regular office hours and copies of that week’s paper available for sale. Local politicians keep her busy. “They should all be shot with Gatling guns,” she says happily. Last July, the most recent paper featured her photograph of mimosa trees and a caption noting that the trees were then in bloom all over Claiborne County, Mississippi, “but they don’t seem to be as pink as I remember from before.” The “This Week In History” section said that in June, 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Vicksburg, thirty miles up the Mississippi River from Port Gibson, during a lecture tour of the United States. An unknown writer at The Vicksburg Herald covered his visit. It was apparently the only American newspaper to report that he planned to lecture on “the primitive cabbage.” – Isabelle Taft
The Vicksburg Herald, May 30, 1882
OSCAR WILDE is to be in Memphis during the middle of June and will be in Vicksburg about the 1st of July, all things being even. He will lecture on the sunflower and the primitive cabbage.
June 9
AMUSEMENTS
OPERA HOUSE
OSCAR WILDE
COMING
ONE NIGHT ONLY
LECTURE ON
“DECORATIVE ART”
WEDNESDAY EVENING, June 14.
***
BREVITIES
We heard a gentleman remark yesterday that we might expect a heavy frost before this present weather was over. The gentleman referred to voted for a defeated candidate in the recent city election.
Yesterday was a dull, gloomy, cloudy, wet and generally disagreeable day. We are sorry that our weather reports cannot impart a better quality of encouragement to the planters of this section.
The Herald received the following telegram from Memphis yesterday: “Memphis, Tenn., June 8.—Sale of seats for Oscar Wilde’s lecture indicate an immense audience. The first seats were sold at big premiums. Peter Tracy.”
June 13
Oscar Wilde.
GREAT SUCCESS AT MEMPHIS–VICKSBURG NEXT.
Special to Vicksburg Herald.
MEMPHIS, TENN., June 12.—Oscar Wilde delivered a fashionable oration to-night to the largest audience of ladies ever seen in the Memphis theatre. He will lecture at Vicksburg Wednesday evening.
June 14
According to programme Oscar Wilde, the apostle of æsthetics, will deliver here to-night his lecture on Decorative Art. The subject is one which admits of various treatment, and how the æsthetic Oscar will treat it remains to be seen. Whether there be anything in what this man Wilde proposes to show or not he has at all events, created a vast sensation in this country. Describing his appearance at a recent lecture an exchange says: “Wilde was well worth seeing, his short breeches and silk stockings showing to even better advantage upon the stage that in the gilded drawing-rooms where the young apostle has heretofore been seen. No sunflower, nor yet a lily, dangled from the buttonhole of his coat; indeed there is room for reasonable doubt as to whether his coat had even one buttonhole to be put to such artistic use. But judging his coat by the laws of the Philistines, it was a well-fitting coat, and looked as though it had been made for the wearer as a real coat and not as a mere piece of decorative drapery.”
June 15
BREVITIES
Oscar Wilde was around among our booksellers yesterday making purchases of such books of art, etc., as suited his taste and genius. Oscar is a tip-top fellow.
And still the “festive pop” infests the State, and its sharp swift concussion sounds the death knell of some unsuspecting fellow-mortal. When will this thing stop?
***
Oscar Wilde’s Lecture
The long-looked for, much traveled and largely talked about Oscar Wilde, the Apostle of Æstheticism, came to town yesterday on the morning train, and during the day was the recipient of some attention and several gazes from our citizens. On the street he was dressed in an ordinary white Marseilles vest with pearl buttons, a maroon-colored, short-cut frock coat made of velvet, and tight-fitting bell-bottomed gray stuff pants. Byronic was the collar he wore, and his cravat carelessly tied was blue and worn in a bow-knot.
Last night was a scorcher, but a very large and recherche audience greeted the young gentleman at the Opera-house. He was ensconced in black dress-coat and knee-breeches, with the addition of the dark-colored silk hose and patent leather low-quartered shoes, we have seen in pictures, and of which we have read about in the newspapers. His hair was worn long and parted in the middle. Ruffled was his shirt bosom, his collar ditto and his wristbands likewise. His audience was seldom applausive, always attentive. His subject was “decorative art.” This he deems to be the handi-craft of men and women, employed upon whatever can beautify, adorn and gratify the human senses.
These expressions of art, are derived from Nature, her tints, her tones of color, her radiant harmonies and exquisite resemblances. The objects of art are of every description, and are essentially founded upon the true and the beautiful. We detect instinctively what is beautiful, we by the same unerring law feel what is fraudulent in art by its failure to resemble nature.
June 16
BREVITIES
Dust knee deep.
Mosquitoes are doing their best.
Only a few cases at the City Court yesterday.
White parasols are the prevailing fashion now.
Marriage licenses are but few and far between just now.
On account of the excessive heat business is somewhat quiet.
A big amount of work is going on in different parts of the city.
Cotton is growing rapidly in all the sections around this city.
The mortuary report is growing beautifully less in this section.
Grumbling has never yet influenced the weather to any great extent.
Travel on the railroads is exceedingly slim about this season of the year.
We hear of a number of private dances that are to be given here at an early date.
Oscar Wilde thinks the National Cemetery at this place one of the, if not the most beautiful in the world.
June 18
Man wants but little here below, but when he wants it he longs for it with a hungry longing that will not be long in being satisfied to its fullest extent if he partakes of one of those tempting dinners, breakfasts, or suppers, which the Delmonico of Vicksburg, Charlie Knight, serves every day in the week, but particularly on Sunday. Oscar Wilde wanted to take Charlie and his restaurant along with him, but Charlie thinks too much of his customers right here in Mississippi—and so said—“Oscar, dear Oscar, I can only go with thee when the too-tooness of the utterly utter is cooked into an indistinguishable jambolaya of lily sauce with sunflower dressing.”
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable are all the uses of the newsgatherer, when he seeketh about the streets all day, searching vainly for items and only gathereth dust.
June 20
In an interview with a reporter of the New Orleans City Item, the other day, Oscar Wilde, the high priest of æsthetes, on being asked the question, expressed himself as being delighted beyond measure with Vicksburg. “It is a charming place, really, so picturesque,” said the poet: and then he launched out on a most eloquent harangue touching “the beauty, taste and intelligence of Southern women.” If Oscar’s head is as level as the plains of Sahara it is nevertheless a thousand per cent fuller of good things.
June 21
We are to have a new Compress in addition to the excellent roomy one already here. Why not a new theater also? Let the solid men answer.
The New Orleans States says Oscar Wilde’s lecture in the Crescent City was coldly received and the applause at its conclusion was mingled with hisses.
Oscar Wilde left New Orleans for Texas Saturday. After lecturing in the principal cities and towns in Texas he will go to Mobile. He is doing a beautiful job all over the South.
June 25
Ho! FOR our railroads, our compresses, and factories—soap and others, our graveled thoroughfares, our big crops, and our business boom in general. It is the very best thing that could have possibly happened to the Hill City, and the people are anxious that it should happen “HARD,” and be so severe that every man, woman and child in this section should feel it to the extent of dollars in their pockets, and work all around them. It is all foolishness about capitalists quarreling among themselves. Let them quarrel and fight, too, for that matter, and poor men will get their due. Capitalists never spill blood. They spill money and the poor man that stands by and watches the fight will get his share of it, if he is smart.
OUR friend Col. John Walsh received a letter from Oscar Wilde yesterday, in which the æsthete states that he is better pleased with the appearance of Vicksburg than any other Southern city that he has visited thus far. He thinks the magnolias “have a more gorgeous beauty here, the lily a more exquisite meekness, the sunflower is richer and more magnificent in its coloring, the mocking bird has a voice more musical and a more touching melody, the saloons better whisky and John Walsh’s shoe store is the most æsthetic and most utterly too too of any that has yet come under his observation. Go up to the Colonel’s and have you measure taken, and at the same read “Dear Oscar’s letter.”
June 27
MEMPHIS lights her streets with the electric light, and the papers there say it is a big success.
COL. L. A. CAMPBELL and wife left by rail, Sunday evening, to visit relatives at Springfield, Mo.
COTTON SEED dealers are resting on their oars, patiently awaiting the time for the next crop to ripen.
IN addition to the heat we have the dust, and in addition to the dust we have oceans of perspiration, etc.
F. M. DAWSON has about 1,400,00 feet of timber, which he desires to sell. See his advertisement in another column.
OSCAR WILDE has returned to New Orleans, and will be the attraction at Spanish Fort for several days. Oscar has a level cranium.
THE James Maguire who was shot at on Levee street, Sunday night, is not our young and popular merchant of that name, but a raftsman.
