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The Green Carnation

Robert Smythe Hichens

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .ect his sin; the weary white dawn, looking into his weary white face through the shimmering window panes, is greeted by a smile that leaps from sleepless eyes. The passion of the creator is upon him. The man who invents a new sin is greater than the man who invents a new religion, Reggie. No Mrs. Humphrey Ward can snatch his glory from him. Religions are the Aunt Sallies that men provide for elderly female venturists to throw missiles at and to demolish. What sin that has ever been invented has ever been demolished? There are always new human beings springing into life to commit it, and to find pleasure in it. Reggie, some day I will write a gospel of strange sins, and I will persuade the S. P. C. K. Society to publish it[Pg 34] in dull, misty scarlet, powdered with golden devils."

"Oh, Esmé, you are great!"

"How true that is! And how seldom people tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our li. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Let me just start off by refuting the official summary, which states that "Gay men in turn-of-the-century Paris wore green carnations in their buttonholes." Wilde wore a green carnation and encouraged his devotees to wear them on at least one occasion, but it was never a widespread practice and its

I’m not sure why there are so many negative reviews of this book. I could quite easily imagine someone really enjoying it.

I had read on Wikipedia that this book was pulled from the shelves in 1894 after Wilde was imprisoned for the gay content in the book, which is not true. In the 1948 reprint of t

*Life imitates art--so do I*
The green carnation, Oscar Wilde’s attribute, as we know, though his favorite colour was vermillion, this artificial flower appears in books here and there. Many writers have a dig at it as well as its owners--“It is said, a wild flower smells warmer if it’s smashed”--an

Reading The Green Carnation is like reading Real Person Fanfic about Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Not Real Person Slash, as the novel is too insistently discreet in its codings of homosexuality to explore their relationship to any great extent beyond mentor/mentee, although there are many re

This novel is a wonderfully wicked window into its era. It loosely lampoons Oscar Wilde, Bosie, and the late Victorian decadent crowd with their aphorisms and their arch wit. The title refers to green carnations as a corsage, this style having been taken up in the 1890s in reference to queer sexuali

I see a lot of negative reviews here, and I can understand the criticisms--there's not much of a plot and none of the characters are particularly likable. However, as a Wildean interested in Wilde's influences, it was fun for me to read, perhaps even more fun than I anticipated. I just read Teleny a

I know a lot about Oscar and Bosie; I really do and have researched and divulged into their lives for a while now. I bought this book with extremely high hopes; after all, this was an important piece of evidence used in Oscar's trail! I fail to see how at all this book was used against Oscar. He eve

This book is one long "Hipsters suck!" rant. Hipsters in 1895 England being dandy aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and Bosie. It's like, "Look at these rich kids, pretending to be *authentic* and being *creative* the privileged bastards. I am seething with... with... envy! No wait, I shouldn't be. At leas

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