‘A strange breath of salty air’: Revealing Walter Edwin Ledger’s Decadent Collection

Abstract

In his autobiography, Arthur Ransome provides a compelling glimpse of Walter Edwin Ledger:

He used to come to town dressed as an old-fashioned Jack Tar, with open neck and a blue-and-white sailor collar and bell-bottom trousers. He was an extremely efficient seaman, […] and in general brought a strange breath of salty air into the somewhat greenhouse atmosphere of the literary Nineties.

Although Ledger would probably have been flattered that Ransome placed him within the sphere of the literary 1890s, he was not a novelist, playwright, poet, or artist. It was as a devoted collector and bibliographer of Oscar Wilde’s works that Ledger became known to many of the individuals connected to the decadent tradition. Though less well known than figures such as Robert Ross and Christopher Millard, who famously engaged in efforts to ensure Wilde’s literary legacy and posthumous reputation, Ledger played an important role in this work and was a friend to both these men. Ledger, in fact, chose to name his magnum opus, ‘The Robert Ross Memorial Collection’, after his close friend. According to the memorandum left with Ledger’s will, the collection was a ‘tribute of admiration and affectionate esteem to [his] friend the late Robert Ross in appreciation of his chivalrous and selfless devotion to and friendship in adversity for Oscar Wilde’. Ledger’s desire to memorialize his friend resulted in a remarkable decadent archive, now housed at University College Oxford. In this brief account, I shall look at what we know about Walter Ledger and the origins of the collection and suggest why it is important.