Minstrelsy? Really? What could be further from Wilde’s highbrow high jinks than that racist, degrading American and English entertainment for the masses? It’s a hard contrast to process, but Mendelssohn’s detailed examination—geared more to the devout Wildephile than to the casual fan—is compelling ... Mendelssohn’s scrupulous account humanizes Wilde, often unflatteringly. He was an unrepentant racist who alternately dismissed or fetishized blacks, bragged about his white-supremacist uncle and toadied up to Jefferson Davis and other Confederate stalwarts, drawing parallels between Southern secessionism and Irish republicanism ... Wilde the wit, the aesthete and the social commentator, partly fashioned in the furnace of an unruly America, continues to be relevant.

Many of the attacks on him...took a highly specific and more pernicious form, and it is Michèle Mendelssohn’s account of these that constitute the backbone of her revelatory narrative—a retelling of Wilde’s American adventure that genuinely makes you rethink vital elements of his life and work ... Nineteenth-century America might well have been a land of immigrants, but it had a [racist] social hierarchy all the same—one that clumped Irishmen (like Wilde) and blacks together right at the bottom ... Harper’s Weekly published an image of a monkey dressed as Wilde; in New York, a woman announced to his face that she was glad to have seen a gorilla at last ... Mendelssohn very skilfully reveals the impact these attacks had on him: not only the misery they caused but also, in the longer term, their effect on both his public persona and his work ... Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance is, she believes, a near relative of the blackface dandies who parodied Wilde while he was on tour ... Mendelssohn’s research is prodigious; she has tapped sources previously unavailable to other scholars ... It may be that we can only see him as a victim of the attitudes of his age, when, at key moments, he was also in cahoots with them, an accomplice after all.

Mendelssohn’s vivid account of Wilde’s creation of Wilde amounts to a primer on methods of publicity and promotion, methods to be sure firmly rooted in the Age of Barnum (and indeed, P. T. Barnum actually attended one of Wilde’s lectures in order to gauge his potential) ... As an account of the genesis of Wilde’s persona, then, the fact that Mendelssohn devotes two-thirds of her book to one crucial year in Wilde’s life makes perfect sense. But the fact that she largely ignores half that year does not. We learn about the beginning of January through the fourth of July in glorious detail but learn next to nothing about Wilde’s subsequent six months in America ... A fuller exploration of what went into the creation of our icon, as opposed to the Victorians’, would be a valuable addition—or would make for a valuable sequel—to Making Oscar Wilde. Quibbles, these. Making Oscar Wilde succeeds commendably at what it sets out to do: offering a vivid, intelligent look at Victorian celebrity culture through the rise to fame of one of its brightest stars. And that’s something you won’t find elsewhere—not even in Ellmann.

From the start, a poisonous strain of racism was an element of the attacks on Wilde [during his American tour] ... But if the American tour was, by and large, a nightmare, it also, Mendelssohn argues, taught Wilde useful lessons ... [the] realization that Wilde’s art is partly based on the techniques of a popular racist entertainment has somehow faded from literary critical memory ... Mendelssohn’s remarkable book focuses on the American year, and fills in the before and after briefly. But it uncovers material missed by lengthier biographies, even Richard Ellmann’s, and conveys the excitement of real research and discovery.

Mendelssohn shows that this anti-Irish sentiment was combined with Negrophobia, with Wilde sometimes presented in minstrel shows and posters in blackface ... Without actually justifying her book's title, Mendelssohn offers a solid introduction to Wilde (though the definitive biography remains Richard Ellman's Oscar Wilde). Her well-told account paints an unsettling picture of post-Civil War America's racism and xenophobia.

A fresh look at Oscar Wilde’s English, Irish, and American contexts ... Mendelssohn’s contribution to Wilde’s legacy is her fresh look at the American tour, providing social and cultural context ... In 1882, Wilde disembarked in New York into a swirling eddy of assumptions about race, class, and gender ... Blackface minstrelsy, a hugely popular form of entertainment, lampooned him ... [and]reflected the inseparable connection of 'Negrophobia and Celtophobia' in 19th-century America ... A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.