Mahaffy, J.P.

John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919), the man who boasted that he "created Wilde", was Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin, and Wilde’s tutor during his time there (1871-74). Wilde was to later tell Frank Harris, “I got my love of the Greek idea and my intimate knowledge of the language at Trinity from Mahaffy…[he] saturated himself with Greek thought and Greek feeling.” During his first two years, Wilde won two of the highest classical honours available: a Foundation Scholarship and the Berkeley gold medal for Greek. Mahaffy is said to have urged Wilde to leave Trinity: "Go to Oxford, my dear Oscar: we are all much too clever for you over here" (cited in Merlin Holland, Wilde Album, 1997). The parting was an amicable one. When Social Life in Greece came out later in 1874, Mahaffy in the preface thanked “Mr. Oscar Wilde of Magdalen College, Oxford" for having made “improvements and corrections all through the book."

The pair met again in Italy in June 1875, and the following year Mahaffy invited Wilde to assist him in the reading of proofs of his Rambles and Studies in Greece at his seaside house in Dublin. In the spring of 1877, Wilde accompanied Mahaffy on the trip to Greece that was to reinforce Wilde’s love of all things Greek, undermine his faith in Roman Catholicism and result in his rustication from Oxford.

It is possible that Wilde was indebted to Mahaffy for his own conversational brilliance. “He was a delightful talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way: an artist in vivid words and eloquent pauses”, as Wilde put it later. However, later relations were strained. In 1887 Wilde published an anonymous review in the Pall Mall Gazette of Mahaffy's Greek Life and Thought, in which such phrases as "somewhat pedantic," "rather awkward," and "inaccurate" occur. In December, he also reviewed Mahaffy's The Principles of the Art of Conversation, in which, write Stanford and McDowell, Wilde "adopted a different attitude, not that of one scholar castigating another, but more like that of someone trying to be kind to a less gifted friend…its tone of condescension may have stung his old tutor more painfully than the outright attack on his classical book" (R.B. McDowell and W.B. Stanford, Mahaffy, A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman, 1971). Mahaffy later refused to sign a petition to the Home Secretary for Wilde's early release from prison.

Social Life in Greece was reprinted many times. However, Mahaffy’s treatment of Greek homosexuality was omitted from all later editions. This first edition is a significant book in its own right.