According to Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955), he offered Lolita (who preferred to Humbert's nonsense verse her teen-magazines) his genius:
One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines. You know the sort. Stone age at heart; up to date, or at least Mycenaean, as to hygiene. A handsome, very ripe actress with huge lashes and a pulpy red underlip, endorsing a shampoo. Ads and fads. Young scholars dote on plenty of pleats - que c’était loin, tout cela! It is your hostess’ duty to provide robes. Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. All of us have known “pickers” - one who picks her cuticle at the office party. Unless he is very elderly or very important, a man should remove his gloves before shaking hands with a woman. Invite Romance by wearing the Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims tums, nips hips. Tristram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital enigma is making yaps flap. Glamorize yourself quickly and inexpensively. Comics. Bad girl dark hair fat father cigar; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache. Or that repulsive strip with the big gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide. Et moi qui t’offrais mon génie … I recalled the rather charming nonsense verse I used to write her when she was a child: “nonsense,” she used to say mockingly, “is correct.”
The Squire and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits
Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.
Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.
The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets… (2.25)
“I have nothing to declare except my genius,” Oscar Wilde famously said—or is supposed to have said—to American customs agents when he arrived at the port of New York on the morning of January 3, 1882. In De Profundis (1897), a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in Reading Gaol, Wilde says that he is completely penniless, and absolutely homeless:
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that. I am quite candid when I say that rather than go out from this prison with bitterness in my heart against the world, I would gladly and readily beg my bread from door to door. If I got nothing from the house of the rich I would get something at the house of the poor. Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share. I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart. The external things of life seem to me now of no importance at all. You can see to what intensity of individualism I have arrived—or am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and ‘where I walk there are thorns.’
Wilde quotes Mrs. Arbuthnot's words in his play A Woman of No Importance (1893):
GERALD. Mother, I didn't know you loved me so much as that. And I will be a better son to you than I have been. And you and I must never leave each other . . . but, mother . . . I can't help it . . . you must become my father's wife. You must marry him. It is your duty.
HESTER. [Running forwards and embracing MRS. ARBUTHNOT.] No, no; you shall not. That would be real dishonour, the first you have ever known. That would be real disgrace: the first to touch you. Leave him and come with me. There are other countries than England . . . Oh! other countries over sea, better, wiser, and less unjust lands. The world is very wide and very big.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. No, not for me. For me the world is shrivelled to a palm's breadth, and where I walk there are thorns. (Act Four)
"The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets." Humbert's nonsense verse brings to mind the nonsense that the editor of a women’s magazine wanted to take out of Wilde during his American tour:
He [Oscar Wilde] was more composed when, on a train in Colorado, he was approached by the editor of a women’s magazine. “Why, don’t you know me?” she asked. “I am the lady whom the state press says should be the one to take the nonsense out of you.” An interviewer traveling with Wilde recorded the aesthete’s response: “You have, then, a prodigious task before you, madam; indeed, one that would take you until the end of the century to accomplish.”
In September 1852, on the eve of the murder of Quilty followed by his arrest, Humbert leaves all his property to Lolita (now married to Dick Schiller):
There were only two blocks to Windmuller’s office. He greeted me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. He thought I was in California. Had I not lived at one time at Beardsley? His daughter had just entered Beardsley College. And how was – ? I gave all necessary information about Mrs. Schiller. We had a pleasant business conference. I walked out into the hot September sunshine a contented pauper. (2.33)
Wilde died on Nov. 30, 1900, a month before the end of the 19th century. The characters in Wilde play A Woman of No Importance, Mrs. Arbuthnot and her son Gerald bring to mind Alexander Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. It was first published in 1735 and composed in 1734, when Pope learned that Arbuthnot was dying.
Humbert’s New York lawyer, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq. brings to mind Sir Edward George Clarke (1841-1931), Oscar Wilde's lawyer in his disastrous prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry for libel.
On the other hand, Humbert's nonsense verse (“nonsense,” Lolita used to say mockingly, “is correct”) makes one think of uncommon nonsense mentioned by the Mock Turtle in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865):
"That's different from what I used to say when I was a child," said the Gryphon.
"Well, I never heard it before," said the Mock Turtle: "but it sounds uncommon nonsense."
Alice said nothing; she had sat down with her face in her hands, wondering if anything would ever happen in a natural way again. (Chapter X "The Lobster Quadrille")
At the beginning of her Adventures in Wonderland Alice sees the White Rabbit (cf. the Rabs and their Rabbits in Humbert's nonsense verse).