Reginald Turner

He worked as a journalist, wrote twelve novels, and his correspondence has been published, but he is best known as one of the few friends who remained loyal to Wilde when he was imprisoned and who supported him after his release.

Turner never knew who his parents were,[2] but was an illegitimate member of, and raised by, the Levy-Lawson family, owners of the newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

On leaving Oxford he trained briefly as a barrister under Travers Humphreys, but was too lazy for the Law;[4] having a leaning towards writing he joined The Daily Telegraph, where he inaugurated the paper's gossip column.

[3] Turner numbered among his friends Max Beerbohm, Lord Alfred Douglas, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Osbert Sitwell and others of the London literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th century.

Osbert Sitwell put a comic version of Turner as "Algy Braithwaite" into his verses On the Continent: "wherever he went, he carried with him / The atmosphere of London in the 1890s.

Weintraub writes, "He felt alienated from an England which had driven Oscar to his death, and realised that some of the hostility toward Wilde might now continue to be directed toward those who had stood by him, and were similarly suspect.