Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, at 21 Westland Row in Dublin, the second son of two of the city's most conspicuous figures ^[1]. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a leading eye and ear surgeon who founded a hospital, published works on Irish archaeology and folklore, and received a knighthood for his statistical work on the Irish census. His mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, wrote fiery nationalist verse for The Nation under the pen name Speranza and later presided over a well known literary salon at the family home on Merrion Square ^[1][2].

The household mixed medicine, poetry, and politics in a way that shaped both Oscar and his elder brother Willie. Any Oscar Wilde biography has to reckon with this Dublin inheritance: the boy grew up surrounded by books, visitors, and his mother's conviction that her sons were destined for greatness. From 1864 to 1871 he boarded at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, where he showed an unusual gift for Greek and won a school prize for classics ^[2].

In 1871 Wilde entered Trinity College Dublin on a scholarship. There he studied under the classicist John Pentland Mahaffy, took the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, and absorbed Mahaffy's taste for conversation as a competitive art ^[1]. Three years later he won a demyship, a form of scholarship, to Magdalen College, Oxford, and left Ireland for the university that would complete his transformation.

At Oxford between 1874 and 1878 Wilde came under two opposed influences: John Ruskin, who preached the moral purpose of art, and Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance urged readers to burn with a hard gemlike flame and treat experience itself as the end of life ^[3]. Wilde took Pater's side. He filled his rooms with blue china and peacock feathers, dressed with studied extravagance, and began building the public character that would make him famous before he had written anything of consequence.

His academic record was formidable. He took first class honours in both classical moderations and Greats, and in 1878 his poem Ravenna won the Newdigate Prize, the university's chief award for verse ^[1][3]. After Oxford he moved to London and set about conquering society on charm alone. He published Poems in 1881 to mixed reviews, but his real product in these years was himself: the velvet jackets, the knee breeches, the epigrams delivered at dinner tables across the capital.

The pose paid off in an unexpected way. Gilbert and Sullivan's 1881 operetta Patience satirised the Aesthetic movement, and the producer Richard D'Oyly Carte, wanting Americans to recognise the target, hired Wilde for a lecture tour of the United States and Canada in 1882 ^[2]. Wilde spent nearly a year crossing North America, speaking on the decorative arts and the English Renaissance to audiences from New York to the mining camps of Colorado, and returned home with money, notoriety, and a stock of anecdotes he mined for years.

Anyone asking who was Oscar Wilde usually meets the plays first, but his mature work began in prose. After marrying in 1884 he supported his family through journalism, editing The Woman's World magazine from 1887 to 1889 and raising its literary standard considerably ^[2]. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, fairy stories written with a melancholy elegance that has kept them in print ever since, followed in 1891 by A House of Pomegranates ^[1].

The year 1891 was the busiest of his life. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared in book form after a shorter magazine version had been attacked as immoral; the story of a beautiful young man whose portrait ages while he does not has become one of the most adapted works of Victorian fiction ^[3]. The same year brought Intentions, a collection of critical dialogues including The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist, and the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in which Wilde argued that individualism, not charity, was the proper goal of social reform ^[2].

Then came the theatre. Lady Windermere's Fan opened in February 1892 and made him rich; A Woman of No Importance followed in 1893, An Ideal Husband in January 1895, and The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James's Theatre on February 14, 1895 ^[1][3]. The last of these, a farce built on invented identities and immaculate nonsense, is widely judged the finest comedy in English since Sheridan. He also wrote Salome in French in 1891; the Lord Chamberlain refused it a London licence because it depicted biblical characters, and it was first staged in Paris in 1896 while its author sat in prison ^[2]. Among Oscar Wilde achievements, the run of four West End hits in three years has few parallels in theatrical history.

On May 29, 1884, Wilde married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a Dublin barrister, and the couple settled at 16 Tite Street in Chelsea ^[1]. They had two sons, Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in 1886. Wilde was by most accounts an affectionate father who told his boys the fairy tales he later published, but the marriage cooled within a few years.

In 1891 Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, a young Oxford undergraduate and poet known as Bosie, the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry ^[3]. Their relationship became the central attachment of Wilde's later life and the direct cause of his ruin. Douglas was beautiful, extravagant, and quarrelsome, and his father, a belligerent aristocrat best remembered for the boxing rules that bear his name, grew determined to end the association.

After the scandal of 1895 Constance took the children to the Continent and changed the family surname to Holland, though she never divorced her husband and continued to send him an allowance ^[2]. She died in Genoa in 1898 following spinal surgery, without seeing Wilde again. Vyvyan Holland later wrote a memoir, Son of Oscar Wilde, and Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland has become a leading editor of his letters.

In February 1895, days after Earnest opened, Queensberry left a card at Wilde's club addressed to him as a posing somdomite, the marquess's misspelling of sodomite ^[3]. Urged on by Douglas, Wilde sued for criminal libel. It was a catastrophic decision. Queensberry's defence, led by Edward Carson, a former Trinity classmate of Wilde's, gathered evidence of Wilde's liaisons with young men, and Wilde withdrew the prosecution after two days of damaging cross examination in April 1895 ^[1][3].

He was arrested the same evening and charged under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 with gross indecency. The first criminal trial ended in a hung jury; at the second, on May 25, 1895, he was convicted and sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labour, the maximum the statute allowed ^[3]. He served the sentence at Pentonville, Wandsworth, and finally Reading Gaol, where the regime of the treadmill, oakum picking, and near total silence broke his health. He was declared bankrupt, his plays were pulled from the stage, and his name was removed from the playbills before they closed.

Prison also produced his most personal writing. In early 1897 he composed a long letter to Douglas, part reproach and part spiritual autobiography, which his literary executor Robert Ross later published in abridged form as De Profundis in 1905 ^[2]. The full text did not appear until 1962, when it was included in his collected letters.

Wilde left prison on May 19, 1897, and crossed to France the same night. He never returned to Britain. Living under the name Sebastian Melmoth, borrowed from a Gothic novel by his great uncle Charles Maturin, he drifted between Berneval, Naples, and Paris, dependent on the generosity of friends such as Robert Ross and Reginald Turner ^[1][2].

He wrote one more major work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published in 1898 under his cell number C.3.3., turned the hanging of a fellow prisoner, a trooper convicted of murdering his wife, into a long meditation on punishment and shared guilt ^[3]. The poem sold well and Wilde used its publication, along with letters to the Daily Chronicle, to argue publicly for prison reform, particularly for the treatment of child prisoners.

His health, damaged by prison and an ear injury sustained there, gave way in the autumn of 1900. Suffering from meningitis after an ear operation, he died in room 16 of the Hotel d'Alsace on the rue des Beaux Arts in Paris on November 30, 1900, aged forty six, having been received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed ^[1][3]. He was buried at Bagneux; in 1909 his remains were moved to Pere Lachaise cemetery, beneath a monument carved by Jacob Epstein.

Few Victorian reputations have travelled better. The society comedies are revived constantly, The Importance of Being Earnest has been filmed repeatedly, and Dorian Gray has inspired adaptations in every medium. Richard Strauss built his 1905 opera Salome on Wilde's play, and the epigrams circulate so widely that Wilde is among the most quoted, and misquoted, writers in English ^[2][3].

His afterlife has also been legal and political. Wilde became an emblem of the cost of Britain's laws against homosexuality, and campaigners cited his case for decades. In 2017 he was among the roughly 50,000 men posthumously pardoned under the Policing and Crime Act, informally called the Alan Turing law, which cleared convictions for abolished offences ^[4]. A statue by Danny Osborne reclines on a boulder in Merrion Square opposite his childhood home, and a memorial window was dedicated to him in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1995, a century after his conviction ^[5].

Scholarship has kept pace. Richard Ellmann's 1987 biography won the Pulitzer Prize and remains the standard life, while Merlin Holland's edition of the complete letters and the full trial transcript he published in 2003 have given readers the record in Wilde's own words ^[6]. Among the more striking Oscar Wilde facts is the simplest one: a writer destroyed by his own society in 1895 is now claimed by it as one of its permanent ornaments.