Oscar Wilde

• 1. Introduction

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  Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde arrived in the world on the 16th of October 1854 at 21 Westland Row in Dublin, and from the very beginning his life seemed constructed for drama. Born the second of three children to two Anglo-Irish intellectuals, he would go on to become one of Victorian London's most dazzling and most prosecuted figures. By the early 1890s he was filling theatres, trading barbs with barons, and writing plays that made society laugh at itself. Then, at the precise height of his fame, with two of his plays running simultaneously in the West End, the machinery of Victorian justice caught up with him. What made a classically trained poet become the era's greatest playwright? How did a man celebrated for his wit end up sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum the law allowed? And what did two years of prison solitude do to someone who had built his entire identity around beauty and pleasure?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Sir William Wilde, Oscar's father, was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon and had been knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser to the censuses of Ireland. His dispensary for the city's poor near Trinity College Dublin was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital. Lady Jane Wilde, writing under the pseudonym "Speranza," the Italian word for hope, had composed poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and was a lifelong Irish nationalist. She read those poets aloud to her sons Willie and Oscar, planting a love of verse in both of them.

  The family home at No. 1 Merrion Square, where they moved in 1855, became a gathering point for figures including Sheridan Le Fanu, Isaac Butt and William Rowan Hamilton. Oscar's younger sister, Isola Francesca Emily Wilde, was born on the 2nd of April 1857 and died at age nine of a febrile illness. Wilde's grief was deep and lasting; his poem "Requiescat" was written in her memory, its first stanza reading: "Tread lightly, she is near / Under the snow / Speak gently, she can hear / The daisies grow."

  Until he was nine, Wilde was educated at home by a French nursemaid and a German governess, acquiring both languages early. He joined his brother Willie at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, from 1864 to 1871. There he excelled in classics, ranking fourth in the school in 1869, and won the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament. He was one of only three students at Portora to win a Royal School scholarship to Trinity. In 1871, the year Wilde turned seventeen, his two elder half-sisters Mary and Emily died together in a terrible accident, fatally burned at a dance at Drumacon, County Monaghan, their muslin dresses catching fire.

• 3. Oxford and the Aesthete's Creed

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  Trinity College Dublin placed Wilde among scholars including Professor J. P. Mahaffy, who called himself Wilde's creator and later, rather bitterly, called him "the only blot on my tutorship." Wilde won the Berkeley Gold Medal in Greek, the university's highest academic prize, and secured a half-scholarship worth £95 per year at Magdalen College, Oxford. At Magdalen, he read Greats from 1874 to 1878, decorated his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers and blue china, and once told friends: "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china." The line circulated so widely that aesthetes adopted it as a slogan.

  Two tutors pulled him in opposite philosophical directions. Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance Wilde later described in De Profundis as "that book that has had such a strange influence over my life," argued that sensibility to beauty should be refined above all else. John Ruskin countered that beauty must be allied with moral good; Wilde eagerly attended Ruskin's lecture series The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence, and even volunteered, despite being given to neither early rising nor manual labour, to help Ruskin convert a swampy country lane into a road edged with flowers.

  Catholicism drew him repeatedly during these years. In 1877, an audience with Pope Pius IX in Rome left him speechless. He met the Reverend Sebastian Bowden of the Brompton Oratory and scheduled a baptism day. On that day, he sent Father Bowden a bunch of altar lilies instead of himself. Wilde was rusticated for one term after returning late from a trip to Greece with Mahaffy, and yet he still graduated in November 1878 with a double first in Classical Moderations and Greats, winning the Newdigate Prize that same year for his poem "Ravenna."

• 4. The Dandy in London and America

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  After Oxford, Wilde set himself up in London with the last of his inheritance from the sale of his father's houses, listing himself in the 1881 British Census as a boarder at 1 Tite Street, Chelsea, in the home of the society painter Frank Miles. Lillie Langtry, introduced to Wilde at Miles' studio in 1877, described his "remarkably fascinating and compelling personality" in her autobiography; Wilde tutored her in Latin and encouraged her to pursue acting. He also completed his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, in 1880, distributing privately printed copies to actresses he hoped to attract to the lead role.

  In mid-1881, at twenty-seven, he published Poems. The first print run of 750 copies sold out, but the Oxford Union condemned the book for alleged plagiarism by a tight vote, and its librarian returned the presentation copy with an apology note. The poet magazine Punch remarked that "The poet is Wilde, but his poetry's tame."

  Aestheticism was already fashionable enough to be caricatured by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience in 1881. Richard D'Oyly Carte, the English impresario, invited Wilde to lecture across North America, partly to prime audiences for the Patience tour. Wilde arrived on the SS Arizona on the 2nd of January 1882. Originally planned for four months, the tour stretched to nearly a year because of its commercial success. He claimed to have drunk whiskey with miners in Leadville, Colorado. The reception in the press was often hostile; Harper's Weekly placed a sunflower-worshipping monkey dressed as Wilde on its January 1882 front cover, and the Washington Post ran Wilde's image alongside the Wild Man of Borneo asking "How far is it from this to this?" The San Francisco Chronicle reported the city divided into two camps: those who found him an original thinker, and those who thought him "the most pretentious fraud ever perpetrated on a groaning public."

• 5. Marriage, Editorship and the Writing Life

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  Wilde met Constance Lloyd in 1881, the daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy Queen's Counsel. She happened to be in Dublin in 1884 when Wilde was lecturing at the Gaiety Theatre, and he proposed on that occasion. They married on the 29th of May 1884 at the Anglican St James's Church in Paddington, London. Although Constance had a generous annual allowance of £250, the couple renovated No. 16 Tite Street in Chelsea over seven months at considerable expense, because, having preached to others about design for so long, their home was expected to set new standards. They had two sons, Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886.

  In mid-1887, with a family to support, Wilde became editor of The Lady's World magazine. He promptly renamed it The Woman's World and raised its tone, adding serious articles on parenting, culture and politics. His own column, "Literary and Other Notes," became popular and amusing, and contributors included Lady Wilde and Constance. The initial vigour faded as office routines grew tedious, and by October 1889 Wilde had left; the magazine survived him by only a year.

  A dinner with James McNeill Whistler produced one of the era's most retold anecdotes. Whistler delivered a remark Wilde found so witty that Wilde exclaimed he wished he had said it himself. Whistler replied: "You will, Oscar, you will." Their mutual friend Herbert Vivian published this exchange in The Sun in 1889, alleging that Wilde habitually passed off other people's witticisms as his own. Wilde called this "the inaccuracy of an eavesdropper with the method of a blackmailer" and the friendship ended. In his essay series of the late 1880s, Wilde refined his beliefs about art's social role: "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value."

• 6. The Novel and the Stage

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  The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared as the lead story in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The Daily Chronicle called it "unclean," "poisonous" and "heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction." Wilde vigorously disputed this, writing to the editor of the Scots Observer that "If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly will see its moral lesson." For the 1891 book edition he added six new chapters, excised some overtly decadent passages, and introduced a preface of twenty-two epigrams including the now-famous line: "Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

  Salome was written rapidly in French while Wilde was in Paris in 1891. Rehearsals starring Sarah Bernhardt began in London, but the Lord Chamberlain refused the play a licence because it depicted biblical characters, a prohibition then in force on the English stage. It was published jointly in Paris and London in 1893 in the original French, and in London a year later in Lord Alfred Douglas's English translation with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. It was not performed until 1896 in Paris, by which time Wilde was in prison.

  Lady Windermere's Fan opened on the 20th of February 1892 at St James's Theatre to an audience packed with London society. Wilde earned £7,000 in the first year from that play alone. A Woman of No Importance followed in 1893, and An Ideal Husband in January 1895. The Importance of Being Earnest had its premiere on the 14th of February 1895, also at St James's. Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon, told the biographer Hesketh Pearson: "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than that first night." H. G. Wells, reviewing it for The Pall Mall Gazette, wrote that "More humorous dealing with theatrical conventions it would be difficult to imagine."

• 7. Trials and Ruin

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  Lionel Johnson introduced Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas in mid-1891; Douglas was then an undergraduate at Oxford, known to friends as "Bosie." By 1893 the relationship had become both intense and reckless. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, known for his outspoken atheism and his creation of the modern rules of boxing, confronted Wilde at 16 Tite Street in June 1894 and threatened to thrash him if he was seen with his son in any public restaurant. Wilde responded: "I don't know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight."

  On the 18th of February 1895, Queensberry left his calling card at Wilde's club, the Albemarle, inscribed: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite." Wilde, encouraged by Douglas and against the advice of friends who met at the Café Royal on the 24th of March 1895, issued a prosecution for criminal libel. Frank Harris warned him at that meeting: "They are going to prove sodomy against you." Wilde and Douglas walked out. Queensberry's lawyers, led by Edward Carson QC, gathered evidence from male prostitutes and private detectives. When Carson announced during the trial that he had located several men willing to testify they had had sex with Wilde, Sir Edward Clarke advised Wilde to drop the case. Queensberry was acquitted, and under the Libel Act 1843, Wilde was left liable for Queensberry's considerable legal expenses, rendering him bankrupt.

  Wilde was arrested on the 6th of April 1895 for gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial, presided over by Mr Justice Wills, concluded on the 25th of May 1895. Wilde and Alfred Taylor were convicted. The judge called the sentence of two years' hard labour "totally inadequate for a case such as this," and described it as "the worst case I have ever tried." The Reverend Stewart Headlam put up most of the £5,000 surety that had briefly freed Wilde between trials. When the verdict came, Wilde's response of "And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?" was drowned out in cries of "Shame" from the courtroom.

• 8. Prison and Afterward

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  Wilde first entered Newgate Prison for processing, then Pentonville, where hard labour meant hours walking a treadmill and picking oakum. In November he collapsed during chapel from illness and hunger. The fall ruptured his right eardrum, an injury that would later contribute to his death. Richard B. Haldane, the Liberal MP and reformer, had Wilde transferred on the 23rd of November 1895 to Reading Gaol, thirty miles west of London. The transfer was the lowest point of his incarceration: a crowd jeered and spat at him on the platform at Clapham Junction railway station. At Reading he was known only as C.3.3 - the occupant of the third cell on the third floor of C ward.

  A fellow prisoner at Reading, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, was executed there on the 7th of July 1896 for murdering his wife. From this event Wilde later drew The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published in 1898.

  Between January and March 1897 Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Douglas, which became De Profundis. He could not send it, but took it with him on release. In it he held Douglas responsible for much of his ruin and wrote: "I am here for having tried to put your father in prison." He also traced a spiritual journey in which he concluded that his ordeal had filled his soul with experience, however bitter. He described himself as one who had stood "in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age." Released on the 19th of May 1897, Wilde sailed that same evening for Dieppe. He never returned to Britain or Ireland. He died on the 30th of November 1900, having spent his final years in France and Italy.