Oscar Wilde
The Last Gentleman of Letters
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde arrived in London in 1879 with nothing but a degree from Oxford, an unshakeable conviction in his own genius, and a gift for conversation that made drawing rooms fall silent. Within a decade he was the most famous writer in England. Within fifteen years he was its most famous prisoner. His crime was not what he wrote — though his only novel scandalised Victorian morality — but who he loved. The story of Oscar Wilde is the story of a man who turned his life into a work of art, and then watched the world destroy it.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
1854–1900
Born in Dublin to a distinguished Irish family. Died in a shabby Paris hotel at forty-six, bankrupt and exiled. Between those dates: the most dazzling literary career of the Victorian age.
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Seven completed plays, including four masterpieces in four years — Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest — plus Salomé, written in French, banned in London, and later turned into an opera by Richard Strauss.
2 years
Convicted of 'gross indecency' on May 25, 1895, and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He served every day — at Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading Gaol — emerging broken in health and spirit.
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Fluent in English, French, German, and classical Greek. He wrote Salomé in French, read Dante in Italian, and could quote Homer from memory. At Oxford he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and took a double first in Classics.
Playwright, poet, wit, aesthete, martyr to Victorian morality
Defining Events
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde's only novel was a moral grenade lobbed into the lap of Victorian England. The story of a beautiful young man who remains eternally youthful while his portrait absorbs every sin and cruelty was denounced as 'poisonous,' 'corrupt,' and 'heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.' Wilde responded to his critics in a preface that became the manifesto of the Aesthetic movement: 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' The novel would be read aloud at his trial five years later, its homoerotic undertones presented as evidence of his depravity.
The Importance of Being Earnest
On the evening of February 14, 1895, Wilde stood at the summit of English letters. His comic masterpiece — a 'trivial comedy for serious people' — opened at the St James's Theatre to rapturous reviews and a sold-out house. Two plays running simultaneously in the West End. The Prince of Wales in the audience. Critics called it the finest comedy since Sheridan. It was the last unclouded night of his life. The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, was circling — and within weeks the catastrophe would begin.
The Trials
What followed was the most spectacular public destruction of a literary reputation in English history. When the Marquess of Queensberry left a card at Wilde's club accusing him of 'posing' as a sodomite, Wilde — fatally urged on by Lord Alfred Douglas — sued for libel. The case collapsed when Queensberry's lawyers produced evidence of Wilde's relationships with young men. The Crown then prosecuted Wilde himself. The first criminal trial ended in a hung jury. The second, on May 25, 1895, ended with a guilty verdict and the maximum sentence: two years' hard labour. The judge called it 'the worst case I have ever tried.'
Timeline
Born in Dublin
Born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's leading eye and ear surgeon. His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde, was a poet and Irish nationalist who wrote under the pen name 'Speranza.' From both parents he inherited a love of language, a talent for self-invention, and a dangerous indifference to convention.
Oxford
Won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Classics under Walter Pater and John Ruskin — two men who shaped his aesthetic philosophy in opposing directions. He won the Newdigate Prize for his poem 'Ravenna' in 1878, took a double first, and left Oxford determined to make beauty the organising principle of his life. 'I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,' he told friends.
American Lecture Tour
Arrived in New York for a lecture tour on aesthetics. At customs, he reportedly declared: 'I have nothing to declare except my genius.' He crossed the country by rail, lectured to miners in Leadville, Colorado, and charmed audiences from Boston to San Francisco. America made him famous. England had merely made him fashionable.
Marriage to Constance
Married Constance Lloyd on May 29 at St James's Church, Paddington. They settled at 16 Tite Street, Chelsea, and had two sons — Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886. The marriage was, by most accounts, genuinely affectionate in its early years. Wilde adored his children and wrote fairy tales for them — 'The Happy Prince' and 'The Selfish Giant' — that remain among the finest in the English language.
The Golden Years
Five years of extraordinary productivity. The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890. Four society comedies that conquered the West End. Salomé, written in French for Sarah Bernhardt. Essays, fairy tales, poems, reviews — an outpouring of brilliance that made Wilde the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. He was also, by 1891, involved with Lord Alfred Douglas — the relationship that would consume everything.
Trial and Imprisonment
Arrested on April 6, 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel. Convicted of gross indecency on May 25 and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He was stripped of everything — his home, his possessions, his children, his reputation. In prison at Reading Gaol, he wrote De Profundis, a fifty-thousand-word letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that is part love letter, part indictment, part spiritual autobiography. It was not published in full until 1962.
Exile in France
Released from prison on May 19, 1897, and crossed immediately to France, never to return to England. He adopted the name 'Sebastian Melmoth' — after the arrow-pierced saint and the wandering anti-hero of a Gothic novel by his great-uncle Charles Maturin. He published The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898, his final major work. He drifted between Paris, Naples, and the Swiss coast, increasingly dependent on the charity of friends.
Death in Paris
Died on November 30 at the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris, aged forty-six. He had been received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed — a conversion his friends had long expected. His last recorded remark, according to legend, was about the wallpaper: 'My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.' He was buried at Bagneux, later moved to Père Lachaise cemetery beneath a sphinx by Jacob Epstein.
Key Figures
Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas — 'Bosie' — was the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, beautiful, spoiled, vindictive, and possessed of a talent for poetry that was real but modest. He met Wilde in 1891 and became the consuming passion of Wilde's life. It was Bosie who goaded Wilde into suing his father for libel, a catastrophic miscalculation that led directly to Wilde's arrest. After Wilde's imprisonment, Bosie drifted away. They reunited briefly in Naples in 1897, but the relationship had burned itself out. Douglas spent the rest of his long life alternately defending and denouncing Wilde's memory.
Constance Lloyd
Constance Mary Lloyd married Wilde in 1884 and bore him two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. She was intelligent, politically active — an early advocate for women's dress reform and Irish Home Rule — and, by all evidence, deeply in love with her husband. Wilde's arrest destroyed her life as completely as it destroyed his. She changed her surname and the children's to Holland, fled to the Continent, and died in Genoa in 1898 after a failed gynecological operation, aged thirty-nine. She and Wilde never divorced, but they never lived together again after 1895.
The Legacy of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's fall was so swift, so total, and so public that it has become a parable — of art against philistinism, of love against law, of the individual against the state. He entered Reading Gaol as the most celebrated writer in England and left it a broken man who would never write another play. Yet what survives is not the tragedy but the work: the plays that still fill theatres, the novel that still provokes, the fairy tales that still make children cry, and the epigrams that have become part of the English language itself. 'I have put my genius into my life,' he told André Gide. 'I have put only my talent into my works.'
If the talent produced this much, the genius must have been extraordinary indeed. Read his story in his own words — the first-person ePub takes you inside the mind of a man who believed that life itself could be a work of art, and paid the ultimate price for proving it.
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