Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) was an Irish poet, playwright, essayist and novelist, and one of the most celebrated figures of late Victorian London. Known for his epigrammatic wit and his advocacy of aestheticism, he wrote the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and a series of society comedies culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest, before a conviction for homosexual acts in 1895 ended his career and left him in exile. [1][2]
Early life and education
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854 to Sir William Wilde, a distinguished surgeon, and Jane Wilde, a poet and nationalist writer who published as "Speranza". He read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, before winning a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. [1]
At Oxford he absorbed the ideas of Walter Pater and John Ruskin and began to fashion the public persona of the aesthete. In 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna and took a double first in his final examinations. [2]
Early career
Wilde settled in London, published Poems in 1881, and became a recognisable figure in literary society, satirised in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. In 1882 he undertook an extended lecture tour of North America, speaking on the English Renaissance and on decorative art. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884, with whom he had two sons. [1]
In the later 1880s he worked as a journalist and editor and produced the fairy tales collected in The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, alongside critical essays including The Decay of Lying and The Soul of Man Under Socialism. [3]
Major work
His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared in 1890 and in revised book form in 1891. Its treatment of beauty, corruption and the moral cost of a life devoted to sensation provoked hostile reviews, and Wilde added a preface setting out his position that art has no moral purpose. [2]
Between 1892 and 1895 he wrote the comedies on which his theatrical reputation rests: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. The last, a farce built on mistaken identity and social pretence, is regarded as one of the finest comedies in English. His French-language play Salomé was refused a licence in Britain. [1]
Trials and imprisonment
Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas led him to sue Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for criminal libel in 1895. The case collapsed and Wilde was prosecuted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act for gross indecency. Convicted at a second trial, he was sentenced to two years' hard labour, serving much of it in Reading Gaol. [2]
In prison he wrote the long letter to Douglas published after his death as De Profundis. Released in 1897, bankrupt and separated from his family, he left for the Continent and published The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a protest against prison conditions, under the name of his cell number. [3]
Later life and legacy
Wilde spent his final years in France under the name Sebastian Melmoth and died in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery beneath a monument by Jacob Epstein. [1]
His plays returned to the repertory within a generation and have never left it, while his trials became a reference point in histories of the criminalisation of homosexuality in Britain. He was among those pardoned posthumously under the legislation of 2017 known informally as the Alan Turing law. [4]
