biography of oscar wilde in english

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Early life and education

Aestheticism, early writings, and marriage, the picture of dorian gray, plays and epigrams, relationship with lord alfred douglas and trials for gross indecency, imprisonment and de profundis, the ballad of reading gaol and death.

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Oscar Wilde

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• The Art Story - Biography of Oscar Wilde
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• Table Of Contents

Oscar Wilde’s literary reputation rests largely on his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and on his masterful comedies of manners Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was also known for his wit, his flamboyance, and his trials and jail sentence for homosexual acts.

Oscar Wilde came from a prominent family. While studying at Oxford in the 1870s, he gained notice as a scholar, poseur, wit, and poet and for his devotion to the Aesthetic movement , which held that art should exist for its beauty alone. Wilde later established himself in London’s social and artistic circles.

How did Oscar Wilde die?

After his release from prison in 1897, Oscar Wilde lived in France in straitened circumstances. In 1900 at the age of 46, he died of meningitis following an acute ear infection.

Oscar Wilde (born October 16, 1854, Dublin , Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France) was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel , The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In his comedies he proved himself to be a master of the epigram . He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England , which advocated art for art’s sake , and he was the object of notorious civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97). Despite his fall from society’s grace at the end of his life, Wilde came to be regarded as the personification of wit and sophistication.

Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, William Wilde, was Ireland ’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology , folklore , and the satirist Jonathan Swift . His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee), was a nationalist poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore who wrote under the name Speranza. Wilde was one of three children. His elder brother, Willie, became a journalist, and his younger sister, Isola, died of a fever when she was 10. As a child, Wilde was baptized a Roman Catholic at his mother’s behest , despite his family’s affiliation with the Anglican church ; presumably, this act signified his mother’s rejection of the Protestant landlord class and its values, since Wilde received no further education in the Catholic faith.

After attending Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College Dublin (1871–74) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honors. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter’s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater’s urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d’art, resulted in his famous remark, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china !”

In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London , Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. And in their comic opera Patience , Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems (1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne , Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and John Keats . Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.

In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan , were born, in 1885 and 1886, respectively. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale .

“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” —Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

In the final decade of his life Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890 and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, in 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French Decadent fiction. The novel tells the story of an extraordinarily beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, who is taken under the wing of an older, amoral man, Lord Henry Wotton. Entranced by Henry’s views on art and sensuality, Dorian wishes to remain as young and handsome as a portrait of himself painted by another admirer, Basil Hallward. In time, the portrait changes and becomes hideous to reflect all of Dorian’s sins and moral failings while the flesh-and-blood Dorian remains entirely unchanged in appearance. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of the novel’s apparently moral ending.

Intentions (1891), a collection of previously published essays , restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler . In the same year two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to Wilde’s extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates .

Wilde’s greatest successes were his society comedies . Within the conventions of the French “ well-made play ” (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theater . His first success, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama .

In the same year rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé , written in French and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion, were halted by the censor because of a law that prohibited plays containing biblical characters. (In the Bible , Salome is the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas , the ruler of Galilee . At the instigation of her mother, she arranges for the execution of John the Baptist by asking for his head on a platter as a reward for her dance before Herod. In Wilde’s version Salome lusts after John the Baptist and plots his death after he spurns her. After he is killed, she kisses his severed head.) It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with English artist Aubrey Beardsley ’s celebrated illustrations.

A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest , were produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams —seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

“I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all.” —Oscar Wilde, from a letter to a friend, 1885

In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure—or, as Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, characterized it, “a Faustian thirst for experience.” About the time of his son Vyvyan’s birth, Wilde began a sexual relationship with a friend, Canadian journalist and art critic Robert Ross. It was the first in a series of secret affairs that he had with other men, culminating in his close and tempestuous friendship with Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas , whom he had met in 1891 and who was 16 years younger than Wilde. Their relationship infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father, a violent-tempered man whom Douglas despised. Accused by the marquess of being a sodomite , Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued the marquess for criminal libel .

The case went to trial in April 1895. Wilde’s case collapsed within three days, however, when the evidence went against him. His writings were called into question, particularly The Picture of Dorian Gray and its homoerotic themes, and it was revealed that Wilde had solicited the services of male sex workers (albeit initially at Douglas’s urging). Wilde dropped the suit, but the evidence made him vulnerable to arrest for having violated Britain ’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized sex acts between men (though not between women). Urged to flee to France (where homosexuality was legal) by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial for acts of gross indecency.

Wilde testified brilliantly, drawing applause (and some hisses) after giving an eloquent speech about “the love that dare not speak its name,” an expression in Douglas’s poem “Two Loves.” Interpreting it as a coy reference to homosexuality, the prosecution demanded that Wilde explain its meaning. He characterized it, in part, as “a great affection of an elder for a younger man…such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.” But the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labor.

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” —Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis (1905)

Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis ) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work. Yet the letter also expressed Wilde’s spirituality , with elegant ruminations on suffering, repentance, and “the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist.”

To avoid scandal Constance Wilde moved to the European continent and changed the family’s surname to Holland. They corresponded often through letters, however, and she visited him once in prison after the death of his mother in 1896. She died in Genoa , Italy , in 1898, several days after a botched operation that was meant to resolve a uterine tumor. (Contemporary medical experts believe that she was misdiagnosed and in fact had multiple sclerosis .)

Wilde is one of several famous artists buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris . Read about this celebrated resting ground and eight other “cemeteries to die for.”

In May 1897 Wilde was released from prison, a bankrupt , and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems, he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, who would become his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. Wilde died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church , which he had long admired.

In January 2017 Wilde was among 50,000 men who were posthumously pardoned under the Turing Law (named for British mathematician and logician Alan Turing , who was convicted of gross indecency in 1952). The law was introduced to exonerate individuals who had been unjustly convicted of homosexual crimes that no longer exist.

Oscar Wilde

Author Oscar Wilde was known for his acclaimed works including 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' as well as his brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality.

(1854-1900)

Who Was Oscar Wilde?

Author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde’s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.

Early Life and Education

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed doctor who was knighted for his work as a medical advisor for the Irish censuses. William later founded St. Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital, entirely at his own personal expense, to treat the city's poor. Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a poet who was closely associated with the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, a skilled linguist whose acclaimed English translation of Pomeranian novelist Wilhelm Meinhold's Sidonia the Sorceress had a deep influence on her son's later writing.

Wilde was a bright and bookish child. He attended the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen where he fell in love with Greek and Roman studies. He won the school's prize for the top classics student in each of his last two years, as well as second prize in drawing during his final year. Upon graduating in 1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin. At the end of his first year at Trinity, in 1872, he placed first in the school's classics examination and received the college's Foundation Scholarship, the highest honor awarded to undergraduates.

Upon his graduation in 1874, Wilde received the Berkeley Gold Medal as Trinity's best student in Greek, as well as the Demyship scholarship for further study at Magdalen College in Oxford. At Oxford, Wilde continued to excel academically, receiving first class marks from his examiners in both classics and classical moderations. It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first sustained attempts at creative writing. In 1878, the year of his graduation, his poem "Ravenna" won the Newdigate Prize for the best English verse composition by an Oxford undergraduate.

Career Beginnings

Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his friend, Frank Miles, a popular portraitist among London's high society. There, he continued to focus on writing poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems , in 1881. While the book received only modest critical praise, it nevertheless established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer. The next year, in 1882, Wilde traveled from London to New York City to embark on an American lecture tour, for which he delivered a staggering 140 lectures in just nine months.

Upon the conclusion of his American tour, Wilde returned home and immediately commenced another lecture circuit of England and Ireland that lasted until the middle of 1884. Through his lectures, as well as his early poetry, Wilde established himself as a leading proponent of the aesthetic movement, a theory of art and literature that emphasized the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, rather than to promote any political or social viewpoint.

On May 29, 1884, Wilde married a wealthy Englishwoman named Constance Lloyd. They had two sons: Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in 1886. A year after his wedding, Wilde was hired to run Lady's World , a once-popular English magazine that had recently fallen out of fashion. During his two years editing Lady's World , Wilde revitalized the magazine by expanding its coverage to "deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think and what they feel. The Lady's World ," wrote Wilde, "should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure."

Acclaimed Works

Beginning in 1888, while he was still serving as editor of Lady's World , Wilde entered a seven-year period of furious creativity, during which he produced nearly all of his great literary works. In 1888, seven years after he wrote Poems , Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales , a collection of children's stories. In 1891, he published Intentions , an essay collection arguing the tenets of aestheticism, and that same year, he published his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray . The novel is a cautionary tale about a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, who wishes (and receives his wish) that his portrait ages while he remains youthful and lives a life of sin and pleasure.

Though the novel is now revered as a great and classic work, at the time critics were outraged by the book's apparent lack of morality. Wilde vehemently defended himself in a preface to the novel, considered one of the great testaments to aestheticism, in which he wrote, "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" and "vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art."

Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan , opened in February 1892 to widespread popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form. Over the next few years, Wilde produced several great plays—witty, highly satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark and serious undertones. His most notable plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play.

Personal Life and Prison Sentence

Around the same time that he was enjoying his greatest literary success, Wilde commenced an affair with a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas. On February 18, 1895, Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, who had gotten wind of the affair, left a calling card at Wilde's home addressed to "Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite," a misspelling of sodomite. Although Wilde's homosexuality was something of an open secret, he was so outraged by Queensberry's note that he sued him for libel. The decision ruined his life.

When the trial began in March, Queensberry and his lawyers presented evidence of Wilde's homosexuality—homoerotic passages from his literary works, as well as his love letters to Douglas—that quickly resulted in the dismissal of Wilde's libel case and his arrest on charges of "gross indecency." Wilde was convicted on May 25, 1895, and sentenced to two years in prison.

Wilde emerged from prison in 1897, physically depleted, emotionally exhausted and flat broke. He went into exile in France, where, living in cheap hotels and friends' apartments, he briefly reunited with Douglas. Wilde wrote very little during these last years; his only notable work was a poem he completed in 1898 about his experiences in prison, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Death and Legacy

Wilde died of meningitis on November 30, 1900, at the age of 46. More than a century after his death, Wilde is still better remembered for his personal life—his exuberant personality, consummate wit and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality—than for his literary accomplishments. Nevertheless, his witty, imaginative and undeniably beautiful works, in particular his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest , are considered among the great literary masterpieces of the late Victorian period.

Throughout his entire life, Wilde remained deeply committed to the principles of aestheticism, principles that he expounded through his lectures and demonstrated through his works as well as anyone of his era. "All art is at once surface and symbol," Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray . "Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Oscar Wilde
• Birth Year: 1854
• Birth date: October 16, 1854
• Birth City: Dublin
• Birth Country: Ireland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Author Oscar Wilde was known for his acclaimed works including 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' as well as his brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Theater and Dance
• Astrological Sign: Libra
• Portora Royal School
• Magdalen College
• Trinity College
• Nationalities
• Death Year: 1900
• Death date: November 30, 1900
• Death City: Paris
• Death Country: France

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Biography Online

Oscar Wilde Biography

“To get back my youth I would do anything  in the world, except take exercise, get up early or be respectable.”

– Oscar Wilde

Short biography Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. His parents were well known and attracted a degree of gossip for their extravagant lifestyles. In 1864, his father Wille Wilde was knighted for his services to medicine.

In one academic year, he got rusticated for turning up to College three weeks after the start of term. Thus, after a while, he lost interest in pursuing an academic career in Oxford and moved to London. It was in London that he was able to skillfully enter into high society, soon becoming well known as a playwright and noted wit. Oscar Wilde became famous throughout London society. He was one of the early “celebrities” – in some respects, he was famous for being famous. His dress was a target for satire in the cartoons, but Wilde didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he learnt the art of self-publicity and seemed to revel in it, at least up until his trial in 1898.

Shortly, after the case ended, a warrant was issued for Wilde’s arrest under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 – which outlawed homosexuality – even between consenting adults.

Trial of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s trial gripped the nation, the subject matter a source of intense gossip and speculation in the press. The trial moved to a quick conclusion and Wilde was found guilty. For his “crime” of homosexual acts, Wilde was given the maximum jail sentence of two years hard labour in Wandsworth and then Reading Gaol. It is no understatement to say this experience deeply shocked and affected the previously ebullient Wilde.

In some respects he never really recovered; on his release, he left for Paris where he lived in comparative anonymity. However, he retained his wit and continued to write, heavily influenced by his chastening experiences. Of these post gaol writings, his poem “Ballad of Reading Gaol” is perhaps the most well known, illustrating a new dimension to Wilde’s writing.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain, Within another ring, And was wondering if the man had done A great or little thing, When a voice behind me whispered low, “ That fellow’s got to swing .”

From: Ballad of Reading Gaol

Although Wilde couldn’t return to his previous level of writing he developed new capacities, whilst retaining his sharp intellect. As Jonathon Fryer commented on Oscar Wilde’s final part of life he was.

 “beaten but not bowed, still a clown behind a mask of tragedy.”

The Life of Wilde was turbulent and volatile – never short of incident. It reflected his own inner paradoxes and revolutionary views. In some ways, he was both a saint and sinner at the same time. Rightly or wrongly Wilde is remembered as much for his life as his writings. However he himself said.

“I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living.”

His writings reflect in part his paradoxical view of life, suggesting things were not always as they appeared. As his biographer, Richard Ellman said of Wilde.

“Along with Blake and Nietzsche , he was proposing that good and evil are not what they seem, and that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of behaviour”

Whatever one may make of Wilde’s life, his capacity for writing remains undeniable. His greatest work and comedy is arguably  “ The Importance of Being Earnest ”. Here the plot line is thin, to say the least, but Wilde brings it alive through his scintillating repertoire of wit and biting humour.

“Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

– Algernon , Act I

“Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

– Lady Bracknell , Act III

Wilde was not an overtly political commentator, but through his plays, there is an underlying critique of social norms that are illumined for their absurdities.

Wilde remains a fascinating character; someone who lived life to the full, experiencing both the joy and tragedy of society’s vacillating judgements. With the distance of over a century, it is easier to judge Wilde for his unique contributions to literature rather than through the eyes of Victorian moral standards. His quotes have become immortal a fitting tribute to a genius of the witticism

“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. ”

-Oscar Wilde

As Stephen Fry wrote of Oscar Wilde.

“What of Wilde the man? He stood for Art. He stood for nothing less all his life. He is still enormously underestimated as an artist and a thinker.. Wilde was a great writer and a great man.”

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Oscar Wilde ”, Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net , 22nd Nov. 2006. Last updated 8 February 2018.

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Oscar Wilde Biography

Born: October 16, 1854 Dublin, Ireland Died: November 30, 1900 Paris, France Irish-born English author, dramatist, and poet

The English author Oscar Wilde was part of the "art for art's sake" movement in English literature at the end of the nineteenth century. He is best known for his brilliant, witty comedies including the play The Importance of Being Earnest and his classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Outstanding childhood

Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a well-known surgeon; his mother, Jane Francisca Elgee Wilde, wrote popular poetry and other work under the pseudonym (pen name) Speranza. Because of his mother's literary successes, young Oscar enjoyed a cultured and privileged childhood.

After attending Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Ireland, Wilde moved on to study the classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874. There, he began attracting public attention through the uniqueness of his writing and his lifestyle. Before leaving Trinity College, Wilde was awarded many honors, including the Berkely Gold Medal for Greek.

Begins writing career

At the age of twenty-three Wilde entered Magdalen College, Oxford, England. In 1878 he was awarded the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Ravenna." He attracted a group of followers whose members were purposefully unproductive and artificial. "The first duty in life," Wilde wrote in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), "is to be as artificial as possible." After leaving Oxford he expanded his cult (a following). His iconoclasm (attacking of established religious institutions) clashed with the holiness that came with the Victorian era of the late nineteenth century, but this contradiction was one that he aimed for. Another of his aims was the glorification of youth.

Sexuality of Oscar Wilde

In 1886 Wilde became a practicing homosexual, or one who is sexually attracted to a member of their own sex. He believed that his attacks on the Victorian moral code was the inspiration for his writing. He considered himself a criminal who challenged society by creating scandal. Before his conviction (found guilty) for homosexuality in 1895, the scandal was essentially private. Wilde believed in the criminal mentality. "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891), treated murder and its successful cover-up comically. The original version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott's Magazine emphasized the murder of the painter Basil Hallward by Dorian as the turning point in Dorian's downfall. Wilde stressed that criminal tendency became criminal act.

Dorian Gray was published in book form in 1891. The novel was a celebration of youth. Dorian, in a gesture typical of Wilde, is parentless. He does not age, and he is a criminal. Like all of Wilde's work, the novel was a popular success. His only book of formal criticism, Intentions (1891), restated many of the views that Dorian Gray had emphasized, and it points toward his later plays and stories. Intentions emphasized the importance of criticism in an age that Wilde believed was uncritical. For him, criticism was an independent branch of literature, and its function was important.

Between 1892 and 1895 Wilde was an active dramatist (writer of plays), writing what he identified as "trivial [unimportant] comedies for serious people." His plays were popular because their dialogue was baffling, clever, and often short and clear, relying on puns and elaborate word games for their effect. Lady Windermere's Fan was produced in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893, and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.

On March 2, 1895, Wilde initiated a suit for criminal libel (a statement that damages someone's reputation) against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had objected to Wilde's friendship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. When his suit failed in April, countercharges followed. After a spectacular court action, Wilde was convicted of homosexual misconduct and sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor.

Prison transformed Wilde's experience as extremely as had his 1886 introduction to homosexuality. In a sense he had prepared himself for prison and its transformation of his art. De Profundis is a moving letter to a friend and apologia (a formal defense) that Wilde wrote in prison; it was first published as a whole in 1905. His theme was that he was not unlike other men and was a scapegoat, or one who bears blame for others. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) was written after his release. In this poem a man murdered his mistress and was about to be executed, but Wilde considered him only as criminal as the rest of humanity. He wrote: "For each man kills the thing he loves, / Yet each man does not die."

After Wilde was released from prison he lived in Paris, France. He attempted to write a play in his style before his imprisonment, but this effort failed. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900.

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. Oscar Wilde. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Kaufman, Moises. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Pearce, Joseph. The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. London: HarperCollins, 2000.

Woodcock, George. Oscar Wilde: The Double Image. New York: Black Rose Books, 1989.

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• Art Influencers

Oscar Wilde

Irish Writer, Critic, Aesthete

Summary of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde emerged in late nineteenth century London as the living embodiment of the Aesthetic movement . He won fame as a dramatist, poet and novelist whose ideas on art, beauty and personal freedom formed a formidable challenge to Victorian puritanicalism. At the same time, Wilde attracted public notoriety for his stream of witty aphorisms and his "effeminate" long hair, dandyish clothing and his devotion to flowers. He was halted at the height of his fame when sentenced to three years imprisonment for illegal homosexual activity. Ruined physically and financially, he lived out the final few years of his life in Paris, dying aged just 46. Wilde's star, which today burns brightest within the gay/queer community, has never diminished, however, and his legacy - exemplified by two classics of English literature, the Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the stage satire, The Importance of Being Earnest - prevails through screen biographies and countless reinterpretations of his works. But perhaps it was his flair for self-publicity and his oft-quoted witticisms that his name truly endures in the consciousness of the public.

Accomplishments

• Wilde's name is routinely linked with Théophile Gautier's famous maxim " Arte per amore dell' Arte " ( art for art's sake ). Guided by this maxim, Wilde did more than any other to cultivate the modern idea that art, as a pure product of the senses, could "prevent the death of the human soul".
• Wilde used the Aesthetic doctrine to promote the cult of beauty and pleasure and, as the physical embodiment of that ideal, he promoted hedonism as the way out of repressive Victorian culture and society. By liberating English literature from its Victorian preconceptions, he helped align British culture with the modernist values emerging on the European continent.
• Wilde found a way to marry the role of rebel and dandy. The rebel belonged to the realm of the bohemian while the dandy sat closer to aristocratic culture. Wilde plotted his own path; a dandy whose sartorial elegance was a symbol of his superiority of spirit and personal freedom rather that a symbol of his wealth and status. In this way, Wilde was perhaps the first to self-consciously treat public life as an artistic performance.
• While he claimed to live a life governed by no other responsibility than to enjoy excess and create beauty, Wilde did not shy away from calling for social and political reform. The strength of his political convictions have, however, been questioned by some scholars. And although he was apt to excuse his carnal proclivities as a "form of sexual madness", there can be no questioning Wilde's martyr-like status which has seen him canonized as an icon for the Gay Liberation movement.

The Life of Oscar Wilde

The greatest champion of the credo "art-for-art's-sake", Wilde professed that no "form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under" and that, as far as the true artist was concerned, any "authority over him and his art is ridiculous".

Oscar Wilde and Important Artists and Artworks

Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1872-77)

Artist: James Whistler

Whistler's Impressionistic treatment of Battersea Bridge evoked the hushed atmosphere of the river Thames at dusk; the foggy London skyline peppered with exploding fireworks. It was one of a series of paintings that many, including the critic John Ruskin, saw as an affront to standards in art. In June 1888, following the two men's recent re-acquaintance, Wilde gifted a copy of his new anthology, The Happy Prince , to Ruskin. Wilde's gift was accompanied by a note which read: "There is in you something of prophet or priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given to none other, so that your message might come to us with the fire of passion, and the marvel of music, making the deaf hear, and the blind see". One of the tales in the book was called "The Remarkable Rocket", a satire about a delusional toy rocket who believes that his "setting off" will take center stage at a royal marriage. The rocket has not realized that he will be "a mere footnote to the party". As the literary historian Anne Bruder describes it, "When the Rocket begins an exhortation on his superiority to the other fireworks and his importance to the future of the Prince and Princess, he pathetically begins to weep, and thus destroys his ability to be ignited. His fuse wet, he gets tossed onto a trash heap where uninterested children, who do not even watch the explosion, set him off as they walk away. And while the narrator tells us, "But nobody saw him," the Rocket dies swearing, "I knew I should create a great sensation". As Bruder concluded, "The placement of this tale in Wilde's oeuvre and his gifting it to Ruskin [...] was almost certainly an allegorical rendering of his former friend and famous egotist J. M. Whistler". Whistler's painting prompted Ruskin to accuse the artist of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler's detestation of the critic led to him suing for libel, a lawsuit he won at great expense and which brought him just minor financial retribution. Unfortunately, the legal costs bankrupted the painter.

Oil on canvas - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Illustration for Salomé, "J'ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan" (1893)

Artist: Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley was a fashionable young British illustrator who had made a name for himself by illustrating a book, Mort d'Arthur , by the medieval poet Malory. The book proved a favorite amongst the Pre-Raphaelites, with whom Wilde was initially affiliated through his admiration of the movement's maverick son, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Beardsley first met Wilde in 1891. He was somewhat spellbound by the author and even displayed a photograph of Wilde on his fireplace. When Salomé was first published (in English) in February 1893, the Pall Mall Budget magazine commissioned Beardsley for a drawing to illustrate the play's content. However, the magazine rejected the macabre, fantastical image that was based on the play's last scene in which Salomé kisses the lips of John the Baptist's severed head. It was a highly decorative, gruesome, and sexually suggestive vision, which Beardsley thought Wilde would appreciate. In the April of that year, however, an art publication called The Studio ran the illustration as part of its first edition. Wilde saw the drawing pre-publication and liked it so much he presented Beardsley with an inscribed copy of the earlier printing of the book which read thus: "March '93. For Aubrey. For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is, and can see that invisible dance". The critic Peter Raby argued that "Beardsley gave the text its first true public and modern performance, placing it firmly within the 1890s - a disturbing framework for the dark elements of cruelty and eroticism, and of the deliberate ambiguity and blurring of gender, which he released from Wilde's play as though he were opening Pandora's box". As an interesting footnote, Beardsley became art editor of the fashionable magazine The Yellow Book which ran from 1894-97. Promoting the ideas of the Aesthetic movement, the magazine took its name from the "dishonourable" covering under which controversial French novels were hidden from public view (as the British Library notes, it is, in fact, a "yellow book" which corrupts Dorian Gray, that book generally thought to be Joris-Karl Huysmans's decadent 1884 novel A rebours ( Against nature )). The British Library records moreover that "when Wilde was arrested in 1895, there were rumours he had been carrying a yellow-bound book. Though this was actually Pierre Louÿs's French novel Aphrodite , a confused crowd thought it was a copy of [the] magazine, and gathered to throw stones at the publishers offices".

Line block print on Japanese vellum paper - Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Oscar Wilde and Whistler (1894)

Artist: Philip William May

The English satirist Phil May, a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, contributed many caricatures of actors, artists, and writers to London periodicals. His self-assured drawing style and his cutting wit attracted a devoted following with his illustrations published in book collections. His caricature of Wilde and the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler was reproduced in Phil May's Sketch-book , first published in 1895. The caption refers to Whistler's repeated accusation that Wilde plagiarized his ideas. May's caption reads: [Wilde]: "That was an awfully good joke you made last night. I wish I could say it was mine". [Whistler]: "You will my boy. You will". The acerbic Whistler's eagerness to court controversy, and his craving for the limelight, made him and Wilde natural friends and together they fronted the public image of the Aesthetic movement. Twenty-years older, Whistler initially regarded Wilde as a disciple demanding of his master's approval. Indeed, Wilde's editor, Frank Harris, believed that Whistler did more to influence Wilde's wit than any other acquaintance: "Of all the personal influences which went into the moulding of Oscar Wilde's talent, that of Whistler was by far the most important; Whistler taught him the value of wit and the power a consciousness of genius and a knowledge of men lend to the artist". However, as with many of both men's close friendships, theirs ended in acrimony. Whistler felt increasingly that Wilde, whose reputation was eclipsing his own, had copied his dandyish style of dress and speech (hence the caption in May's caricature). Responding to Whistler's charge of plagiarism, Wilde retorted, "as far as borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority over painters greater than himself". Wilde further opined, "Mr Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it with a capital I". Whistler retorted, "What has Oscar in common with Art? Except that he dines at our tables, and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces". By 1890 the two men's friendship had dissolved entirely with Wilde, ever one to have the last word, basing the murdered artist in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray on his friend-turned-nemesis, Whistler.

Pen and black ink, with black crayon and touches of blue crayon, on ivory laminate board - The Art Institute of Chicago

The tomb of Oscar Wilde (1914)

Artist: Jacob Epstein

For Wilde's tomb, the modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein created an enormous, horizontally-winged Art Deco Sphinx - carved from a 20-ton block of stone - giving the feeling of forward flight, suggestive of the poet as a messenger. The design may reflect Epstein's early interest in the primal sexuality of Indian and Egyptian art and statues of winged Assyrian bulls in the British Museum. Epstein was commissioned in 1908 to design the tomb, at a cost of £2000. His original sketches depicted two, grieving young men but, abandoning that plan, he drew inspiration from Wilde's poem, The Sphinx . Epstein initially planned a small angelic figure behind the Sphinx's ear, as a reference to the verse, "sing me all your memories". He also envisaged five figures on the Sphinx's headdress, one with a crucifix perhaps symbolizing martyrdom and Wilde's Catholicism. When the sculpture was previewed in 1912 (in Epstein's London studio), The Guardian reported: "one may see that this flying messenger, incomplete with worn eyes and the strange headdress, flying through our world with incredible swiftness, telling of beauty and of fatal mutiny against life, is at once a revelation and an enigma that will hold the attention of men as long as the great block of limestone lasts". After arriving in Paris, the Sphinx's unusually large testicles were covered over with plaster to be replaced with a bronze plaque of a butterfly. Epstein was furious and refused to attend the tomb's unveiling. The testicles were then stolen by vandals in 1961, leading to rumors that the cemetery manager was using them as a paperweight. The tradition in which visitors would kiss the tomb after applying greasy lipstick to their mouths led to the surface being eroded. In 2011, a glass barrier was erected around the lower half of the tomb to protect it. According to historian Ellen Crowell, the tomb "stands out like a sore thumb in a nineteenth-century cemetery whose sculptural aesthetic seems, to the modern visitor, overarchingly figurative and representational. It is precisely this aesthetic alterity that has, for one hundred years, prompted viewers to regard Epstein's 'Tomb for Oscar Wilde' as future- rather than past-oriented, more modernist than Victorian, a monument to enlightened pride rather than retrograde shame".

Hopton Wood stone - Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

From Oscar Wilde (1974)

Artist: Anselm Keifer

In this small and delicate early watercolor, Kiefer depicts a pale pink rose blooming against a dense and fluidly painted organic background. The inclusion of the words "von Oskar Wilde/für Julia" suggests that the rose is a gift from Wilde himself to Kiefer's then wife. It has been suggested that if the picture is turned anti-clockwise, the face of the artist can be seen in the flower. Keifer has said, "If you have a big idea, a big theme, you need a small format", and here, and in many other works, his interest in alchemy and transformation is reflected in the theme of growth and decay in nature. The image specifically references Wilde's touching fairy tale The Nightingale and the Rose . In it, the songbird sacrifices itself on the rosebush's thorns with the combination of the birdsong and its blood giving life to the red flower of love. The rose is then plucked by a lovestruck philosophy student who presents the flower to his true love. She however rejects him in favor of another suitor who brings her jewels. Brokenhearted, the injured third party turns back to philosophy, the only kind of life knowledge he understands (a knowledge certainly more "knowable" than love).

Watercolor and Gouache on paper - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998)

Artist: Maggi Hambling

This "witty and amusing" sculpture/bench in central London resembles a sarcophagus with a sinewy bust of Wilde laughing, emerging from one end like the wisps of smoke from his cigarette. It is inscribed with a famous quotation from Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan : "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". A permanent memorial to Wilde in central London was first suggested during the 1980s and early 1990s by fans of the playwright's work, including the Queer avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman. Following Jarman's death in 1994, a committee, including thespians Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, and the Irish poet and Nobel Laurette Seamus Heaney, brough the proposal to fruition with hundreds of individual donors and foundations contributing funds for the project. Following Danny Osbourne's Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture which was unveiled in Wild's birthplace (in Merrion Square, Dublin) a year earlier, Hambling's work was chosen from a shortlist of six. Hambling said of her work, "The idea is that he is rising, talking, laughing, smoking from this sarcophagus and the passer by, should he or she choose to, can sit on the sarcophagus and have a conversation with him". The memorial, while popular with passers-by, met with mixed critical reviews. Tom Lubbock, chief art critic for The Independent acknowledged the need for a Wilde memorial in London, and commended the project for its "real and proper Victorian public spirit", but he dismissed the work itself which he compared to a Madame Tussauds waxwork. He wrote: "We have nothing of the nerve, the folly, the ruin, the glory [of Wilde]. We have nothing for history - only the whimsical notion of us chatting cheerfully with this anodyne figment". Charles Spencer, chief drama critic of The Telegraph added to the scorn when he wrote: "Hideous is too gentle a word to describe it. [...] The idea is quite witty [...] but the representation of Wilde is loathsome. He looks even worse than the picture of Dorian Gray in the attic, sporting Medusa-like snakes of hair and a vile, degenerate grin. Even Wilde, the master of the aphorism, might have been stumped for words to describe it". It was left to committee member Jeremy Isaacs to highlight the fact that the sculpture "already evokes more favourable response from the public than any other statue I know in London, with the possible exception of Peter Pan".

Granite - Adelaide Street, London

The Oscar Wilde Temple (2017)

Artist: McDermott and McGough

Working in painting, film, photography and sculpture, David McDermott and Peter McGough, have explored such themes as religion, medicine, fashion and sexual behaviour throughout their partnership. For many years, they dressed as Victorian gentlemen, living in a townhouse lit only by candlelight, creating a historical fantasy where they could live and work. Initially transforming the Russell Chapel in the Church of the Village in New York, their immersive installation, The Oscar Wilde Temple took 20 years to create, setting out to transport visitors back to Wilde's visit to America between 1882-83. The artists created a complete, Aesthetic movement interior with fabric wall coverings, architectural and decorative details and furnishings. The Temple's centerpiece was an altar built around a 4'3" wooden statue of Wilde, poised in a devotional style. On the pedestal below is carved C33, Wilde's prison number at Reading Gaol. Framing each side of the statue were eight "stations": paintings tracing the journey of Wilde - depicted as a divine being - from arrest through imprisonment and his hard labor. "Commemorating Oscar Wilde as a martyr", wrote art critic Leon Craig, "subverts traditional Christian teachings on bodily purity and homosexuality, while pointing out the homoeroticism in many medieval and early modern representations of male martyrs". A second altar honored people who have died, or are suffering, from AIDS. It was complemented with portraits of other contemporary "martyrs" who have contributed to rising worldwide awareness of the disease. McDermott & McGough aimed to celebrate the creative process by which experience is transformed into art and reality abstracted into revelation. Critic Rosemary Waugh wrote, "The Oscar Wilde Temple is essentially a shrine, a devotional offering to all that LGBT+ people have endured, past and present. In this respect, it's intensely sad, a reminder of entirely needless suffering".

Oil on linen - Studio Voltaire, New York

Biography of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born into a family of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's preeminent ear and eye surgeon and a philanthropist and writer who published books on archaeology, peasant folklore and a biography of the satirist Jonathan Swift. Wilde's mother, Jane, a committed Irish nationalist, and recognized authority on Celtic myth, was a revolutionary poet who wrote under the pen-name "Speranza". It was Jane Wilde who can be credited with instilling in her son his love for poetry and neo-classical art.

Early Education and Training

A pupil at the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen between 1864-71, Wilde was already gaining a reputation as something of a wunderkind . He demonstrated an early prowess for humorous storytelling and excelled in reading the classics. He also took to languages, becoming fluent in French and German. Wilde went on to win awards for his translations of Greek and Latin texts, including a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin, Ireland's most prestigious university. Attending between 1871-74, Wilde became an outspoken member of Trinity's Philosophical Society. A champion of the maverick Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and the "passionately atheistic" poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Wilde would win one of Trinity's top academic awards, the Berkely Gold Medal for Greek, while actively promoting himself as an Aesthete. Even at this early age, Wilde had started to attract attention through his unique writing style and his nonconformist lifestyle.

Between 1874 and 1878, Wilde studied classical literature at Magdalen College at Oxford University where he distinguished himself as a classical scholar, a poseur and a humourist. He was attracted by the rituals and dress of Freemasonry and attained the "Sublime Degree of Master Mason"; and though he held widely conflicting views on religion, he was deeply attracted to Catholicism, even meeting Pope Pius IX in 1877.

In his third year at Oxford, Wilde met the essayist and art critic Walter Pater who advocated the rejection of "vulgar" bourgeois virtue in favor of an art that exists without the need for justification or moral purpose. Pater argued, moreover, for an enhanced sensibility towards beauty, and a life lived with aesthetic intensity. Under Pater's influence, Wilde's devotion to art intensified while the teachings of art historian and critic John Ruskin offered the young scholar fresh perspectives on the nature of art. Wilde began to dabble in art criticism himself with his review of the opening show of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 for Dublin University Magazine . As the literary historian Anne Bruder observed, "His review exemplifies his early attitudes toward the coming of modernism, views clearly derived from Ruskin" in the way he "elevates that which represents nature most clearly to the highest position of excellence".

Following Pater's maxim "burn always with a hard gemlike flame", Wilde revelled in the idea of the aesthetic pose and immersed himself in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements. Growing his hair long and dressing flamboyantly, he decorated his rooms with objets d'art , peacock feathers, lilies and sunflowers, declaring, "Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!". Wilde won Oxford University's prestigious Newdigate Prize, an annual poetry award (won previously by Ruskin) for his poem Ravenna . By now, Wilde had started to attract a group of dedicated followers who were drawn to the Irishman's iconoclasm and his glorification of the virtues of youth.

After completing his studies at Oxford, Wilde returned to Ireland where he hoped to revive his romantic relationship with Florence Balcombe, a celebrated beauty. Florence, much to Wilde's anguish, became engaged to Bram Stoker (author of Dracula ) prompting Wilde to move to London where he boarded with the highly successful society portraitist Frank Miles. Miles, who shared Wilde's love of flowers, had purchased a house in the newly fashionable Tite Street in Chelsea; a street that counted the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler , and the illustrator Charles Rickets and his partner Charles Shannon, amongst its residence. Miles's home was decorated (as was Whistler's) with sparse furnishings and with a Japoniste colour scheme and styling.

Mature Period

In 1881 Wilde published (at his own expense) his first poetry collection, Poems . Drawing heavily on the likes of Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Keats (a little too heavily for some critics') it drew mixed notices. The satirical magazine Punch , which lampooned Aestheticism as an effeminate art form, singled out Wilde as its literary talisman: "The poet is Wilde, but his poetry's tame" it pronounced. Any objections to Poems did not dent his rising fame, however, and the names of Wilde and Miles soon spread throughout London's Society circles who flocked to Chelsea to socialize with the two aesthetes.

With the rising interest in the Aestheticism movement in America, Richard D'Oyly Carte, the theatre impresario who staged the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, sent the 27-year old Wilde on a lecture tour of North America. His role was to promote Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience , which satirised the Aesthetic movement and partly parodied Wilde as the "fleshly poet" Bunthorne. The American press had been somewhat scathing of Wilde's indolence and his aesthetic attire (of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and silk stockings) but they were, nevertheless, eager to get an original quote from him. Several newspaper reporters even hired a launch boat to meet Wilde on his ship before it docked in New York. But it was on his passage through the port's customs office that Wilde offered the most famous of all his witticisms, declaring "I have nothing to declare but my genius". In an interview the following day, Wilde added that "I am here to diffuse beauty, and I have no objection to saying that".

The lecture tour, originally scheduled for four months, lasted an entire year, with Wilde giving a total of 140 lectures. At Harvard University, the students dressed as Bunthorne, paraded to their front row seats, brandishing sunflowers and lilies. Alerted of their actions in advance, Wilde confounded expectations by taking to the stage in conventional evening dress and announcing, "Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius [...] Save me from my disciples". A highlight of Wilde's travels came at a silver mine in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. There, he read passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the eminent 16 th century Italian silversmith. The "uncultured" miners were disappointed that Wilde had not brought Cellini with him as a guest! Informing them that Cellini was dead, one of the miners asked, "Who shot him?" Wilde also met with various distinguished writers, including Henry Longfellow, Henry James and Walt Whitman. To Whitman, Wilde wrote, "There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honor so much". Whitman later told the press that he and Wilde had "a jolly good time".

While staying at the Long Beach Hotel on New York's Long Island, Wilde encountered the wealthy industrialist Albert Clifford Barney, his wife Alice, and their daughters Natalie and Laura. Alice listened intently to Wilde's pronouncements on the importance of developing children's artistic tastes and how to decorate one's home aesthetically. Wilde left an indelible impression on Alice, who herself went on to pursue a bohemian lifestyle and a new career in art (despite her husband's vocal protests). On one occasion, Wilde rescued Natalie from a gang of chasing schoolboys who by scooping her up onto his lap and calming her by recounting a fairy tale. From that moment, Wilde became Natalie's lifelong hero. She grew up to become one of Paris's most celebrated and notorious literary salon hostesses, and a lesbian lover of Wilde's niece Dolly.

Returning from America, Wilde embarked on a lecture tour in Britain, regaling his audiences with his impressions of the New World. In 1884, he proposed to Constance Lloyd whom he had met three years earlier. Their marital home at 16 Tite Street in London was renovated at considerable expense to match the couple's Aesthetic ideals. The couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, but after he second pregnancy, Wilde was left physically repelled by Constance. His first homosexual experience was probably with Robert "Robbie" Ross, who Wilde met in Oxford in 1886. Ross's inclinations were open and unrestrained, despite Victorian Britain's attitudes towards morality.

Between 1887-89, Wilde acted as editor for The Lady's World magazine (renaming it The Woman's World ). In addition to his views on art and literature, he contributed serious articles on parenting, culture, and politics, and even stories to be read to children. Wilde saw the magazine as "the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure". While The Woman's World was not a commercial success, his involvement with the publication helped catapult Wilde to even greater fame. The Happy Prince and Other Tales was published meanwhile in 1888, revealing his talent for allegoric fairy tales (one of which carried a cutting criticism of Whistler's Impressionistic painting Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1887)).

Wilde produced his most important works in his later life. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray - a story about a self-destructive man who maintains eternal youth at the expense of his soul - was published in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine . It was expanded by six chapters into book form the following year. Despite the cautionary tale that was the hero's self-destruction, the novel came under fire for its decadence and homosexual allusions with The Daily Chronicle describing it as "unclean", "poisonous", and "heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction". Wilde vigorously defended himself in letters to the press, but later revised the book, removing the passages of overt homo-eroticism, and adding a preface of 22 epigrams on the purpose of art.

In 1891, Wilde published a collection of essays on aestheticism in Intentions (1891), an anthology influenced by the ideas of the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire , and the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler (with whom he endured a most fractious relationship). Wilde expounded his aesthetic ideals through essays such as "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue". The essay, written in Socratic dialogue, presents its ideas through the conversation between the two characters Vivian and Cyril. Vivian tells Cyril of an article he has been writing called "The Decay Of Lying: A Protest" which espouses the values of Aestheticism and the "art for art's sake" maxim. It has not been lost on historians such as Bruder, however, that Wilde's philosophy on art was "decidedly fickle" in the way it fluctuated between the Ruskin's view that the role of the art critic was indispensable to establishing the true value of art, and the Whistler's position that true art was (or should be) able to speak for itself.

Nevertheless, Wilde travelled to Paris where he was celebrated as a respected writer at renowned literary salons. It was through his conversations in social settings that Wilde truly thrived. Writer Frances Winwar described how, before "a group of listeners, especially if they were young and handsome and titled, he outdid himself. In the spark of their admiration his mind quickened. Epigram followed epigram, one more dazzling, more preposterous than the other, yet always, like the incandescent core of the firework, with the burning truth at the heart".

Wilde had first met William Morris in 1881. Following that meeting, Morris wrote that though Wilde was "certainly clever" he thought of him as "an ass". The two men did, however, become friends and their political views were close enough that ten years on Morris's essay "The Socialist Ideal" appeared together in a pamphlet with Wilde's "Soul of Man under Socialism" (also published in The Fortnightly Review in February 1891). Wilde's essay has confused scholars who have queried his motivations. As historian Xavier Giudicelli observed, the essay is "a surprising and slippery text, whose nature and value is difficult to ascertain". He suggests that "One possible way of solving the problem [...] is to dismiss it as a mere playful variation upon such notions as socialism, individualism or democracy and to regard it as a flippant response to contemporary debates in late Victorian Britain". But both Morris and Wilde backed the socialist principle that the worker's "moral character" was only improved if there was a creative aspect to manual labor. Wilde wrote: "A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is morally and mentally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such".

Later in 1891 Wilde was back on more familiar territory with the publication of two volumes of stories and fairy tales: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates . The publication of the latter confirmed Wilde's friendship with Charles Rickets whose graphic work was inspired by the dreamy maidens of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (he would also illustrate Wilde's The Sphinx in 1894, and painted the hero of Wilde's short story, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. , which was used as the frontispiece of the book). The men formed a close and lasting relationship with Rickets, who described Wilde as "the most remarkable man he had met", even publishing a personal memoir, Recollections of Oscar Wilde in 1932. (shortly before Rickets's death). (The memoir was written through the narrative device of an imagined conversation between Rickets and a fictitious French writer he named Jean Paul Raymond (a decision which would have no doubt met with Wilde's approval).

Later Period

It was, however, for Wilde's society stage comedies, executed in the strict style of drama known as the pièce bien faite ("well made play") that he would become best known. His first stage success was the comedy of manners, Lady Windermere's Fan , first performed in 1892. Set in London, the play involves a jealous wife whose husband's becomes closely acquainted with a mysterious and beautiful older woman, Mrs. Erlynne. It transpires that Mrs. Erlynne is Lady Windermere's divorced mother who had disappeared from her daughter's life when she was just a baby. Mrs. Erlynne and the well intentioned and proper Lord Windermere are not engaged in an illicit affair at all but, rather, Mrs. Erlynne is hatching a plot to be reunited with her estranged daughter. Taking to the stage after its first performance (in February), Wilde announced, "The actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself". The play duly toured Britain, earning Wilde £7,000 (around £800,000 in todays money) in its first year.

After becoming captivated by the New Testament story of the beheading of John the Baptist, Wilde interpreted, firstly in French, the macabre story of Salomé as a one-act play. The story had been a popular subject for Christian art since the Renaissance (well-known examples include Masolino de Panicale's 1435 fresco, Salome Bringing the Head of the Baptist to Herodias and French Symbolist Gustave Moreau's 1876 painting, The Apparition ( Dance of Salome )). Wilde's Salomé was published in 1893, and in English the following year, promoted with the help of designer Aubrey Beardsley 's controversial illustration. It was not performed until 1896, however, because of Britain's ban on the representation of biblical characters on stage. When it finally reached the West End stage, a critic for The Times said of Salomé , "It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred". Salomé was quickly followed by three society comedies, bringing their author significant financial rewards.

The first was A Woman of No Importance (1893), a comedy of manners (the name given to a type of play that satirizes the behaviour in a particular social group) targeting English upper-class mores and hypocrisy, and a protest against gender inequalities. The critic William Archer said of the play it "must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama". An Ideal Husband and, by almost unanimous agreement, his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest both followed in 1895. An Ideal Husband is a scandalous social satire about a political blackmail plot that embroils a lively cast including an idle philanderer, young lovers, an imperious father, society doyennes and a fearsome femme fatale. The play opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London in January 1895 to popular acclaim, and exceeded 100 performances. His final play, The Importance of Being Earnest (subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People ) proved his greatest legacy to the stage as he took the conventions of farce and transformed them, in three acts, through a series of satiric epigrams that ridiculed Victorian hypocrisies.

A comedy of overlapping mistaken identities (two philanderers, Jack and Algernon, adopt the same pseudonym (Earnest)), The Importance of Being Earnest opened at George Alexander's St. James Theatre in London's West End on Valentine's Day 1895. It was said that on its opening night, as a mark of recognition for Wilde's aestheticism, many women dressed in lily corsages, while many men wore lilies of the valley in their lapels. Wilde himself arrived in typically flamboyant dress. It was widely reported in the press that he wore a black coat with a velvet collar, a white waistcoat, a black moiré ribbon watch chain, white gloves, a green scarab ring, and lilies of the valley in his lapel. It was not lost on Wilde devotees, either, that the West End was the red light district; a place where married men could abandon their true identity and indulge in the reckless pursuit of pleasure. Indeed, most of Wilde's works operated around the themes of sin, indiscretion and their destructive consequences. Indeed, his maxim that "life imitates art" (as opposed to "art imitates life") was proving to be most prescient as he himself was beginning to feel the destructive consequences of his own pursuit of unbridled pleasure.

In 1891 Wilde had been introduced to the 21-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, who was studying at Oxford. They embarked on an indiscreet and tempestuous affair, with the infatuated Wilde indulging the spoilt Douglas's every whim. Douglas introduced Wilde into the world of gay prostitution, and illicit meetings with working-class boys. Their relationship exacerbated Douglas's already rocky relationship with his father, the Marquess of Queensberry. On February 18 th , 1895, four days after the opening of Earnest , the Marquess left a calling card for Wilde inscribed, "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]". Urged on by Douglas, but against the advice of close friends, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel.

Queensberry had to demonstrate that his accusation was true and hired private detectives to uncover evidence of Wilde's sexual deviance. Details of Wilde's private life began to appear in the press, and when a number of male prostitutes agreed to testify against him, Wilde dropped the prosecution. On leaving court, Wilde, who had ignored advice from his friends to flee to France, was immediately arrested for "gross indecency". During his first trial, Wilde dazzled the court with his witty repartee, and the jury was unable to reach a verdict. At the re-trial, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour. His initial incarceration at Pentonville Prison consisted of many gruelling hours on a treadmill and the mundane task of separating out fibres from old rope. Subsequently, at Wandsworth Prison, he collapsed from illness and hunger, rupturing his right ear drum in the fall. He was later transferred to Reading Gaol where he was addressed and identified only by his prison number: C33. Rickets visited his good friend in Reading (and publicly reproached the "social reformer" William Morris for not doing so) but according to Wilde the visit was not a success.

Between January and March 1897, Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, tracing his spiritual journey of redemption and fulfilment. He was barred from sending the letter, but was permitted to take it with him when released from prison in the May of that year. In the letter, published posthumously in 1905 as De Profundis , Wilde reflected upon his life and career, as one who "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age". The dramatically cut De Profundis was filled with recriminations against Douglas for encouraging him into debauchery and for distracting him from his life's work though the two lovers would be briefly reunited.

On the day of his release, a bankrupt and broken Wilde, headed for France, never to return to Britain. He spent the last three years of his life in exile, living under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. His only further published work was a long poem called "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898), an eloquent plea for prison reform. His wife Constance refused to meet him or allow him to see their sons, although she did provide him with monies. Wilde and Douglas lived together near Naples for a few months before they were effectively separated by both families under the threat of cutting off all further funds.

In 1898 the English painters Augustus John and William Rothenstein met Wilde in Paris. John, "appreciative of him as a great man", described Wilde as a "distinguished reprobate [...] a big and good-natured fellow with an enormous sense of fun, impeccable bad taste [and] a deeply religious apprehension of the Devil". Wilde was similarly taken with John, describing him as a "charming Celtish poet in colour". George Bernard Shaw, meanwhile, noted that despite his numerous woes, Wilde maintained "an unconquerable gaiety of soul" and he was also visited by loyal friends, the caricaturist and wit Max Beerbohm, and his future literary executor Robert Ross. By November 25 th 1900 Wilde had developed cerebral meningitis and died five days later at the age of 46, having been finally received into the Roman Catholic Church. Wilde had proved true to his word when he had predicted that he "could never outlive the [nineteenth] century as the English people would not stand it".

The Legacy of Oscar Wilde

Although Wilde did not contribute directly to the plastic arts, stylistically, Aubrey Beardsley's illustration for Wilde's play Salomé helped promote the florid decoration of Art Nouveau and the illustrations of artists such as William Rothenstein. Indeed, Wilde was a giant presence within the Aesthetic movement, promoting its values through his writing, and his seemingly single-handed invention of the "cult of personality". He offered as much as anyone in defining the alternative culture of Victorian London. As the living personification of his art, he pre-empted a trait amongst contemporary artists, that reached a new apex in Britain in the mid-1990s with the Young British Artists movement , for hedonistic self-publicity.

In more enlightened times, Wilde (despite being personally conflicted over his sexual drives) has been cast by the LGBTQ activists as a martyr to their cause and was commemorated with a stained-glass window at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1995. In 2014, he was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco's Castro neighbourhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields".

Writer, director and thespian, Rupert Everett wrote, directed, and starred as Wilde in The Happy Prince (2018), the latest in a long line of filmed adaptations of Wilde's life. Everett stated, "for me he is an integral character in that [...] he really is, in modern times, the first "out" gay man and I think for all of us [gay men] that's quite important in the sense that homosexuality up until him was something nobody ever talked about [...] The road to liberation I think started with him [...] he's my Christ figure really".

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Oscar Wilde

• Oscar Wilde By Richard Ellmann
• Oscar - A Life By Matthew Sturgis
• Making Oscar Wilde By Michele Mendelssohn
• Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years By Nicholas Frankel
• The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography By Neil McKenna
• Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions By Frank Harris
• Son of Oscar Wilde By Vyvyan Holland
• The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde By Merlin Holland
• Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity By David M. Friedman
• Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde By Thomas Wright
• The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde By Joseph Pearce
• The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose By Oscar Wilde
• The Decay of Lying: An Observation By Oscar Wilde
• The Critic as Artist By Oscar Wilde
• The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde By Oscar Wilde
• Oscar Wilde - The Official Website of Oscar Wilde
• Oscar Wilde Online
• The Oscar Wilde Society
• Memorial for Oscar Wilde's grave in Paris - archive, 1912 By James Bone / The Guardian / February 12, 1912
• Constructing Artist and Critic Between J. M. Whistler and Oscar Wilde: "In the best days of art there were no art-critics" By Anne Bruder / English Literature in Translation: Volume 47, Number 2, 2004
• Rupert Everett interview The Graham Norton Show, BBC Radio 2 / November 21, 2020
• Aesthetics and Politics: The Afterlives of Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) By Xavier Giudicelli / OpenEdition Journal / February 13, 2016
• The Yellow Book British Library Books Collection
• Art and the Handycraftsman By Oscar Wilde
• The English Renaissance By Oscar Wilde
• House Decoration By Oscar Wilde
• Lecture to Art Students By Oscar Wilde
• London Models By Oscar Wilde
• Omnibus - 'Oscar Wilde' In this BBC documentary, writer Michael Bracewell portrays Oscar Wilde as an inspiration to generations of rockers and artists. Contributors include Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys, playwright Tom Stoppard and actor Stephen Fry.
• Oscar Wilde 2001 Biography channel/History Television documentary
• Reputations: Oscar Wilde himself Biography channel documentary
• Wilde (1997) British biopic starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law
• The Happy Prince (2018) Rupert Everett stars as Wilde during his final, tragic days
• The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) Peter Finch plays Wilde in this account of his criminal cases
• Oscar Wilde (1960) Low-budget biopic starring Robert Morley
• Wilde Salomé (2011) Docu-drama starring, and written and directed by, Al Pacino

Content compiled and written by Robert Weinberg

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

EARLY YEARS

Oscar Wilde’s rich and dramatic portrayals of the human condition came during the height of the prosperity that swept through London in the Victorian Era of the late 19th century. At a time when all citizens of Britain were finally able to embrace literature the wealthy and educated could only once afford, Wilde wrote many short stories, plays and poems that continue to inspire millions around the world.

By the time William Wilde, Oscar’s father, was 28, he had graduated as a doctor, completed a voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, North Africa and the Middle East, studied at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, written two books and been appointed medical advisor to the Irish Census of 1841. When the medical statistics were published two years later they contained data which had not been collected in any other country at the time, and as a result, William became the Assistant Commissioner to the 1851 Census. He held the same position for the two succeeding Censuses and, in 1864, he was knighted for his work on them. When William opened a Dublin practice specializing in ear and eye diseases, he felt he should make some provision for the free treatment of the city’s poor population. In 1844, he founded St. Mark’s Ophthalmic Hospital, built entirely at his own expense.

Before he married, William fathered three children. Henry Wilson was born in 1838, Emily in 1847 and Mary in 1849. To William’s credit, he provided financial support for all of them. He paid for Henry’s education and medical studies, eventually hiring him into St. Mark’s Hospital as an assistant. Sadly, Mary and Emily, who were raised by William’s brother, both died in a fire at the ages of 22 and 24.

Oscar’s mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, first gained attention in 1846 when she began writing revolutionary poems under the pseudonym “Speranza” for a weekly Irish newspaper, The Nation. In 1848, as the country’s famine worsened and the Year of Revolution took hold of Europe, the newspaper offices were raided and had to close. Jane, who was also a gifted linguist with working knowledge of the major European languages, went on to translate Wilhelm Meinhold’s gothic horror novel “Sidonia the Sorceress.” Oscar would later read the translation with relish, and draw on it for the darker elements of his own work.

Jane’s first child, William “Willie” Charles Kingsbury, was born on September 26, 1852 and her second, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie, on October 16, 1854. The daughter she had longed for, Isola Emily Francesca, was delivered on April 2, 1857. Ten years later, however, Emily died from a sudden fever. Oscar was profoundly affected by the loss of his sister, and for his lifetime he carried a lock of her hair sealed in a decorated envelope.

Willie and Oscar attended the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen, where Oscar excelled at studying the classics, taking top prize his last two years, and also earning a second prize in drawing. In 1871, Oscar was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin. Again, he did particularly well in his classics courses, placing first in his examinations in 1872 and earning the highest honor the college could bestow on an undergraduate, a Foundation Scholarship. In 1874, Oscar crowned his successes at Trinity with two final achievements. He won the college’s Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek and was awarded a Demyship scholarship to Magdalen College in Oxford.

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Biography of Oscar Wilde, Irish Poet and Playwright

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Born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was a popular poet, novelist, and playwright in the late 19 th century. He wrote some of the most enduring works in the English language, but is equally remembered for his scandalous personal life, which ultimately led to his imprisonment.

Fast Facts: Oscar Wilde

• Full Name : Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
• Occupation : Playwright, novelist, and poet
• Born : October 16, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland
• Died : November 30, 1900 in Paris, France
• Notable Works : The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome , Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance , An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest
• Spouse : Constance Lloyd (m. 1884-1898)
• Children : Cyril (b. 1885) and Vyvyan (b. 1886).

Wilde, born in Dublin, was the second of three children. His parents were Sir William Wilde and Jane Wilde, both of whom were intellectuals (his father was a surgeon and his mother wrote). He had three illegitimate half-siblings, who Sir William acknowledged and supported, as well as two full siblings: a brother, Willie, and a sister, Isola, who died of meningitis at age nine. Wilde was educated first at home, then by one of the oldest schools in Ireland.

In 1871, Wilde left home with a scholarship to study at Trinity College in Dublin, where he particularly studied the classics, literature, and philosophy. He proved himself to be an excellent student, winning competitive academic awards and coming first in his class. In 1874, he competed for and won a scholarship to study at Magdalen College, Oxford for another four years.

During this time, Wilde developed several, widely differing interests. For a time, he considered converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism. He became involved with Freemasonry at Oxford, and later became even more involved with the aesthetic and Decadent movements. Wilde scorned “masculine” sports and deliberately created an image of himself as an aesthete. However, he was not helpless or delicate: reportedly, when a group of students attacked him, he singlehandedly fought them off. He graduated with honors in 1878.

Society and Writing Debut

After his graduation, Wilde moved to London and began his writing career in earnest. His poems and lyrics had been published in various magazines previously, and his first book of poetry was published in 1881, when Wilde was 27 years old. The next year, he was invited to make a lecture tour of North America talking about aestheticism; it was so successful and popular that a planned four-month tour turned into nearly a year. Although he was popular with general audiences, critics eviscerated him in the press.

In 1884, he crossed paths with an old acquaintance, a wealthy young woman named Constance Lloyd. The couple married and set out to establish themselves as stylish trendsetters in society. They had two sons, Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886, but their marriage began to fall apart after Vyvyan’s birth. It was also around this time that Wilde first met Robert Ross, a young gay man who eventually became Wilde’s first male lover.

Wilde was, by most accounts, a loving and attentive father, and he worked to support his family in a variety of pursuits. He had a stint as editor of a women’s magazine, sold short fiction, and developed his essay writing as well.

Literary Legend

Wilde wrote his only novel – arguably his most famous work – in 1890-1891. The Picture of Dorian Gray eerily focuses on a man who bargains to have his aging taken on by a portrait so that he himself can stay young and beautiful forever. At the time, critics heaped disdain on the novel for its portrayal of hedonism and fairly blatant homosexual overtones. However, it’s endured as a classic of the English language.

Over the next few years, Wilde turned his attentions to playwriting. His first play was a French-language tragedy Salome , but he soon shifted to English comedies of manners. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance , and An Ideal Husband appealed to society while also subtly critiquing it. These Victorian comedies often revolved around farcical plots that nonetheless found ways to critique society, which made them immensely popular with audiences but riled up more conservative or straitlaced critics.

Wilde’s final play would prove to be his masterpiece. Debuting onstage in 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest broke away from Wilde’s “stock” plots and characters to create a drawing room comedy that was, nonetheless, the epitome of Wilde’s witty, socially-sharp style. It became his most popular play, as well as his most praised one.

Scandal and Trial

Wilde’s life began to unravel when he became romantically involved with Lord Alfred Douglas, who introduced Wilde to some of the seedier side of gay London society (and who coined the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”). Lord Alfred’s estranged father, the Marquess of Queensbury, was livid, and an enmity between Wilde and the marquess sprung up. The feud reached a boiling point when Queensbury left a calling card accusing Wilde of sodomy; an infuriated Wilde decided to sue for libel . The plan backfired, since Queensbury’s legal team mounted a defense based on the argument that it could not be libel if it was the truth. Details of Wilde’s liaisons with men came out, as did some blackmail material, and even the moral content of Wilde’s writing came under criticism.

Wilde was forced to drop the case, and he himself was arrested and tried for gross indecency (the formal umbrella charge for homosexual behavior). Douglas continued to visit him and had even tried to get him to flee the country when the warrant was first issued. Wilde pled not guilty and spoke eloquently on the stand, but he did warn Douglas to leave for Paris before the trial ended, just in case. Ultimately, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labor, the maximum allowed under the law, which the judge decried as still not sufficient.

While in prison, the hard labor took a toll on Wilde’s already-precarious health. He suffered an ear injury in a fall that later contributed to his death. During his stay, he was eventually allowed writing materials, and he wrote a lengthy letter to Douglas that he could not send, but that laid out a reflection on his own life, their relationship, and his spiritual evolution during his imprisonment. In 1897, he was released from prison and immediately sailed to France.

Final Years and Legacy

Wilde took the name “Sebastian Melmoth” while in exile and spent his final years digging into spirituality and railing for prison reform. He spent some time with Ross, his longtime friend and first lover, as well as Douglas. After losing the will to write and encountering many unfriendly former friends, Wilde’s health took a steep decline.

Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in 1900. He was conditionally baptized into the Catholic Church, at his wish, just before his death. At his side to the end was Reggie Turner, who had remained a loyal friend, and Ross, who became his literary executor and the primary keeper of his legacy. Wilde is buried in Paris, where his tomb has become a major attraction for tourists and literary pilgrims. A small compartment in the tomb also houses Ross’s ashes.

In 2017, Wilde was one of the men formally given posthumous pardons for convictions of previously-criminal homosexuality under the “ Alan Turing law.” Wilde has become an icon, much like he was in his time, for his style and unique sense of self. His literary works have also become some of the most important in the canon.

• Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde . Vintage Books, 1988.
• Pearson, Hesketh. The Life of Oscar Wilde . Penguin Books (reprint), 1985
• Sturgis, Matthew. Oscar: A Life . London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018.
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Poems & Poets

Oscar Wilde

No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than that of Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his considerable contributions to English literature. His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five plays, one of which— The Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895—is a classic of comic theater. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of his notoriety. This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems early in his career as a writer. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1896). On a curious but productive tangent to his more serious work, Wilde produced two volumes of fairy tales that are delightful in themselves and provide insight into some of his serious social and artistic concerns. His significant literary contributions are rounded off by his critical essays, most notably in Intentions (1891), and his long soul-searching letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis , written in 1897 from Reading Gaol.

Imprisonment for homosexuality was a particularly tragic end for an artist who believed that style—in life as well as art—was of utmost importance. That Wilde became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising since, as H. Montgomery Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography , his mother was a poet and Irish revolutionary who published under the name “Speranza,” and his father a successful eye and ear surgeon in Dublin and “author of a work which remained the standard textbook on aural surgery for many years.” Though his background was literary and professional, it was anything but stable. His mother doted on him as a child and, according to Hyde, “insisted on dressing him in girl’s clothes.” Dr. William Wilde was a notorious philanderer, and, in an ironic foreshadowing of his son’s famous trials, suffered public condemnation when a libel case disclosed his sexual indiscretions with a young woman named Mary Travers.

Wilde was a brilliant student in college, first at Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, and later at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where his poem “Ravenna” captured the prestigious Newdigate Prize in 1878. It was at Oxford that Wilde came under the influences of John Ruskin, a critic, writer, and professor, and Walter Pater, a critic and essayist whose Studies in the History of The Renaissance legitimized Wilde’s nascent ideas on art and individualism.

After earning his B.A. at Oxford, Wilde settled in London in 1879 and two years later published his first book, Poems. Most of the poems in this volume had been previously published in various Irish periodicals. The collection met with mixed reviews, less favorable in England than in America. Punch was at the vanguard of the criticism, leveling what was to become a common charge against Wilde: “Mr. Wilde may be aesthetic, but he is not original. This is a volume of echoes, it is Swinburne and water.” Hesketh Pearson recorded the words of Oliver Elton, who spoke against the acceptance of the volume as a gift to the Oxford Union, the famous debating society: “It is not that these poems are thin—and they are thin, it is not that they are this or that—they are all this or that; it is that they are for the most part not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors. They are in fact by William Shakespeare , by Philip Sidney , by John Donne , by Lord Byron , by William Morris, by Algernon Swinburne , and by sixty more.” While Elton exaggerated the case, it is clear that most of the collection’s poems are highly derivative.

Some of these early poems—“Panthea,” for example—are, as one would expect from a young aesthete, poems that extol pleasure and sensation: “to feel is better than to know.” Epifanio San Juan, in The Art of Oscar Wilde , summed up the argument of “Panthea”: “Let us live pleasurably since the gods are indifferent.” But other poems—“Helas” and “E Tenebris,” for example—strike a contrary note of moral awareness and even remorse. In “E Tenebris” the poet states, “And well I know my soul in Hell must lie / If I this night before God’s throne should stand.” As Philip Cohen noted in The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde , this moral strain is paradoxically woven throughout the fabric of Wilde’s work, despite his seemingly definitive statements to the contrary, such as in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray : “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” This moralism and remorse receive their fullest expression in the letter from jail, De Profundis. Perhaps the best poems of the 1881 volume are those titled “Impressions,” in which “Wilde attains sharpness and total complexity in the depiction of scenes,” San Juan remarked. “Colors, tactile sensations, and a weird ‘animistic’ vibration characterize physical movements, as in ‘Impressions du Matin.’”

Among Wilde’s most famous poems is “The Sphinx.” As Hyde reported, the work was begun at Oxford, substantially composed in Paris in 1883, and repeatedly polished until its publication in 1894. This most exotic of all Wilde’s poems begins with the raven-like sphinx planted in the corner of the poet’s room and proceeds through a series of imagined scenes in which the sphinx is depicted as a goddess, a prophet, and a lover. Reviewers criticized the work for being sensational and artificial, but later critics have found some notable qualities; in San Juan’s words, “Among all Wilde’s poems, ‘The Sphinx’ alone betrays a masculine energy that enlivens gorgeous landscape, fusing religion, iconology, and historical facts within the current of meditation and monologue.”

Between the publication of Poems in 1881 and his next significant book in 1888, Wilde went on a lecture tour of America, was married to Constance Lloyd, fathered two sons, became editor of a fashionable magazine, Woman’s World , and continued to build his reputation as the most sought-after dinner guest in the British Isles. Frances Winwar, in Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties , described this social aspect of his fame: “His life from now on assumed an air of arrogance. He would do nothing in moderation—except work. But then, his real work was accomplished when he talked. Before a group of listeners, especially if they were young and handsome and titled, he outdid himself. In the spark of their admiration his mind quickened. Epigram followed epigram, one more dazzling, more preposterous than the other, yet always, like the incandescent core of the firework, with a burning truth at the heart.” In addition to his epigrams, Wilde’s table talk frequently consisted of his original fairy tales; they were later published in two volumes, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891).

That Wilde told these stories at dinner parties before they were published illustrates an unusual fact about their intended audience: they were not composed for children. A few of the stories in the first volume, particularly “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant,” continually find their way into anthologies of fairy tales for children, but most of the book’s nine tales do not appeal to young people. This is particularly true of the stories in A House of Pomegranates , which generally have more elaborate plots and a more mannered style than do those in The Happy Prince and Other Tales. When asked if the tales of the second volume were intended for children, Wilde replied in a typically flippant way: “I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I did of pleasing the British public.” The first volume received generally favorable reviews and, more importantly for Wilde, his mentor Walter Pater wrote him from Oxford to express his approval: “I am confined to my room with gout, but have been consoling myself with ‘The Happy Prince,’ and feel it would he ungrateful not to send a line to tell you how delightful I have found him and his companions. I hardly know whether to admire more the wise wit of ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ or the beauty and tenderness of ‘The Selfish Giant’: the latter is perfect in its kind.”

Wilde’s fairy tales deserve more notice than they have generally received. A few of them are minor prose masterpieces, most notably “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Fisherman and His Soul.” But they should be taken seriously for another reason as well: they embody some of the conflicts and themes that run throughout Wilde’s work. “The Happy Prince” stresses the importance of giving of oneself, even of making the ultimate sacrifice, in order to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. This message foreshadows some of Wilde’s ideas in his later work The Soul of Man under Socialism (privately printed 1895, republished 1904). “The Nightingale and the Rose” deals in a similar way with giving, but here the emphasis is on the need to sacrifice for love. Wilde’s love of beauty and his conception of its fleeting quality find expression in this story of a nightingale who sacrifices its life to produce the perfect rose. In the story’s final satirical twist the beautiful rose is rejected because it does not match the color of a young girl’s dress. In Oscar Wilde , Robert K. Miller declared that this ironic turn reveals Wilde’s “ambivalence toward love” that is “related to his ambivalence about women.” In “The Selfish Giant” the title character overcomes his selfishness toward children and thus serves as an allegory of Christian redemption. The imaginative sympathy of the giant is similar to that which Wilde ascribes to Christ in his later work, De Profundis (1905). “The Fisherman and His Soul,” from the second volume, is the most complex of Wilde’s fairy tales; it was described by John A. Quintus in Virginia Quarterly Review as “another treatment of the doppelgänger theme in which the body and the soul are separated, as they are in The Picture of Dorian Gray. ” In a reversal of the usual situation in which the body corrupts the soul, the Fisherman’s soul—which the Fisherman has dispensed with so that he can love a mermaid—tempts his body to sin and through the resultant suffering body and soul are reunited.

Both Quintus and Miller emphasized Wilde’s moral point of view in these stories. This element has already been seen in some of the early poems, and it reappears in Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Quintus was careful to point out, however, that “Wilde’s tales are not ... designed to encourage faith or advocate Christianity.” As much as they sometimes seem to be moral exempla , his tales also have their uncertainties: love is complex, and sometimes unrequited; error is not always recognized; sin, in “The Fisherman and His Soul,” is the means by which harmony is achieved—Wilde’s version of the felix culpa , the fortunate fall.

In July of 1889 Wilde gave up the editorship of Women’s World and settled down to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is Wilde’s only novel, a blend of French decadence and English gothicism. It is filled with genuinely witty dialogue and beautiful descriptive passages, while sometimes descending to the level of slick melodrama and ponderous theorizing. The novel details the life of a hedonistic aristocrat, Dorian Gray. When Dorian sees the portrait that Basil Hallward paints of him, he wishes he could change places with his likeness, remain always young and beautiful, and allow the portrait to bear the effects of time—and, as it turns out, the effects of sin. As in the world of the fairy tale, the wish is granted, but at a terrible price.

At the time he was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray , Wilde became friendly with Robert (“Robbie”) Ross, whom he had first met in 1886 at Oxford and who later served as Wilde’s literary executor after faithfully standing by him through Wilde’s trials and the horrors of Wilde’s two years in prison. H. Montgomery Hyde, in Oscar Wilde: A Biography , cited “strong grounds for believing that it was with [Ross] that Wilde first deliberately experimented in homosexual practices.” Ross kept Wilde apprised of all the literary gossip, and when Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, Ross wrote the following to him: “Even in the precincts of the Savile nothing but praise of Dorian Gray, though of course it is said to be very dangerous. I heard a clergyman extolling it, he only regretted some of the sentiments ... as apt to lead people astray.” Most of the reviews of the novel were hostile because of the book’s supposed perversity and immorality. A particularly scathing attack in The Scots Observer made a veiled reference to Wilde’s homosexuality and suggested he take up tailoring or some other “decent” trade. For the novel’s hardcover edition, published the following year, Wilde made some changes, most important of which was the addition of six chapters and the famous epigrammatic preface. Perhaps surprisingly, the reviews this time were more favorable. Walter Pater praised the book highly, and, as Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography , Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats wrote that “ Dorian Gray , with all its faults, is a wonderful book.”

Countering charges that the novel is immoral—it is certainly replete with descriptions of a dissolute lifestyle—Wilde argued that on the contrary “there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray , a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy.” The moral allegory is perhaps too evident even to what Wilde would have called a philistine audience. Joyce Carol Oates  in Critical Inquiry described the novel as a “parable of the fall” and identified Dorian’s sin in his practice of involving others, “without any emotion, ... in his life’s drama, simply as a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.” Miller struck a similar note, stating that “Dorian’s misfortune is not that he has lived deeply and well but that he loses the capacity to feel and with it the capacity to merge his life with others. His life becomes a series of one-night stands, each encounter briefer than the last.” This view led Miller to suggest that, for Wilde, “art, like experience, is good only so long as it contributes to self-development.”

This theme of self-development is central to the book, and each character’s failure to develop illustrates the real tragedy of the novel. The painter Basil Hallward, for all his goodness, sublimates his true feelings in the beautiful portrait. Lord Henry Wotton, for all his theories about the importance of indiscriminate experience, does not act. And Dorian Gray, whose actions with others lead him only to the point of prizing things such as tapestries, jewels, and vestments, unconvincingly tries to redeem himself with the village girl Hetty, but succeeds only in ending his life in a melodramatic fashion.

“In spite of its many weaknesses,” asserted Edouard Roditi in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Guidebook , “ The Picture of Dorian Gray yet remains, in many respects, a great novel. Though hastily written and clumsily constructed, it manages to haunt many readers with vivid memories of its visionary descriptions.” Epifanio San Juan preferred to assess the book’s importance in terms of its contribution to the development of the novel: “In setting a portrait, a work of art, at the center of the action, Wilde effects the interplay of natural perception and moral judgment in the novel. From the reader’s viewpoint, the picture suggests the treatment of angle and distance—the ways of telling and showing—which make up the perennial issues of the aesthetics and criticism of fiction.”

While The Picture of Dorian Gray has an assured place as a serious work of art and a document of fin de siècle aestheticism, it did not gain for its author a reputation as a great novelist. It is rather because of his dramas that Wilde’s reputation has remained most secure. Louis Kronenberger, in The Thread of Laughter , mentioned Wilde together with the great 18th-century dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan : “The brilliant stage comedy that glittered briefly in Sheridan and then remained dormant, if not dead, for over a hundred years is in some measure brought back to life with Oscar Wilde.” Wilde’s strengths were certainly suited to the theater; no medium better showcases his irrepressible wit, his penchant for paradox, and his sardonic views on manners and morals.

Though Wilde wrote nine plays in all between 1879 and 1894, his fame as a dramatist rests entirely on four comedies— Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1899), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—and the strange and infamous Salomé. Written first, Salomé was composed in Paris in 1891 but not performed in England until 1905, after Wilde’s death. Britain’s Lord Chamberlain, responsible for licensing stage performances, banned the play on the technical grounds that it portrayed biblical characters, which was forbidden since the days of the Protestant Reformation. The play no doubt offended on other grounds as well, such as those expressed by a critic in The Times in 1893: “It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.”

Salomé is vastly different from Wilde’s society comedies, which were rapidly to follow in the early 1890s. This exotic one-act play has more the atmosphere of the earlier poem The Sphinx in its variations on the themes of obsession, lust, incest, and violence. Salomé moves forward largely on the basis of ritualistic repetition and a unifying pattern of imagery. Richard Ellmann, in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays , described this unity as “the extreme concentration upon a single episode which is like an image, with a synchronized moon changing color from pale to blood-red in keeping with the action, and an atmosphere of frenzy framed in exotic chill.” Salomé is Wilde’s most completely decadent work. While the play exhibits a few traces of a moral point of view—Jokanaan’s rejection of Salomé and Herod’s fearful conscience at the end—the dominant impression is one of macabre beauty, and the climax is reached when Salomé’s kisses the bitter lips of Jokanaan’s severed head. This impression was undercut for critic Alan Bird, who, in The Plays of Oscar Wilde , contended that even in this play Wilde’s wit shows through: “Yet the reader (or audience) can never escape the uncomfortable sensation that the author is actually parodying the action, the words, the characters, the whole ensemble of the drama. This suspicion of parody, however faint, produces an intentional distancing, a deliberate alienation, which far from allowing us to dismiss the drama seems to increase the total effect of decadence.”

Beginning with the society comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan , Wilde finally found his métier. This play and his last, The Importance of Being Earnest, reveal Wilde at the height of his powers, dealing in a sure way with those things he knew and did best—portraying the upper crust of society, creating characters who could mouth his brilliant epigrams and paradoxes in amusing, if conventional, plots. These plays use much of the typical material of the comedy of manners: mistaken identities, sexual indiscretions, cases of unknown parentage, and social snobbery. Lady Windermere’s Fan , A Woman of No Importance , and An Ideal Husband also deal, in varying degrees of seriousness, with Wilde’s favorite themes of the loss of innocence and the assertion of individuality.

Lady Windermere’s Fan was originally produced by the actor-manager George Alexander before a thoroughly appreciative audience. It ran for 156 performances and solidified Wilde’s position in the fashionable society he so much aspired to. He retained this exalted status for only three years before his trial for homosexuality made him a convict and a social outcast. But while his fame lasted Wilde enjoyed it with his usual flair. When the first-night audience at Lady Windermere’s Fan called him to the stage after the final curtain, he smugly offered to those present: “The actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.” On the whole, the drama critics of the day did not agree with the audience, but their negative reviews did not deter people from flocking to subsequent performances.

Lady Windermere’s Fan is a story about a woman with a past. Mrs. Erlynne, the fallen woman who years ago left her husband and her daughter—now Lady Windermere—reappears and tries to regain a social position. Ironically it is the fallen woman who turns out to be the “good woman” of the subtitle (“A Play about a Good Woman”), and the good woman of the first act, Lady Windermere, is forced to undergo a painful realization that things are not always what they appear to be. Arthur Ganz observed in British Victorian Literature that Lady Windermere “learns that a single act is not a final indicator of character and that a sinner may be a very noble person indeed.” This recognition, growing even as it does from a rather conventional return of a relative, adds a note of seriousness to a play that probably could have succeeded on its wit alone. Lines such as “Why, I have met hundreds of good women. I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle class education” probably flattered the upper class audience and confirmed the suspicions of the middle class that this is the way dandies spoke in their drawing rooms and clubs. Robert Keith Miller complained that the play suffers from the juxtaposition of this verbal wit with the serious nature of the plot and maintained, “The union of Mrs. Erlynne with Lord Augustus, in the last fifty lines of the play, strikes one as a rather desperate attempt to relieve the tension of the last several acts in order to end on a light note.”

While publicly Wilde was enjoying the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan , in his private life the author was beginning a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde had been introduced to “Bosie” Douglas, the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, by the poet Lionel Johnson. As Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, Douglas immediately fell under the spell of Wilde’s charming conversation. In July of 1893 Wilde moved in with Douglas at The Cottage, Goring-on-Thames, ostensibly so that they could work together.

A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband followed quickly on the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan and received similar acclaim from the audiences and similar disdain from the critics. Again in these plays Wilde presents characters with “pasts”—Lady Arbuthnot, the “Woman,” and Sir Robert Chiltern, the “Husband.” Both have their counterparts in puritanical characters that clearly resemble Lady Windermere. In both of these plays, Miller noted, “we find Wilde condemning absolutes and pleading for tolerance in a world that is apt to be harsh.” Neither of these plays is as carefully structured as Lady Windermere’s Fan. Agreeing with Speranza, Wilde’s mother, that the plays needed “more plot,” Alan Bird declared that in A Woman of No Importance “the plot is weak, and is, in fact, practically nonexistent. The incident, such as it is, of a woman meeting a former lover and being involved in a tug-of-war over their child does not offer sufficient action or opportunity for development to fill four acts.”

The culmination of Wilde’s dramatic art is The Importance of Being Earnest. Hyde reported that Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon in the first performance, recalled many years later: “In my fifty-three years of acting I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest. The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again.” This time the critics were highly favorable in their reviews. Superficially, at least, The Importance of Being Earnest contains many of the same elements as the earlier plays. Once again there are the question of parentage, a matter of mistaken identity, and a character who has been living a lie for years. But, as Louis Kronenberger observed, “the only difference is that here nothing can seem bogus because nothing pretends-to-be-real; nothing can offend our feelings because nothing can affect them.” What Arthur Ganz identified in the earlier plays as the conflict between the philistine world and the dandyish world no longer exists in this play, because the philistine world has been replaced by a world of almost pure farce.

The plot centers on two pairs of lovers—Jack Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, and Algernon Moncrieff and Cecily Cardew. Each of the men leads a double life: Jack, who lives in the country with his ward Cecily, has invented an alter ego named Ernest for his life in town; Algernon has done similarly with his imaginary invalid friend Bunbury, who lives in the country. When the audience shortly learns that each of the young women absurdly wishes to marry a man named Ernest, the stage is set for farcical twists and turns. Over almost all the action presides Lady Bracknell, a woman with wit to spare and a discerning judgment regarding the credentials requisite for the proper marriage. When Jack and Algernon turn out to be brothers in the same respectable family as Lady Bracknell, the play can end happily and absurdly with the two marriages.

George Woodcock, who in The Paradox of Oscar Wilde examined at length the social ideas in Wilde’s other comedies, found “no explicit social theme” in The Importance of Being Earnest. In Papers on Language and Literature , Dennis Spininger concurred, explaining that Wilde “uses the tools of the satirist without wanting to cure the follies and ills he criticizes.” Although Kate Matlock posited in Journal of Irish Literature that Wilde makes an affirmation at the end of the play in that it “asserts that marriage is a positive social element which reins in deceptive and potentially corrupt bachelor tendencies,” such critics as Spininger and Morris Freedman have moved away from such a conventional view of the comedy as a reassertion of order and toward a perception of the play as anticipating the drama of the absurd. Perhaps Freedman was correct when in The Moral Impulse he described the play as “an account of the search of several young persons for meaning in a society extraordinarily reluctant, even impotent, to assign importance to anything except the superficial.” However, the second part of this statement is much easier to accept than the first part, because the young people participate in this farcical society, and they live by its rules—or break them in acceptable ways. If an element of seriousness can be identified in this play, it may be what Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker called “a pseudo-irresponsible jabbing at all the great problems.”

Wilde’s dramatic career, and indeed his entire writing career, with the exception of De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol , came to an end following the enormously successful Importance of Being Earnest. This play and An Ideal Husband played concurrently in London in 1895 until Wilde’s arrest and trial. The Importance of Being Earnest subsequently ran for a month with the author’s name removed from the playbills and the program; An Ideal Husband was canceled almost immediately.

During his imprisonment Wilde continued to write as an essayist. He had been writing critical essays since 1879, when he arrived in London from Oxford and began to write on art for various London periodicals. In 1882 he lectured in America, and these lectures were published after his death by his bibliographer Stuart Mason. His most important critical essays were “The Decay of Lying,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Truth of Masks,” first published in Intentions (1891); “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1891; and De Profundis, a long letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison and published in 1905. Richard Ellman, in his introduction to The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde , placed him at the end of a clear progression of English critics from Matthew Arnold to Ruskin to Pater. Wilde clearly had Arnold in mind in “The Critic as Artist,” when he turned upside down his predecessor’s famous dictum that the function of criticism is to see the object as it really is: Wilde would have it that “the aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not.” This is no mere playing with paradox for Wilde, because this whole essay strives to show that criticism is creative, that the critic uses the work of art as a jumping-off place for his own imaginative activity. The higher the imagination soars, both from the work of art and from reality, the better the criticism. Just as the critic in this sense can be superior to the artist, so the artist is superior to the man of action. The man of action is the least imaginative because action is “a base concession to fact.”

“Imaginative freedom is the key element in Wilde’s criticism. In “The Decay of Lying” he argues that lying is a requisite of art, for without it there is nothing but a base realism. The problem with the novel in England, Wilde claims, is that writers do not lie enough; they do not have enough imagination in their works: “they find life crude, and leave it raw.” In this essay Wilde makes his seemingly outrageous statement that “life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life.” Though perhaps overstating the fact, Wilde convincingly discusses the many ways in which our perceptions of reality are affected by the art that we have experienced, an idea adapted from poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other earlier English romantics.

The Soul of Man under Socialism , though not collected in Intentions , was published in the same year, 1891. Wilde’s society friends must have been amused at his advocacy of socialism, but the conclusions of this essay are consistent with those of the other essays—if we accept his premises about socialism. Wilde advocates a nonauthoritarian socialism under which the individual would be freed from either the burden of poverty or the burdens of greed and guilt. As Michael Helfand and Philip Smith stated in Texas Studies in Literature and Language , “Wilde formulated a nonauthoritarian socialist theory which encouraged aesthetic activity, analogous to sexual selection, and reduced competition (and thus natural selection), as the way of achieving continuous cultural and social improvement.” To Wilde’s previous emphasis on imagination he now brings an emphasis on individualism, both of which, he speculates, would flourish under socialism.

Wilde’s last important essay was written during his imprisonment. Events leading up to Wilde’s incarceration began when Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, tried unsuccessfully to end the relationship between his son and Wilde. Frustrated by his lack of success, he went to Wilde’s club and left his card, which was inscribed “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [ sic ].” Against all advice, in early 1895 Wilde decided to sue Queensberry for libel. Wilde lost the case, and as a result of the testimony against him at the trial, he was arrested and tried for homosexuality. Since the jury could not agree on a verdict, Wilde was tried a second time and ultimately convicted. The record of these trials, which was published by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1948 as Trials of Oscar Wilde , makes fascinating reading, revealing as it does the vanity of Wilde, the eccentricities of Queensbury, and exultation of the British public at the verdict. Wilde was sentenced in May 1895 to two years of hard labor, most of which was spent at Reading Gaol.

At Reading Gaol, toward the end of his term, Wilde wrote the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that has come to be called De Profundis. A heavily edited version of this letter was published in 1905; the entire work did not appear until Rupert Hart-Davis’s complete edition of Wilde’s letters was published in 1962. As a work of art, De Profundis suffers from a divided purpose caused in part by the fact that there is more than one audience. From the beginning Wilde intended the letter to be read by more people than Douglas alone. At the end of the work he expressed its weaknesses as well as anyone later appraising De Profundis has: “How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failures to realize those aspirations shows you quite clearly.” The scorn and bitterness come early in the letter, where he excoriates Douglas for his lack of imagination and soul. Then Wilde reverses his position and accepts any blame for the outcome of events. But the vehemence of the early denunciation renders hollow a finely cried statement like the following: “To regret one’s own experience is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” Though on the whole it is beautifully written, the letter suffers from this uncertain tone and, as George Woodcock noted, presents Wilde’s sentimentality at “its most irritating depth in De Profundis. ”

Nevertheless, the work contains passages of real power, such as those in which Wilde describes life in prison and the ridicule he was subjected to during his transfer from Wandsworth to Reading. And Wilde reasserts the most important critical principles of the earlier essays: the importance of individualism, imagination, self-expression, and self-development. In De Profundis, Christ becomes the archetype of the artist, “the most supreme of individualists.”

Wilde’s last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol , was written shortly after his release from prison in 1897. Hyde recorded in The Annotated Oscar Wilde that Yeats called it “a great or almost great poem,” but the fact that he chose only 38 of the poem’s 109 stanzas for publication in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse suggests his awareness of the work’s diffuseness. The poem appeared in 1898 without Wilde’s name but with the identification “C.3.3.,” his cell number at Reading Gaol. The ballad tells a very moving story of a man condemned to death for the murder of his young wife and records the horror of his fellow prisoners as they watch him go through his last days. Though the poem has much of the realism that Wilde always abhorred, it transcends 19th-century prison life in its handling of the themes of suffering, isolation, and collective guilt (“Yet each man kills the thing he loves”). The poem is the most successful of Wilde’s non-dramatic works primarily because, as Robert Keith Miller said, Wilde himself is “no longer the center of attention.” The speaker is a prisoner, but the focus is first on the condemned man and then on all of the prisoners as a group.

Similarly, Wilde eluded attention after his prison release. He wandered Europe for three and a half years under an assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth, and died bankrupt in a Paris hotel on November 30, 1900.

“From Wilde’s death until the late 1940s, critics generally focused on his biography, choosing to discuss the man rather than his writings,” reported Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Debra Boyd. Even then, Wilde was “relegated to being a minor fixture in the Victorian pantheon of writers, one admired mainly for The Importance of Being Earnest or considered a representative of Aestheticism or the Decadent movement.” But in more recent decades, Boyd continued, the writer’s reputation has risen. “Additional biographical and textual materials have been made available,” affording critics and scholars an enhanced view of Wilde’s sense of his own works. “In addition,” said Boyd, “poststructuralist criticism and gay studies have provided scholars with varied theoretical frameworks from which to examine Wilde’s works.”

Boyd pointed to a handful of scholars, including Jonathan Dollimore and Richard Dellamora, who have subsequently placed Wilde “in the forefront of writers who examine the sexual and political dimensions of art.” Boyd argues that even in such a favorable light, scholars tend to gravitate toward the author’s plays and longer fiction like Dorian Gray , to the neglect of Wilde’s shorter pieces. “More attention must be paid to his short fiction,” she maintained. “In this age of literary theory, few writers can articulate as clearly as Wilde did for the theoretical bases for their works and then actually practice what they preach. Wilde’s stories show that he was able to merge theory and practice, creating works of art that stand up well to critical scrutiny.” The author has been the subject of many biographies, both in book and film version, notably Richard Ellmann’s 1988 work, Oscar Wilde , and the dramatic film Wilde , released in the late 1990s.

Just as Wilde the playwright and poet established his place in the literary canon, so Wilde the correspondent has been the object of critical examination as well. Several volumes of the author’s letters have been published, including The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde , coedited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and published in 2000. In his introduction, Holland describes coming across the full texts of letters previously published only in fragments. In his grandson’s view, the missives show another side to Wilde, beyond the creator of social comedies and poems. With these letters, maintained Holland, readers must reinterpret the author as “a hard-working professional writer, deeply interested by the issues of his day and carrying in his intellectual baggage something that we all to frequently overlook, a quite extraordinary classical, literary and philosophical education.”

• Ireland & Northern Ireland

The following abbreviated chronological biography of Oscar Wilde has been reproduced from numerous sources, but primarily from Merlin Holland’s “ Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters “.

1864-71: Studies at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen

1871: Begins studying Classics at Trinity College, Dublin

1874: Begins studying Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford

1878: Wins Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’, takes BA degree

1879: Settles in London

1881: First edition of his Poems published

1882: Lectures in the USA and Canada all year

1883: Writes The Duchess of Padua

1884: Marries Constance Lloyd after 6 month engagement, settles in Chelsea (London)

1885: First son, Cyril, is born; Wilde writes reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette

1886: Second son, Vyvyan, is born

1887: Becomes editor of The Woman’s World ; ‘The Canterville Ghost’, ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crimes’, and ‘The Model Millionaire’ are published

1888: ‘The Happy Prince and Other Tales’ is published

1889: ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ are published; Wilde gives up editorship of Woman’s World

1890: First version of The Picture of Dorian Gray  published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine . ‘The Critic as Artist’ published

1891: ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ‘Intentions’, and ‘A House of Pomegranates’ are published; Wilde meets Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie); writes Salome in Paris

1892: Lady Windermere’s Fan produced at St. James’s Theatre; Salome is denied a licence for performance; Wilde writes A Woman of No Importance

1893: Salome is published in French; A Woman of No Importance is produced at Haymarket Theatre; writes An Ideal Husband ; Lady Windermere’s Fan is published

1894: Salome published in English translation; The Sphinx published; and A Woman of No Importance published

1895: An Ideal Husband produced at Haymarket Theatre; The Importance of Being Earnest produced at St. James’s Theatre. Wilde finds Marquess of Queensberry’s card at Albermarle Club; obtains warrant for Queensberry’s arrest on a charge of criminal libel ; Queensberry goes on trial and is acquitted; Wilde is arrested, charged with gross indecency, convicted, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Imprisoned at Pentonville, transferred to Wandsworth and finally to Reading Gaol. In November declared bankrupt.

1896: Death of his mother, Lady Wilde; Salome is produced in Paris

1897: Writes De Profundis ; is released from prison, adopts the name Sebastian Melmoth, settles first in France at Berneval; later joins Lord Alfred Douglas in Naples

1898: Moves to Paris, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is published; death of his wife, Constance

1899: The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband are published; Wilde moves into the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris

1900: Undergoes ear operation in hotel room; is baptized a Roman Catholic and on 30 November dies of cerebral meningitis; buried in Bagneux Cemetery

1906: Wilde’s estate is discharged from bankruptcy

1909: Wilde’s remains are moved from Bagneux to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris and in 1912 a monument by Jacob Epstein is erected over them

Oscar Wilde Biography

Birthday: October 16 , 1854 ( Libra )

Born In: Dublin, Ireland

Oscar Wilde was a noted Irish playwright, novelist, poet and essayist, born in the middle of the nineteenth century into an intellectual family. While studying in Trinity, Dublin, he was influenced by the aesthetic movement, which advocated that art must be practiced only for the sake of art and soon became one of its ardent followers. Although his very first book, ‘Poems’ established him as an upcoming poet, he tasted real success only in the last decade of his relatively short life. But by then, despite being married with two sons, he had become entangled in a homosexual relationship and when that came into light, he was sentenced to two-year rigorous imprisonment. On coming out of prison, he went to France, where he spent the last years of his life, cut off from his family and shunned by most of his friends. By then, his books had also stopped selling and his plays were closed down. Thus he lived in poverty and ill-health till he died aged just forty-six.

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Also Known As: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

Died At Age: 46

Spouse/Ex-: Constance Lloyd (m. 1884–1898), Constance Lloyd (m. 1884–1898)

father: Sir William Wilde

mother: Lady Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde

children: Cyril Holland, Vyvyan Holland

Born Country: Ireland

Poets Novelists

Died on: November 30 , 1900

place of death: Paris, France

Grouping of People: Gay

Cause of Death: Meningitis

Notable Alumni: Magdalen College, Oxford

Ancestry: English Irish, Italian Irish

City: Dublin, Ireland

education: Trinity College, Dublin, Magdalen College, Oxford

awards: 1988 - National (USA) Book Critics Circle Award

You wanted to know

What are some famous works by oscar wilde.

Some of Oscar Wilde's most famous works include "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "The Importance of Being Earnest," and "Lady Windermere's Fan."

What was Oscar Wilde known for besides his writing?

What impact did oscar wilde have on literature.

Oscar Wilde is considered one of the most prominent figures in the literary world due to his contributions to literature, particularly in the genre of comedy and satire.

What is the significance of Oscar Wilde's trial and imprisonment?

Oscar Wilde's trial and imprisonment for "gross indecency" due to his homosexuality had a significant impact on his life and legacy, as well as on the cultural understanding of LGBTQ+ issues.

How did Oscar Wilde's personal life influence his work?

Oscar Wilde's personal experiences, including his relationships and social interactions, often influenced the themes and characters in his works, adding depth and complexity to his writing.

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The Life and Times of Oscar Wilde

“I can resist everything except temptation.” Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet and celebrity, known for his flamboyant dress, sharp wit and scandalous love life…

Jessica Brain

One of the most popular and controversial literary figures of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde was a celebrated playwright, poet and novelist, famous for his satire and sharp wit.

He was an unconventional figure of his day, well known for his colourful and flamboyant style both in prose and in dress.

In his time he caused quite a stir, with some deeming his work to be immoral. Nevertheless, his satirical plays still garnered considerable interest and drew large audiences.

Some of his most famous work includes “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, which initially received a poor rating from his Victorian counterparts, only to become one of his most well-known works.

His story begins in Dublin. He was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde to a father who had been knighted for his work in the medical profession and a mother whose poetry would later inspire her own son’s future writing.

From an early age, Wilde demonstrated his propensity for the artistic and literary world, particularly extolling the virtues of the classics of Greece and Rome.

After excelling in his early education, young Oscar went on to achieve a scholarship allowing him to attend Trinity College in Dublin. In less than a year at the college he was already making his mark, having achieved the highest grades in the year and also receiving a second scholarship.

During this time, his academic prowess and literary skills flourished, so much so that in 1874 he graduated and received the highest award, the Berkeley Gold Medal, for best student in Greek.

As a young adult, the opportunity for him to study at Oxford was a natural progression for someone displaying such talent and potential. It was at Magdalen College, Oxford where he would continue to excel in his academic studies and begin to dabble in the field of creative writing.

His poetry became an instant hit and on the year of his graduation he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for the best English verse composition with his poem, “Ravenna”.

Whilst he was at Oxford, he fell under the influence of art critic John Ruskin and Walter Pater, famous essayists. Their works would illustrate the approaches to art and intellectualism which began to characterise nineteenth century Europe.

The artistic movement which took centre stage and in which Oscar Wilde immersed himself, was called aestheticism. Perhaps most succinctly, the movement was characterised by the phrase: art for art’s sake. The focus of their work whether it was literary, art, or design, was primarily on the aesthetics. The emphasis on the beauty of the composition, rather than the contextual background of social, economic or political ramifications characterised the work of this era.

Beauty in all its forms was to be explored and throughout his career, Wilde became a representative of this ideal.

With his academic prowess firmly established at Oxford, upon graduation Wilde moved to London alongside his good friend Frank Miles, an artist popular in London social circles.

Only two years after moving to the capital he released his first publication entitled, “Poems”, an assortment of poetry which received a mixed reaction, with many critics deeming his work to be distinctly aesthetic but also unoriginal.

Despite this setback, his publication did garner enough attention for him to be considered a promising newcomer in the world of writing. In his next move, he would travel to the Big Apple in America to go on a lecture tour which lasted nine months.

In this short time, Wilde mixed with a variety of characters, including the famous American poet, Walt Whitman whom Wilde greatly admired.

When he returned home, after the success of his American lecture tour Wilde decided to embark on a tour of the British Isles which lasted until 1884.

In this time, his poetry and his academic lectures helped to firmly establish him in literary circles and he became a leading light of the aesthetic movement, emphasising beauty over socio-political interpretations.

Whilst his career grew from strength to strength, his personal life would be dogged by rumours of infidelity and scandal.

In 1884, he married a wealthy Englishwoman by the name of Constance Lloyd and settled down, having two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. As he continued to establish himself in London, he was asked to take over the running of an English magazine that was beginning to lose its popularity called the “Lady’s World”.

Wilde accepted the challenge and successfully reversed the magazines fortunes by transforming its focus from fashion to a complete lifestyle publication on all aspects of women’s lives.

It was at this time, whilst he worked as editor of the magazine that he embarked on one of the most successful periods of his career, producing great and varied works that have since become popular classics of English literature.

In 1888, many years after his first publication of poetry, Wilde published a very different kind of literature, this time for children called, “The Happy Prince and Other Tales”.

A few years later, he turned his attentions to the movement of which he had become a figurehead and produced a selection of essays in defence of aestheticism and the values it represented.

Perhaps one of his most famous works, which turned out to be his only novel, was also published in the same year. A story of a man who lives a debauched life with pleasure as his main goal, the young Dorian Gray was the epitome of aestheticism and was said to have been a reflection of Wilde himself.

The hedonism characterised by the novel shocked Victorian readers and greatly offended the sensibilities of the conventional classes who were not ready for the shocking decadence described in his one and only novel.

Despite this, by the 1890’s, Wilde was one of the most successful and well-known literary figures. Celebrated as a playwright, he certainly made his mark on the stage. The plays which gained most traction were his comedies such as “An Ideal Husband” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”.

In 1895 his play “The Importance of Being Earnest” proved highly popular and was an instant hit, drawing large crowds in London’s West End. Sadly, this success proved short-lived and marked the zenith of his career, with his turbulent personal life destined to take centre stage.

Whilst Wilde explored themes of luxury, decadence and debauchery in his literature, much of it served as a mirror to his own life. After only seven years of being married to his wife, Wilde embarked on an affair with man nicknamed “Bosie”, also known as Lord Alfred Douglas, a young aristocrat and poet.

At the time, homosexuality was a crime and their love affair was kept secret, however Douglas’ father, after discovering the relationship, was determined to make a spectacle of Wilde and ruin his career.

The Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’ father, arranged to disrupt Wilde’s play at the West End and present him with a bouquet of rotting vegetables; however, Wilde was able to intervene and prevent him from entering. Inevitably, the quarrel escalated and soon entered the public domain when Queensberry left a card at the Albemarle Club which exposed and accused Wilde of homosexuality.

This caused outrage and immediately close friends of Wilde who knew of his sexuality urged him to flee to France where they had already decriminalised homosexuality in 1791.

Unfortunately, Wilde chose to ignore this advice and instead took the argument to the courts by suing the Marquess for defamation, a case which Wilde lost, costing him his career as well as a spell in prison.

His homosexuality and infidelity would ultimately lead to his downfall and public disgrace.

The accusations of libel levelled at the Marquess did not hold and the attention of the court immediately turned to Wilde’s sexuality, with a number of witnesses called upon to testify to the sight of young men entering Wilde’s bedroom.

The trial ended with no verdict from the jury forcing a retrial a few weeks later which convicted Wilde of gross indecency and a sentence of two years of hard labour.

In May 1895 he began his prison sentence and was put to work. Inevitably, his health deteriorated considerably and in 1897, upon his release, he was shadow of his former self.

Now in exile in Paris, he spent the last three years of his life in poverty, composing his last work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. In November 1900 he passed away at the age of forty-six.

He was a notorious figure who would be remembered for both for his unorthodox, dramatic and scandalous private life as well as his unconventional, creative, intelligent literary creations which provoked and entertained, much like the man himself.

Jessica Brain is a freelance writer specialising in history. Based in Kent and a lover of all things historical.

Published: July 8th, 2021.

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