Oscar Wilde Meets his Fate

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Wilde's father, Sir William Wilde, was a leading ear and eye surgeon who also wrote about folklore and archaeology. His mother, Jane Francesca, wrote poetry under the name Speranza. She was also a keen Irish nationalist.

After the usual upper middle class schooling, Wilde read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the highest award available in his subject, Berkeley Gold Medal. He then won a scholarship for further studies at Magdalen College, Oxford in England, and graduated with a double first in 1878.

While he was at Oxford he joined the Aesthetic Movement whose motto was 'Art for art's sake'. It was at this stage of his life that he adopted the foppish style now associated with him. This involved the long hair, elegant clothes, languid manner and the cynical witticisms.

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It seems that Wilde took the tenets of Aesthetism to heart and was a great admirer of John Ruskin, one of the founding fathers of the Movement. Ruskin's central argument was that art shouldn't be useful but it should still be a central part of a person's life and way of living.

Oscar Wilde took it all very seriously and was ridiculed for it by many people. Some suggested that his espousement of Aesthetism was simply attention seeking and a bid for fame.

D'Oyly Carte, the impresario famous for his partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan, was taking their latest operetta, Patience on tour in the USA. As Patience mocked the Movement, he asked Wilde to undertake a lecture tour of there to spread understanding of Aestheticism.

He received a mixed reception although his foppish mannerisms seemed to have been appreciated more than might have been expected in some small towns. Many critics gave him a roasting, though, as can be seen from this cartoon which appeared in the San Francisco Wasp.

Because of his notoriety and his cultivation of a flamboyant public persona, Oscar Wilde's poetry, plays and prose are often overlooked when talking or writing about him. This is perfectly understandable because he lived his life and behaved in a way that makes one think his greatest work was himself. He created his own character in the way he created characters in his plays.

As might be expected from a famous wit, his plays were witty and were usually a comedy of manners, parodying English upper class society. Probably the most famous is The Importance of Being Earnest. Who can forget Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell in the movie when she delivered the famous line "A handbag!".

It might come as a surprise but Oscar Wilde married and had children.

After he left Oxford and returned to Ireland, his first love seems to have been Florence Balcombe but she rejected his advances and married Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. After his rejection, he told her he was leaving Ireland for good and lived in London as well as Paris and the USA, only returning to his native land for short visits.

By coincidence, in 1884 and six years after he left Ireland, he met his future wife, Constance Lloyd, in Dublin when he was there to give a lecture. They were married in May of the same year and went on to have two sons, Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886.

After Wilde's disgrace and imprisonment, his wife changed her and her sons' surname to Holland.

Oscar Wilde's downfall came from his relationships with men which were almost certainly homosexual. There is a debate whether he was aware of his sexual orientation before he was married or whether he discovered it the year after. It is said he had a number of relationships with men during his marriage - then he met Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891. They lived together until 1895, the year Oscar Wilde's fate caught up with him.

The beginning of the end came when the Marquis of Queensberry, Lord Alfred's father, became aware of the relationship and was determined to end it. He pursued Wilde at home and in public causing him a great deal of embarrassment. The final straw for Wilde came when the Marquis left his calling club at Wilde's club with an insult on it referring to his sexuality.

Oscar Wilde made an official complaint of criminal libel on the basis of what was written on the card. If only he hadn't made the complaint, perhaps he could have escaped his fate.

The trial began in the first week of April 1895 and it went badly, particularly when Wilde was cross-examined. In the end, the prosecution conceded the case rather than risk the defense parading numerous young men through the witness box.

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When Wilde left the court after the criminal libel case collapsed, charges were filed against him on a charge of gross indecency. There was a delay in issuing the warrant of arrest which would have allowed him to escape to mainland Europe but he didn't go. Wilde stayed in London so missing his last chance to avoid his fate.

He was arrested in the Cadogan Hotel and kept on remand in Holloway Prison. His trial started on April 26th, 1895, just over three weeks after the trial for criminal libel had begun. Lord Alfred Douglas, after Wilde begged him to leave the country, did go abroad as did other young men who might have been called as witnesses for the prosecution.

Under cross-examination, Oscar Wilde defended his friendships with young men. He said:

"The love that dares not speak its name; in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, 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. It dictates and pervades
great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dares not speak its name", and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

This trial ended indecisively as the jury could not agree on a verdict.

After the first trial ended, Wilde was allowed out on £5000 bail half of which was put up for him by the Reverend Steward Headlam, a Christian Socialist who, although he didn't know Wilde, was disgusted with his treatment during the previous trials. Of course, Oscar Wilde could not escape now without the clergyman losing the bail money.

The second trial started on May 25th, 1895. Nothing could save him a second time and Oscar Wilde was found guilty of acts of gross indecency.

He was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour. He was first sent to Pentonville and then Wandsworth Prison before finally being sent to Reading, immortalised in his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

At first he wasn't allowed writing materials and, when he was allowed them, he wrote a 50,000 word letter to Sir Alfred Douglas which prison authorities refused to allow him to send. After release he asked a friend to send it to Lord Alfred but it's uncertain whether it was sent or received. It was finally published in full in The Letters of Oscar Wilde in 1962.

Oscar Wilde was released from prison on May 19th, 1897. He went to live in Paris although he was penniless and in very poor health. Even so, his friends there reported that he quickly went back to friendships with young men.

He died on November 30th, 1900 of cerebral meningitis and was buried in Cimetière de Bagneux, outside Paris, but was moved to Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, the final resting place of many famous people.

Poetry

• Ravenna (1878)


• Poems (1881)The Sphinx (1894)


• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) [edit]

Plays

• Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)


• The Duchess of Padua (1883)


• Salomé (French version) (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)


• Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)


• A Woman of No Importance (1893)


• Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde
  by Lord Alfred Douglas, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)


• An Ideal Husband (1895) (text)


• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) (text)


• La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy Fragmentary. First published
  1908 in Methuen's Collected Works (Dates are dates of first performance, which
  approximate better with the probable date of composition than dates of publication.)

Prose

• The Canterville Ghost (1887)


• The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy tales)


• The Decay Of Lying (First published in 1889, republished in Intentions 1891)
  
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)


• Intentions (1891, critical dialogues and essays, comprising The Critic as
  Artist, The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison and The Truth of Masks)
  
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, Wilde's only novel)


• A House of Pomegranates (1891, fairy tales)


• The Soul of Man under Socialism (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette,
  1891, first book publication 1904)


• Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (First published in the
  Oxford student magazine The Chameleon, December, 1894)


• De Profundis (1905)


• The Rise of Historical Criticism (published in incomplete form 1905 and
  completed form in 1908)


• The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1960) Re-released in 2000, with letters uncovered
  since 1960, and new, detailed, footnotes by Merlin Holland.


• Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal (Paris, 1893) has been attributed to
  Wilde, but was more likely a combined effort by a several of Wilde's friends,
  which he may have edited.

List from Wikipedia