97

Oscar Wilde

1854–1900

 

Oscar Wilde was the remarkable son of remarkable parents.  His father was Sir William Wilde, surgeon and archaeologist, one of the most celebrated intellectual figures in nineteenth-century Ireland.  Sir William was the author of two books which are still read about the River Boyne, and Lough Corrib, in Galway.  Both of these mingle topography and archaeology in a most readable way.  However, it was his work on the medical aspects of the Irish census of 1851, which dealt in large part with the affects of the famine on the population of the country, for which he was knighted.  In 1851 he married Jane Elgee, who already had a reputation of her own as a patriotic poet under the pen name Speranza, and who had contributed fiery poetry and prose to the Nation when it was edited by GAVIN  DUFFY  [82].

      Wilde was a tiny little man with factual tastes, Jane was large, flamboyant and fanciful - she claimed to be a descendant of Dante.  Sir William suffered socially in the aftermath of a civil action in which it was alleged he had raped one of his patients, but he re-established himself before he died, in 1876.

      Their son, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, was born on 16th October 1854, at 15 Westland Roe, although a little later the family moved to a larger mansion at 1 Merrion Square.  He was raised with an appreciation of what it meant to be in the public eye.  He was educated at Portora Royal School, and at Trinity College in Dublin, where he first began to emerge as a personality under the friendship of a celebrated don of the day, John Mahaffy, the professor of Greek.  He then went on to Oxford, where he became friends with the art critic John Ruskin.  The combination of Greek culture and aesthetics affected his own development.  He won a first-class degree and the Newdigate Prize for his poem 'Ravenna'.

      He moved to London at the age of twenty-five, and was, from then on, basically a Londoner.  There his novel aesthetic views added to his college reputation, and he was the subject of genial satire by Gilbert and Sullivan in the character of the poet Bunthorne in their comic opera Patience.

      Following this reputation, he went on a money-making lecture tour of America, where he proved to be a big success, even with the hard-bitten gold diggers of Montana.  However, his first play, Vera, produced in New York, was a failure.

      Wilde married an Irishwoman, Constance Lloyd, by whom he had two sons, born in 1885 and 1886.  But as his story 'The Portrait of Mr W.H.' showed, he was beginning to explore other aspects of his sexuality.  About this time he met Robert Ross and was initiated into homosexuality.

      In 1891 he first met his nemesis in the form of Lord Alfred Douglas, the dandyish son of the notorious marquis of Queensbury, who was responsible for drawing up the rules of prizefighting.  The Picture of Dorian Gray, with its hints at sinister dark sins, was a further step in a revolt against the morality of the day.  His essays 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' followed.  But these paradoxical and political pieces were not a full demonstration of his evolving genius.

      In 1892 the first play of his last period, Lady Windermere's Fan, was produced in London.  He described this one as 'one of those modern drawing-room plays with pink lampshades'.  This was quickly followed by A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.  He was at the very height of success, with two plays running in London, when disaster fell upon him.

      By this time he was leading a dangerous life with Lord Alfred, and involved with male prostitutes and other shadowy figures in the homosexual underworld of London.  Lord Alfred and his father were feuding, and the marquis took exception to Wilde and began to hound him.

      On 18th February 1895, the marquis left a card with the porter of Wilde's club addressed 'Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite.'  The porter put it in an envelope and gave it to Wilde on his next visit.  Lord Alfred urged him to sue the marquis for libel, which he did.  At the trial all the details of his private life were exposed, and he lost the case.  Rather than flee the country, as was the custom with exposed homosexuals in the polite society of Victorian London, he lingered, and was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel and put on trial for sexual offences.  The jury disagreed at the first trial, but at a second he was convicted and sentenced to five years with hard labour in Reading Gaol.

      Wilde's prison experiences provided him with two important works: De Profundis, an attack on Lord Alfred Douglas, and a little later 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', by far his most successful poem, perhaps because it was his most objective.

      Once released from prison, he went abroad.  His wife Constance, who had separated from him on the advice of her relatives to protect her two boys, gave him an allowance.  But this was stopped when he took up again with Lord Alfred.  Some old friends of a more decent kind, such as Robert Ross, remained friends, but otherwise he was shunned as an outlaw, gaped at in cafes and pointed out in public places.  He became fat, unhealthy, and finally ill.  He died on 30th November 1900, in the Hôtel D'Alsace in the Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris.  He was received into the Catholic Church shortly before he died.  He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, where his grave, now surmounted by a monumental sculpture be Jacob Epstein, is a place of literary pilgrimage.

      Wilde had been bankrupt, but Ross eventually recovered his copyrights for the benefit of his sons.  He deposited a copy of the full version of De Profundis in the British Library, protecting it from Lord Alfred, who had destroyed what he thought was the only copy.  Wilde's son Cyril was killed in the First World War.  Vyvyan lived on and wrote a memoir about his father, and his son, Merlin, is now the guardian of the Wilde estate.

      When Wilde was tried, his nationality was not in question.  At his trials it did not matter to the jury if he was Irish or British.  More recently, Irish writers and academics have attempted to recapture him for Irish, rather than English, literature.  His conversational style of story-telling has been related to the Gaelic style that so interested his parents.  More importantly, he was, like Sheridan and Goldsmith before him, an outsider in the society he depicted in his plays.  He was alert to the comic possibilities of the London drawing room in a way that the natives were not.  Thus, the social satirist was given full play.  Finally, his gift of language is thought to have its origins in the verbal skills native to the Irish of all periods.

      Whatever its background, The Importance of Being Earnest is a classic of the English-language theatre, but it is not Wilde's literary qualities that maintain his notoriety.   He is widely seen as a gay martyr in a repressive society, which is enough to keep large numbers of people interested in him and to keep his work alive.  For the scandal-ridden son of scandal-ridden parents, it is a strange but perhaps appropriate apotheosis.