About:
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland into a family not known for reticence. His father was a leading ear and eye surgeon and his mother, the self-styled ‘Speranza’, was an intellectual socialite with an eye for notoriety. As W B Yeats was to note, “When one listens to her and remembers that Sir William Wilde was in his day a famous raconteur, one finds it in no way wonderful that Oscar Wilde should be the most finished talker of our time.”
Following a highly successful time at Trinity, Dublin, Wilde continued his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford University where his two main tutors, John Ruskin and Walter Pater battled it out for dominance over the development of the precocious young man. Wilde moved on from Oxford, with his newly widowed (and debt laden) mother, to a highly visible dominance of the cultural scene in London. He was central in establishing what would become known as ‘Aestheticism’ following the maxim of art for art’s sake. Living in the newly fashionable Chelsea, in a house whose décor was designed for him by Whistler, Wilde soon became notorious, not only for his prodigious wit and elegance of phrase but also for his flamboyant rejection of convention and conformity. He was earning his living from lecturing and writing and in 1882, Gilbert and Sullivan’s D’Oyly Carte company funded a lecture tour for him across the United States as a publicity device prior to the American opening of their production of Patience, which was a parody of the Aestheticist movement and Wilde in particular. He, rather surprisingly, won much acclaim and respect in the States and returned an international figure.
He married, in 1884, Constance Lloyd, a rather mousy but undeniably wealthy fan of his, and for several years he attempted to settle down to a fairly domestic existence, fathering three children, who he adored and earning a stable wage turning a dull society monthly, Lady’s World, into a highly popular vehicle for intellectual and modernist female writing - Women’s World.
However, he was also becoming increasingly involved with young men, his first known affair, and the one to last him until his death was with Robert Ross, an undergraduate at Oxford, whom he met in 1885. A regular habit of what Wilde called “feasting with panthers” or playing the field dangerously with rent boys and rough trade, was interrupted by his great love, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), who was also to prove his great undoing. He had had great success with his publishing of The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888 and in 1891 he published The Picture of Dorian Gray which attracted scandal and sales in almost equal measure and the immense success of his plays which followed, during the 1890s, Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Ernest, all served to make him increasingly successful and hence increasingly uninhibited in a era when flouting convention could be legally dangerous.
Three days after the first night of his most recent hit, The Importance of Being Ernest Bosie’s father, the irascible and slightly unhinged inventor of the rules of boxing, the Marquess of Queensbury, finally could stand his son’s association with Wilde no longer and left a calling card at his club addressed to ‘Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite(sic)’. For reasons best known to himself, and possibly encouraged by the anti-establishment republican leanings of his mother, Wilde decided to sue Queensbury for libel. The court, unsurprisingly, threw the case out in two days, but on the strength of the evidence provided at the trial issued immediate warrants for Wilde’s arrest on a charge of ‘Gross Indecency’. Having deliberately not fled the country when he had the chance, again his mother apparently having told him she’d never speak to him again if he did, Wilde took on the System, and lost.
He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour, for which he was sent to Pentonville, on to Wandsworth and finally to Reading Gaol. The conditions under which he was held did nothing for his health and when, in 1897 he was released he bolted to Paris, where under an assumed name but with no slackening of his practices, he lived an increasingly poverty stricken life. Bosie, had deserted him during his time in Prison and although there was a short reunion, he did not last long with Wilde. Ross on the other hand remained a steadfast friend (in spite of being the major encourager of Wilde’s wilder side) and Wilde died with Ross by his bed in what was at the time a near doss house L’Hôtel d’Alsace, in 1900. His body was later laid in a tomb, designed by Jacob Epstein, in the Père Lachaise Cemetary just outside Paris.