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The Life of Oscar Wilde

(1854-1900)

            Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and playwright who penned a large body of work during the last ten years of his short life. Wilde's wry and witty humor styling served him well in both his literary career and personal life, and he was known throughout all of Britain in his day as a flamboyant character obsessed with the aesthetical details of life. To this day he remains a master of wit, with his novel A PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1891), and his plays, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1895), LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN (1893), AN IDEAL HUSBAND (1895), and A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (1893), showing his worth as a writer.

            Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16th, 1854. His parents were Sir William Wilde, an accomplished doctor and humanitarian who was knighted in 1864 for his work on an Irish medical census, and Lady Jane Francesca Elgee, who wrote poems under the pen name Speranza. Although he funded a hospital dedicated to treating the poor for free on his own expense, William Wilde was not beyond carrying on a number of love affairs outside of his marriage. Jane apparently did not mind, and the two carried on very well. Their first son William Charles Kingsbury Wilde was born in 1852, with Oscar's birth following two years later, and a daughter, Isola Emily Francesca Wilde, in 1857. Jane loved both "Willie" and Oscar equally, but she felt a special amount of affection for Emily, whose birth she had been eagerly awaiting for years. The young Oscar was enchanted with his mother at a very early age, and was highly susceptible to the love she lavished upon him. It is thought that his close relationship with his mother is what led to his later homosexuality, but this is still debated by his biographers. It is generally thought, however, that Wilde received his peculiar taste in clothing and deep appreciation of surface appearances from his mother.

             At the age of ten, Oscar enrolled at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen. Oscar's mother had taken to dressing the boy in girlish clothing in the years before the birth of Emily, and Oscar would continue to dress as a Dandy for the rest of his youth. Sporting suits of bright scarlet and purple, the young Wilde was often teased by his classmates, and a large number of his teachers were scandalized by the eccentricity of the young man's wardrobe. Another factor that led to a distancing of himself and his peers were his negative views on religion. Despite being a bit of an outcast, the young Oscar excelled in all of his classes. In 1867, Emily Wilde was to die of a fever at the age of ten. The young Oscar deeply mourned the death of his beloved sister, as did Jane Wilde. Perhaps in a hardened determination to do well following the death of his sister, Oscar's last two years at the school hold his strongest grades, and he was awarded a number of accolades, including a scholarship to Trinity College, where he again did very well. After only a few years as an undergraduate, Wilde was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Magdalene College in Oxford. It was here that Wilde began to write poetry, and his poem Ravenna was awarded the Newdigate prize.

            In 1876, Oscar's father William passed away. Oscar was not forced to leave school, and join the workforce, however, thanks to a son of William's from an earlier marriage by the name of Henry, who supported the family. Wilde stayed on two years longer at Oxford before leaving for London after graduation. He worked as an art critic for a year in 1881, and published a collection of poetry that same year. The critical reception was lackluster, but the young writer had nevertheless succeeded in becoming published. Later that year, Wilde traveled to America and began a lecture tour on aesthetical principles that would close to a year. In 1883, Wilde moved to Paris and began writing a play that he would never succeed in getting published. Following his brief stay in Paris, he proceeded to tour around Great Britain and Ireland, lecturing about aesthetics. Wilde settled down finally towards the end of 1884, when he married a free-thinking and well-read young woman named Constance Lloyd. The next year, Constance gave birth to a son, Cyril, and in 1886, a boy named Vyvyan followed. With a family to support, Wilde could no longer afford to travel at leisure, and the young writer settled down with his family and took a job as editor of a woman's magazine.

            In 1888, Wilde wrote a collection of fairy tales for his children entitled THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES. In 1890, he began work on his first and only novel, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. The story depicts a young man named Dorian Gray who sells his soul for eternal youth. With obvious homosexual undertones, the Victorian audience rejected the work as sinister and immoral, and it would later be cited during his trial for obscenity in 1895. Critics, however, praised the novel. Following the publication of his first novel, Wilde turned his attentions to writing plays, and in 1892, LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN was published. The play depicted high society scandal and blackmail, and understandably did very well both critically and financially. The success of his first play encouraged Wilde to continue past his debut in the theater with a number of popular plays published in rapid succession. A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE appeared in 1893. The play involves the struggle of a young man to choose between his mother and father. The play was a success, and Wilde penned AN IDEAL HUSBAND and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST in 1895.

            That same year, the private life of Oscar Wilde became known to all of England. In 1891, Wilde had met a dashing young man named Lord Alfred Douglas, an openly homosexual ne'er-do-well with a penchant for the expensive. "Bosie," as he was known to friends, was the third son of the Marquis of Queensbury. Although the father and son did not get along very well, when Queensbury heard rumors of Wilde's homosexuality, he began trying to pull Bosie away from the popular playwright. When all of his efforts, including an attempt at ruining an early showing of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, failed, Queensbury thought of a sure-fire way to crush Wilde. So far the affairs of Wilde with the young male prostitutes of London had been hushed up, but Queensbury knew a way to bring Wilde's homosexual activities to the public spotlight. He publicly accused Wilde of being gay, to which the playwright sued for criminal libel. In London at the time, malicious slander was considered a crime, but so was homosexuality.

            Although his close friends tried to convince him otherwise, Wilde had had enough of the Marquis of Queensbury and his constant attempts at thwarting the relationship between the playwright and his beloved Bosie. The manipulative Bosie urged onward Wilde, and although the dramatist displayed a master wit in the courtroom, it was eventually proven that he was, in fact, a homosexual. In 1895, the same year that his two of his biggest critical successes, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST and AN IDEAL HUSBAND, were published, Oscar Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labor. For partaking in the "Love that dare not speak its name," Wilde was to suffer for the next two years in Wandsworth Prison and Reading Gaol.

            Following his release in 1897, the forty-three year old, largely forgotten playwright began work on THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL (1898), an allegory concerning the harsh life of a prisoner. After the anonymous publication of the poem, Wilde met again with Bosie, but at that point, he no longer was interested in continuing a relationship with the reckless young man who had ruined him. For the next few years of his life, Wilde began to travel Europe. THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL, despite being a great success, brought the author no notoriety because of the circumstances of its publication, and he died in 1900 of meningitis. Concerned with aesthetics to the end, the last words he ever spoke were, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."

The Works of Oscar Wilde

Written by Cyanne Topaum

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