Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was the most celebrated wit of the late Victorian age and one of the best-loved writers in English — a brilliant talker, poet, critic, novelist and playwright, the apostle of aestheticism (“art for art’s sake”), and the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the fairy tales of The Happy Prince, and the comedy that many think the most perfect in English, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). At the height of his fame, with two plays running in London’s West End, he sued the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel; the case collapsed, and Wilde was tried, convicted of “gross indecency” with men, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. He emerged bankrupt, broken in health and exiled, and died in Paris three years later at forty-six. His downfall made him a martyr of sexual freedom; his epigrams made him the most quoted writer after Shakespeare and the Bible.

Life

Dublin and Oxford

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854, the second son of Sir William Wilde, an eminent eye and ear surgeon, antiquarian and notorious philanderer, and Jane Francesca Elgee, a towering, theatrical poet and Irish nationalist who wrote under the name “Speranza”. Their house in Merrion Square was a salon of Dublin intellectual life. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he excelled in classics, and won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), where he took a double first and won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

At Oxford he came under the influence of two very different teachers: John Ruskin, the moralist of art, who had his students build a road; and Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) — with its famous conclusion urging readers “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame” and to seek “not the fruit of experience, but experience itself” — became Wilde’s “golden book”. He cultivated an aesthetic persona, filling his rooms with lilies, peacock feathers and blue china.

The aesthete

Moving to London in 1879, he made himself famous before he had done much: a celebrity aesthete in velvet knee-breeches with a lily or sunflower, satirised in Punch and as Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881). In 1882 he made a year-long lecture tour of America on “The English Renaissance” and “The House Beautiful”, talking to miners in Colorado about Benvenuto Cellini. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, a well-read, gentle young woman; they had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, for whom he wrote fairy tales. He edited the magazine The Woman’s World (1887–89).

The great years

From 1888 came a burst of brilliant work. The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891) are fairy tales of beauty and sacrifice — the jewelled statue of the Happy Prince who asks a swallow to strip him of his gold for the poor; the nightingale who presses her breast against a thorn to colour a rose with her blood; the Selfish Giant. His critical dialogues, collected in Intentions (1891), are the manifesto of aestheticism: “The Decay of Lying” argues that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” and that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art”; “The Critic as Artist” claims criticism as a creative art. The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891) argues that socialism would free individuals from poverty and property to realise their personalities. Around 1886 he had his first sexual relationship with a man, Robert Ross, who became his lifelong friend and literary executor.

The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 and in expanded book form in 1891, with a preface of aphorisms: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all… All art is quite useless.” It tells of Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man whose portrait is painted by the infatuated artist Basil Hallward. Under the influence of the cynical, epigrammatic Lord Henry Wotton — who preaches a “new Hedonism”, the cult of youth, beauty and sensation — Dorian wishes that the portrait might age instead of him: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that — for that — I would give everything! … I would give my soul for that!” His wish is granted. He breaks the heart of a young actress, Sibyl Vane, who kills herself; he sees the first trace of cruelty appear in the portrait’s mouth. Over eighteen years, while Dorian stays outwardly young and innocent, he plunges into secret vice and corruption, ruining the lives of those around him, haunting opium dens, reading a “poisonous” French book (Huysmans’s À rebours), and the portrait, locked in an attic, becomes hideous. When Basil sees it, Dorian murders him. Finally Dorian stabs the portrait to destroy it — and the servants find on the floor a withered, loathsome old man with a knife in his heart, and on the wall the portrait of their master in all his youth and beauty. Reviewers called the novel unclean and poisonous; it was later used against Wilde at his trial.

In 1891 he met Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”), a beautiful, spoiled, volatile young poet, son of the Marquess of Queensberry, and fell disastrously in love. Through Douglas he entered the world of male prostitution.

Wilde then conquered the theatre with four comedies of society: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) — “I can resist everything except temptation”; “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” — A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). His symbolist drama Salomé, written in French, was banned from the English stage for depicting biblical characters; Richard Strauss turned it into an opera.

The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People opened on 14 February 1895 at the St James’s Theatre and is the masterpiece of English farce. Two young men about town lead double lives: Jack Worthing, a respectable guardian in the country, pretends to have a wicked younger brother called Ernest in London so that he can escape there; Algernon Moncrieff has invented an invalid friend, Bunbury, whose illnesses let him escape boring family dinners (“Bunburying”). Jack, as “Ernest”, woos Algernon’s cousin Gwendolen, who loves him chiefly because his name is Ernest; Algernon, posing as Ernest, woos Jack’s ward Cecily, who has imagined an engagement with the wicked Ernest for months. Gwendolen’s mother, the formidable Lady Bracknell, interrogates Jack about his origins and is horrified to learn that he was found as a baby in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station: “A handbag?… To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life.” After every complication, it is revealed that Jack was the baby misplaced by Cecily’s governess Miss Prism, who put the manuscript of her three-volume novel in the pram and the baby in the handbag — that he is Algernon’s elder brother — and that his name really is Ernest: “I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” It is a play in which nothing is serious and everything is a joke at the expense of Victorian earnestness, morality, marriage, class and money.

Trial and prison

Queensberry, a brutal man obsessed with his son’s relationship with Wilde, left a card at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, on 18 February 1895, addressed (misspelt) “For Oscar Wilde posing somdomite”. Urged by Douglas, Wilde sued him for criminal libel. Queensberry’s lawyers, led by Edward Carson (Wilde’s old classmate from Trinity), produced evidence of Wilde’s relations with young male prostitutes and blackmailers; Wilde’s brilliant answers in the witness box — about Dorian Gray, about “the love that dare not speak its name” — could not save the case, which he withdrew. He was arrested the same day, 6 April 1895. After a first trial in which the jury could not agree, he was convicted at a second trial of gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and sentenced on 25 May 1895 to two years’ hard labour — the maximum. The judge called it “the worst case I have ever tried.”

He served his sentence at Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading Gaol, in conditions that destroyed his health: solitary confinement, a plank bed, starvation diet, the treadmill, picking oakum. He was declared bankrupt; his possessions were sold; his wife changed her and the children’s name to Holland and took them abroad; his mother died while he was in prison. In his last months at Reading, allowed pen and paper, he wrote a long letter to Douglas, later published (in part) as De Profundis, a searing account of their relationship and of what suffering had taught him: “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground… I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.”

Exile and death

Released in May 1897, he left England for ever, living in France and Italy under the name Sebastian Melmoth. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem about the hanging of a trooper who had killed his wife, with the refrain “each man kills the thing he loves”: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves, / By each let this be heard, / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word, / The coward does it with a kiss, / The brave man with a sword!” He briefly reunited with Douglas in Naples, then lived in poverty in Paris, drinking, borrowing money and talking. Constance died in 1898. He died of meningitis on 30 November 1900 in the Hôtel d’Alsace, having been received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, under a monument by Jacob Epstein, long covered in lipstick kisses.

Ideas and art

Aestheticism. Wilde’s creed was that art exists for its own sake, independent of morality, utility or truth to nature — though his own works are full of moral seriousness. Dorian Gray can be read as a cautionary tale about the aesthetic life, and Wilde said of it, “It has a moral… All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.”

Paradox and the epigram. Wilde’s wit works by inverting conventional wisdom: “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”; “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”; “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language”; “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”; “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” The paradoxes expose the hypocrisy beneath respectable Victorian values.

Masks and identity. Wilde’s work is full of double lives — Dorian’s portrait, Jack’s Ernest, Algernon’s Bunbury — and of the idea that the self is a performance: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”

Legacy

Wilde was disgraced and his name unmentionable for a generation after his trial; his plays were performed without his name. His reputation recovered in the twentieth century: Earnest became the most performed comedy in English after Shakespeare; Dorian Gray has been filmed many times; his fairy tales are beloved. He became an icon of gay history and of the struggle for sexual freedom, and his life has been told in films (Wilde, 1997, with Stephen Fry) and plays (David Hare’s The Judas Kiss). He is a national literary hero in Ireland.

In conversation

• “I can resist everything except temptation” — the classic confession of weakness, wittily turned.
• A Dorian Gray — someone who stays youthful while hiding corruption; a picture in the attic — the hidden record of one’s true self.
• Bunburying — inventing an excuse to escape social obligations (from Earnest).
• “A handbag?” — Lady Bracknell’s outrage; any absurd revelation met with horror.