Oscar Wilde(1854–1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, on the sixteenth of October 1854, second son of Sir William Wilde, the eminent Irish oto-ophthalmic surgeon and antiquary, and Jane Francesca Wilde (the poet Speranza of the Nation, who had written some of the central verse of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s). He was raised at 1 Merrion Square in the heart of Georgian Dublin, schooled at Portora Royal in Enniskillen, and at seventeen won the Royal School Scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Greek and Latin literature under the Hellenist Robert Tyrrell and the Mahaffy of the Greek life. He took a first-class degree, the Berkeley Gold Medal in Greek, and on the strength of it a demyship in classics to Magdalen College, Oxford.

At Oxford from 1874 to 1878 he took a double first in Mods and Greats, won the Newdigate Prize for his long poem Ravenna in 1878, and absorbed the Aesthetic doctrine of Walter Pater and the Florentine Renaissance criticism of John Ruskin. He came down in 1878 with the public reputation of an aesthete: long hair, peacock feathers, a sunflower in the buttonhole, the green-carnation Aestheticism of the Grosvenor Gallery set. He took his polemic across the Atlantic on a famous lecture tour of the United States and Canada in 1882 (the customs officer at New York is said to have asked whether he had anything to declare, and to have been answered: Nothing but my genius), lectured in over a hundred American cities on the philosophy of decoration and the use of art in everyday life, and returned to settle in London in 1883.

The 1890s were the decade of his mature work. He published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, the great late-Victorian novel of the cost of the aesthetic life, and produced through the next five years a sequence of stage comedies that became the high-water mark of the English-language comic theatre: Lady Windermere's Fan at the St James's in 1892, A Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket in 1893, An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket in 1895, and The Importance of Being Earnest, his masterpiece, at the St James's on the fourteenth of February 1895. The Earnest first night was, by Henry James's diary entry of the next morning, the most polished comedy of manners on the London stage since Sheridan. He also wrote in the same decade the dark verse-tragedy Salomé in French, banned in England, premiered in Paris in 1896, and adapted by Richard Strauss as the libretto of his 1905 opera.

His later writing carried a different register. In Reading Gaol, where he was confined from November 1895 to May 1897, he wrote the long prose-letter to Lord Alfred Douglas published in 1905 as De Profundis, a sustained meditation on sorrow, repentance and the imaginative life, and on his release composed the Ballad of Reading Gaol, the long narrative poem published under the pseudonym C.3.3 in February 1898, in seven hundred lines the central English-language poem of carceral protest of the nineteenth century, with its refrain Yet each man kills the thing he loves. The Ballad sold seven editions in the first year and remained on the English poetry lists through the twentieth century.

He left England in May 1897, lived for the last three years of his life in France under the name Sebastian Melmoth, and died at the Hôtel d'Alsace on the rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris on the thirtieth of November 1900 in his forty-seventh year, received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed by Father Cuthbert Dunne of the Passionists. He was buried at Bagneux and reinterred in 1909 at Père Lachaise under the great winged-sphinx tomb commissioned from Jacob Epstein by Robert Ross with the funds of an English public subscription. The Importance of Being Earnest has not been off an English-speaking stage in a single year since 1900; The Picture of Dorian Gray has been continuously in print in over thirty languages; the Ballad of Reading Gaol is on every twentieth-century anthology of English verse. The Wilde name in modern English-language letters carries the weight of the Dublin-born Trinity classicist who put the wit of the late Victorian comedy and the protest-poem of late romantic conscience into the English language at the same time.