Wilde

The Wilde family of Dublin descend from a Castlerea-Wilde line of the late eighteenth century. Sir William Wilde (1815–1876), the surgeon-archaeologist and Surgeon-Oculist in Ordinary to Queen Victoria for Ireland from 1853, was the foundational figure of nineteenth-century Irish folklore and archaeology, knighted in 1864 for his census-of-Ireland work. His wife, Jane Francesca Elgee (*Speranza*, 1821–1896), was a Young-Ireland poet and the principal Dublin literary salon hostess of the mid-nineteenth century.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900), their second son, was the most celebrated English-language playwright of the late nineteenth century (*The Importance of Being Earnest*, 1895; *Lady Windermere's Fan*, 1892; *An Ideal Husband*, 1895), the foundational figure of the aestheticist literary movement, and the most internationally famous Irish writer of the late Victorian period. His criminal libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry in March 1895, the consequent Crown prosecution of Wilde under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the two trials at the Old Bailey of April-May 1895, the conviction on the twenty-fifth of May 1895, and the sentence of two years' hard labour, are the foundational legal case of late-Victorian sexual-morality jurisprudence. Wilde served his sentence at Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading prisons; *The Ballad of Reading Gaol* and *De Profundis* are the literary product of the imprisonment. He died in exile at the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris on the thirtieth of November 1900, forty-six years old.