Oscar Wilde

PROFILE

Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. He showed himself as an outstanding classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s with his plays like The Importance of Being Earnest(1895). He was also known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin, and his philosophy of youth, beauty, pleasure was reflected in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Unfortunately, after falling in love with a young socialite Lord Alfred Douglas, his fortune changed dramatically. He was forced to be involved in legal trials with the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Lord Alfred Douglas, and was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
-- Oscar Wilde

chronicle

1954: birth

Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin. His father William Wilde was Ireland's leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. His mother Jane Wilde wrote poetry and read the Young Irelanders' poetry to Oscar and his brother Willie, inspiring a love of these poets in her sons.

1955-1863: Merrion Square No. 1 and home schooling

The Wilde family home on Merrion Square No. 1

In 1855, the Wilde family moved to Merrion Square No. 1, a larger home, which soon became a "unique medical and cultural milieu". And Oscar Wilde´s mother Lady Wilde's interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home.

Oscar Wilde was educated at home until he was 9, where a French bonne and a German governess taught him their languages.

1871-1878: Trinity College Dublin

From 1871 to 1874, Wilde read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, one of the leading classical schools at the time with Royal scholarship. His tutor, Professor J. P. Mahaffy who inspired his interest in Greek literature. As a student Wilde worked with Mahaffy on the latter's book Social Life in Greece. Wilde, despite later reservations, called Mahaffy "my first and best teacher" and "the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things".For his part, Mahaffy boasted of having created Wilde; later, he named him "the only blot on my tutorship".

The University Philosophical Society also provided an education, discussing intellectual and artistic subjects such as Rossetti and Swinburne weekly. Wilde quickly became an established member and presented a paper titled "Aesthetic Morality". At Trinity, Wilde established himself as an outstanding student and in his finals won the Berkeley Gold Medal, the University's highest academic award in Greek. He was encouraged to compete for a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford

the most elegant Irish man Oscar Wilde in checked suit and a bowler hat, Oxford, 1876

Oscar Wilde checked suit and a bowler hat, Oxford, 1876

"Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear."

-- Oscar Wilde

From 1874 to 1878, Oscar Wilde read Greats At Magdalen, Oxford.

While at Magdalen College, Wilde petitioned the Apollo Masonic Lodge at Oxford being attracted by its dress, secrecy, and ritual, and was soon raised to the "Sublime Degree of Master Mason".but his active involvement in Freemasonry lasted only for the time he spent at Oxford.

1874-1878: Oxford

But Wilde was better known for his role in the aesthetic and decadent movements. He wore his hair long, openly scorned "manly" sports though he occasionally boxed, and decorated his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art, once remarking to friends whom he entertained lavishly, "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china." The line quickly became famous, accepted as a slogan by aesthetes but used against them by critics who sensed in it a terrible vacuousness. Some elements disdained the aesthetes, but their languishing attitudes and showy costumes became a recognised pose. By his third year Wilde had truly begun to create himself and his myth, and saw his learning developing in much larger ways than merely the prescribed texts, then he met Walter Pater.

Oscar Wilde had read and had been enthralled by Walter Pater´s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published during Wilde's final year in Trinity. Pater argued that man's sensibility to beauty should be refined above all else, and that each moment should be felt to its fullest extent. Years later, in De Profundis, Wilde called Pater's Studies... "that book that has had such a strange influence over my life". He learned tracts of the book by heart, and carried it with him on travels in later years.

Pater gave Wilde his sense of almost flippant devotion to art, though it was John Ruskin who gave him a purpose for it. Ruskin despaired at the self-validating aestheticism of Pater, arguing that the importance of art lies in its potential for the betterment of society. Ruskin admired beauty, but believed it must be allied with, and applied to, moral good. When Wilde eagerly attended Ruskin's lecture series The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence, he learned about aesthetics as simply the non-mathematical elements of painting.

In November 1878, Oscar Wilde graduated with a double first in his B.A. of Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores (Greats).

1880s Social life

After graduation from Oxford, Oscar Wilde returned to Dublin for a short while then returned to England, set himself up as a bachelor at Tite Street, Chelsea, London with his inheritance from the sale of his father's houses, and spent the next six years in London and Paris, and in the United States where he travelled to deliver lectures.

As aestheticism became vogue, an English impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, invited Wilde to make a lecture tour of North America wanting to sell this most charming aesthete to the American public. Wilde journeyed on the SS Arizona, arriving 2 January 1882, and disembarking the following day. Originally planned to last four months, it continued for almost a year due to the commercial success. There Wilde sought to transpose the beauty he saw in art into daily life. This was a practical as well as philosophical project: in Oxford he had surrounded himself with blue china and lilies, and now one of his lectures was on interior design.

Although Oscar Wilde and aestheticism were both mercilessly caricatured and criticised in the press, he was well received in diverse settings across America and was fêted at the most fashionable salons in many cities he visited.

Between February and mid-May 1883, Oscar Wilde moved to Paris, and returned to England again after a short trip to New York for the production of his first play, Vera.

Elegant playwright Oscar Wilde wife Constance Lloyd. Painting by Louis Desanges 1882Picture

In 1884, Oscar Wilde proposed to Constance Lloyd, daughter of a wealthy Queen's Counsel, and they married on 29 May 1884 at the Anglican St James's Church, Paddington, in London. The couple moved to their new home on No. 16, Tite Street, the same street where Wilde lived as a bachelor.

Oscar Wilde´s wife Constance and their son Cyril 1889

No. 16 Tite Street, Chelsea, the Wilde family home from 1884 to his arrest in 1895. Now it is renumbered as No. 34

Oscar Wilde´s second son Vyvyan Wilde 1891

Oscar Wilde with his wife Constance and their son Cyril 1892

The couple had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). After his wife's second pregnancy, however, Oscar Wilde was left physically repelled and his marriage had begun to unravel, according to American writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn. And it seemed that Wilde was ¨initiated into homosexual sex" by Robert Ross, a seventeen-year-old Canadian journalist sometime in 1886, the same year of the birth of his second son Vyvyan Wilde.

In mid-1887 Oscar Wilde became the editor of The Lady's World magazine, his name prominently appearing on the cover. He promptly renamed it The Woman's World and raised its tone, adding serious articles on parenting, culture, and politics, keeping discussions of fashion and arts. Two pieces of fiction were usually included, one to be read to children, the other for the ladies themselves. Wilde worked hard to solicit good contributions from his wide artistic acquaintance, but his vigor and excitement only lasted for two years before he left the magazine, this experience helped in his development as a writer and facilitated his ascent to fame, because as an editor Wilde was forced to learn to manipulate the literary marketplace on his own terms.

In July 1890, Oscar Wilde published the first version of his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The story begins with a man painting a picture of Gray. When Gray, who has a "face like ivory and rose leaves", sees his finished portrait, he breaks down. Distraught that his beauty will fade while the portrait stays beautiful, he inadvertently makes a Faustian bargain in which only the painted image grows old while he stays beautiful and young. For Wilde, the purpose of art would be to guide life as if beauty alone were its object. As Gray's portrait allows him to escape the corporeal ravages of his hedonism, Wilde sought to juxtapose the beauty he saw in art with daily life. Later it would be extensively revised to be published again as a book in 1891.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

-- Oscar Wilde,

1891 Paris and Salomé

In October 1891 Oscar Wilde went to Paris again as a respected writer and was received at the salons littéraires, including the famous mardis of Stéphane Mallarmé, a renowned symbolist poet of the time. One evening, after discussing depictions of Salome throughout history, he returned to his hotel and noticed a blank copybook lying on the desk, and it occurred to him to write in it what he had been saying. The result was a new play, Salomé, written rapidly and in French.

A tragedy, it tells the story of Salome, the stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who, to her stepfather's dismay but mother's delight, requests the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter as a reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. When Wilde returned to London just before Christmas the Paris Echo referred to him as "le great event" of the season. Rehearsals of the play, starring Sarah Bernhardt, began but the play was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, since it depicted biblical characters. Salome was published jointly in Paris and London in 1893, but was not performed until 1896 in Paris, during Wilde's later incarceration.

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

-- Oscar Wilde

1892-1895 Successful playwright and sexual abandon

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas

In mid-1891, Oscar Wilde was introduced to Lord Alfred Douglas, a handsome and spoilt undergraduate at Oxford who was known to his family and friends as "Bosie". An intimate friendship sprang up between Wilde and Douglas and by 1893 Wilde was infatuated with Douglas and they consorted together regularly in a tempestuous affair, with Wilde indulging Douglas's every whim: material, artistic or sexual. Douglas soon initiated Wilde into the Victorian underground of gay prostitution and Wilde was introduced to a series of young working-class male prostitutes from 1892 onwards who were uneducated and knew nothing of literature.

The time when Oscar Wilde was under Bosi´s bell was also when he achieved his highest glory as a playwright. All of his best comedies were written during this time period. The first one Lady Windermere's Fan was first performed on 20 February 1892 at St James's Theatre, packed with the cream of society. The play was enormously popular, touring the country for months, but largely trashed by conservative critics. It was followed by A Woman of No Importance in 1893, another Victorian comedy, revolving around the spectre of illegitimate births, mistaken identities and late revelations. Then An Ideal Husband was written in 1894. and premiered in January 1895.

His last play, The importance of Being Earnest was rapidly written in Wilde's artistic maturity in the same year as An Ideal Husband,
and was first performed on 14 February 1895, at St James's Theatre in London, Allan Aynesworth (who played Algernon) recalled to Hesketh Pearson, "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than [that] first night." The Importance of Being Earnest was widely thought as Oscar Wilde´s best work and remains his most popular play.

His Glory, however, was very short lived.

Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry who had confronted Wilde and Lord Alfred about the nature of their relationship several times went further by leaving his calling card in Wilde´s club with very insultaneous inscription just 4 days after the premier of Wilde´s play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Wilde, encouraged by Douglas and against the advice of his friends, initiated a private prosecution against Queensberry for libel, which turned out to be the begining of the end of his fortune and life. After several trials, Oscar Wilde was arrested for "gross indecency" on 6 April 1895, and incarcerated from 25 May 1895 to 18 May 1897

"The love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dare not speak its name", and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.¨

-- Oscar Wilde

1900: Death

After his release, Oscar Wilde went to France, took the name "Sebastian Melmoth", after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of Melmoth the Wanderer (a Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, Wilde's great-uncle), and spent his last three years impoverished and in exile.

On 30 November 1900 Oscar Wilde died of meningitis at the dingy Hôtel d'Alsace on rue des Beaux-Arts in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, France.