Who was Oscar Wilde and why was he put in prison?

Oscar Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, the second son of Sir William Wilde, a prominent oculist, and Jane Francesca Wilde, a poet and Irish nationalist who published under the name Speranza. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and then Magdalen College Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and developed the aesthetic philosophy that would define his public persona.

He was the most brilliant conversationalist of his era, the most celebrated playwright in London in the early 1890s, and the man who gave the English language the aphorism as a literary form. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1895 and died in a Paris hotel room five years later at the age of forty-six, describing himself as dying beyond his means.

What did he write?#

Wilde's output was relatively small but almost entirely first-rate. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is the only novel -- a Gothic philosophical fiction about a man who sells his moral development for permanent youth, and whose portrait ages and corrupts in his place. For what the portrait specifically represents, the full symbolic reading of Dorian Gray's portrait covers the critical landscape.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is his masterpiece for the stage -- a comedy in which every character is performing a role, every identity is invented, and the social conventions of the Victorian upper class are treated as theatre rather than reality. It opened on 14 February 1895. It was his greatest triumph and his last.

An Ideal Husband (1895) opened weeks earlier and is the more politically serious play -- a study of political corruption, blackmail, and the impossibility of the moral perfection that public life demands.

His fairy tales -- particularly "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant" -- are among the best short fiction he wrote, and his essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891) is one of the most elegantly argued political essays in the English language.

Why was he put in prison?#

Wilde had been in a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, since 1891. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry -- who had established the rules of boxing and who was a man of spectacular aggression -- left a card at Wilde's club in February 1895 inscribed "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite" [sic].

Wilde, against the advice of almost everyone who knew him, sued Queensberry for criminal libel. The case collapsed when Queensberry's lawyers produced evidence of Wilde's relationships with working-class young men. Wilde dropped the prosecution, was arrested the same afternoon, and was charged under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which criminalised "gross indecency" between men.

His first trial resulted in a hung jury. His second trial, in May 1895, resulted in conviction and a sentence of two years' hard labour at the maximum penalty. He served the full sentence, primarily at Reading Gaol.

What happened after prison?#

The imprisonment destroyed him financially, physically, and socially. His possessions were auctioned. His wife Constance, who had changed her surname and those of their two sons to Holland, refused him access to the boys. He was declared bankrupt.

He was released in May 1897. He spent most of his remaining time in France and Italy, writing The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) -- his finest poem, based on the experience of watching a fellow prisoner hanged -- and De Profundis, the long letter to Douglas written from prison that was published posthumously.

He died in Paris on 30 November 1900, of cerebral meningitis likely related to an ear infection, in a hotel where he was living on credit. He was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.

Why does his work still matter?#

Wilde's work matters because it identified something that the Victorian era was uniquely unwilling to acknowledge: that identity is performed, that sincerity is itself a performance, and that the gap between what people are and what they present to the world is the fundamental subject of social life. He made this argument as comedy and as tragedy, sometimes in the same work.

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Further reading#

For the best Oscar Wilde works to read on Foxing, the full reading guide to his works covers every major title.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, and An Ideal Husband are all free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, Knopf, 1988 -- the definitive biography
• Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, HarperCollins, 2003
• The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, 2000