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Biography:  Oscar Wilde

The letter writer was a young woman named Mary Travers who alleged that when she was a patient of Sir William, he had chloroformed and then raped her. Even though Speranza knew that her husband was capable of all sorts of sexual mischief – his extramarital affairs were no secret – she was infuriated by Travers’ campaign to wreck her husband’s reputation. Speranza wrote Travers’ father hoping that he would tell his daughter to quiet down about what Speranza called "unfounded allegations," but her plan backfired when Mary Travers found the letter. Travers insisted that there was nothing unfounded about her allegations, and sued Speranza for libel. From December 12 to 17, Travers’ case was heard in court, and the judge ruled in the young woman’s favor. Although the judge believed her story, he suspected that Travers was more willing than she said, so he awarded only a farthing’s damages. Still, Sir William’s reputation was damaged enough that the Wildes never completely recovered their good name.

A Brilliant Student

Though he was certainly aware of the details of the Mary Travers affair, young Oscar was proud of his father, and especially proud to be the son of a knight. Although Oscar had acquired his mother’s aristocratic affectations even as a boy, he didn’t stand out at Enniskillen, the private boarding school he attended. That changed when he matriculated at Dublin University’s Trinity College when he was 17. Within the first year, his teachers could see that he was a brilliant student of the Classics. Oscar could see it too, and a talent as rare as his should not be consigned to a provincial college, he thought. Oxford, a school that could confer the prestige he thought he deserved, seemed a better choice. In his third year at Dublin, he competed for a scholarship at Oxford’s Magdalen College and won.

Oscar arrived at Oxford in 1874 and quickly fell in with a new literary movement called aestheticism that was stirring controversy amongst the English literary set. The English aesthetic movement was calculated to shock the Victorian middle class by rejecting the popular notion that a work of literature should be a sort of sermon that serves some higher spiritual purpose. Walter Pater, a leader of the movement and one of Wilde’s favorite professors, replaced core Victorian middle class themes like authenticity, nature, and romance with artifice, sophisticated connoisseurship, and most subversively, individual pleasure. When Pater wrote that art exists to "give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake," he scandalized readers who expected their writers to produce sweet morality tales and their painters to reveal the timeless beauties of nature.

Wilde took to aestheticism with the enthusiasm of a new convert, but he saw that his teacher Pater was more talk than action. In spite of Pater’s disquisitions on beauty and pleasure, he looked like a doddering old proff and lived an austere life. Wilde resolved to become a more thoroughgoing aesthete than his teacher was. He would live a life devoted to beauty and pleasure, a life that was itself a work of art. He started with a makeover. At a time when men’s fashion favored dark suits and inconspicuous ties, Wilde covered his hands with flashy rings, wore a huge bow for a tie, and carried a cane for effect. As often as not, his ensemble included white pants with matching gloves, patent leather shoes, and a jacket accessorized with a contrasting hanky in the breast pocket. Pictures of the young Wilde look effete to the point of silliness today, and that’s just how he looked to his Oxford peers. Even though his outfits made him the object of jeers and insults, his new look succeeded in putting him at the center of attention, just where he wanted to be.

Wilde cultivated good taste by decorating his rooms lavishly, an unusual preoccupation for college students even then, but he found his pleasures where most other Oxford students did, with the local prostitutes. Sex with prostitutes was less stigmatized than it is today and many young men paid money for their pleasures, but some paid a higher price: syphilis. Wilde was one of the unlucky ones. Even though no effective treatment had been discovered, his doctors tried their best. They subjected him to repeated doses of mercury, which probably did the bacteria little harm but did turn his teeth black. Wilde was not a handsome fellow to begin with – he was 6’3" tall, flabby, with a face more oval than it ought to be – and now with black teeth, some found him physically repulsive, fancy clothes or not.

When Wilde contemplated his future, he imagined a life of leisure befitting a man of his exquisite tastes, but those hopes were dashed when his father died. The Wildes owned several homes and lived well, so Speranza and Oscar were sure that when Sir William’s estate was settled, they would be set for life. Instead, they found that the houses were mortgaged and his father had been supporting their aristocratic lifestyle with bank debt. When the accounting was done, so little was left that Speranza became financially dependent on her children.

In similar circumstances, many sons would have felt obligated to drop their dreams and pursue a practical career with better financial prospects than a life of letters, but not Oscar Wilde. When he was asked what his plans were after he graduated, he didn’t give a thought to practicalities. He answered: "I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious."

A Professional Aesthete

After graduation, Wilde settled into rooms on London's fashionable Tite Street, still living on what was left of his inheritance. To all appearances, he was a rich dandy who worked at nothing more than getting into London's A-List parties and publishing an occasional poem in a magazine, but his languorous persona masked a driving ambition to become a famous writer. The poems he published gathered little notice, but his outrageous affectations made him stand out in London's fashionable circles. Soon, he could count glamorous actresses like Sara Bernhardt and the up and coming Lillie Langtry among his friends, and he was telling the truth when he boasted that even the Prince of Wales - Lillie's sometime boyfriend - came to visit him on Tite Street.

Most writers who aspire to greatness start by writing and hope fame follows, but for Wilde celebrity came first, and it came from an unexpected quarter. Punch, an influential British literary magazine that specialized in satire, had published cartoons that poked fun at the London’s literary dandies for years. George Du Maurier, the cartoonist, used Punch to express his distaste for what he saw as effeminacy and superficiality among the aesthetes. In an 1879 piece entitled "Nincompoopiana," the protagonist, a dapper man with Wilde's body and the aesthetic painter Whistler's beard and monocle, holds forth on literature. "I considah the words of 'Little Bopeep' freshah, loveliah, and more subtile than anything Shelley evah wrote!" he exclaims. "How Supreme," the group around him agrees, in unison. Perched on a wall above the speaker, a sculpture labeled "Antinous," the name of the ancient emperor Hadrian’s youthful lover, hints that the sexual proclivities of the aesthetes are just as unnatural as their affectations. Soon, Du Maurier along with cartoonists at other magazines who followed his lead discarded the character's beard and made the clean-shaven Wilde the public emblem of the aesthetic movement before he had even published a book.

In spite of his public image as a man of leisure, Wilde was working hard on two projects in the early 1880s. The first was Vera, or the Nihilists, a play set in Old Russia. In 1880, he circulated copies among his friends, hoping for comment, but his friends were probably too polite to be honest. Vera ranks as Wilde’s worst play, and even though he was disappointed that plans for an 1881 production fell through, it was better for his reputation that his public didn’t see it. The second project was a little more successful. He had published at least 30 poems in English magazines, and in 1881 he published a collection of the ones he liked best along with some new, longer pieces. The reviews were mixed. Predictably, Punch hated the book, but the New York Times published a positive review that shamed English critics for dismissing "what is really best in their own country."

When the New York Times published its review, Wilde was virtually unknown in America, but again, satire boosted his career. This time it was a Gilbert and Sullivan play called Patience. The play, a comedy that lampooned the aesthetes, was enjoying a successful run in the U. S. Though none of Patience’s characters is an exact match for Wilde, several exhibit his signature passions for white lilies, blue china, and the color green. Patience’s producer could see that the play was provoking American curiosity about the English aesthetic movement, so he cabled Wilde, its most visible evangelist, to see if he would do a lecture tour. Wilde, now living on the last dribs of his inheritance, cabled back: "Yes, if offer good."

The offer was good enough. Wilde arrived in New York planning to civilize America in January 1882, and began a tour that took him not just to the big cities on the Eastern seaboard, but to tiny burgs like Augusta, Georgia and Peoria, Illinois, too. American press reports that sneered at his effeteness and outrageous appearance gave Wilde the sideshow appeal of a circus attraction, so he drew large audiences at first. After ten months on the road, though, American curiosity was sated and attendance dropped off.

Wilde ended his lecture tour in October, but spent November and December in New York’s Greenwich Village while he struggled to get a play produced on the American stage. In the end, he secured a contract for a New York run of Vera.

Failure, Marriage, then Success.

Wilde was back in London in January, 1883. His American trip had secured his reputation as a charming dilettante, but he wanted to be respected for his literary production. He was sure Vera would establish him as a literary genius, so when the play went into rehearsal in the summer, he sailed to New York to help. Opening night worried him because a few made catcalls during the last act, but he was still hopeful. Then the reviews came in. The New York Times called Vera "wearisome," the Herald called it "long-drawn dramatic rot," and audiences agreed. The play closed in a week.

Nine years elapsed before Wilde had the courage and the opportunity to stage another play, but Vera’s collapse didn’t deter him from a literary life. Back in London, he turned to freelance writing to make a living and earned a little as a lecturer on the merits of aestheticism. His reputation for witty conversation got him invited to London’s best parties and even though he wasn’t much to look at, his charm made him attractive to the women he met there. One of his fans, Constance Lloyd, caught his eye and the two began to court. Lloyd claimed that her Oscar was quite likeable when he shed his affectations, and though his friends thought her a little dim intellectually, Oscar lovingly described Constance as "a beautiful girl…, a grave, slight violet eyed Artemis" in a note to his friend Lilly Langtry.

Constance wore a wreath of myrtle leaves in her hair, and a dress designed by Oscar himself at their wedding in May, 1884, but it may have been Speranza who achieved the greatest aesthetic heights in her gray satin outfit, adorned as it was with a dramatic Ostrich plume. When the Wildes returned from a French honeymoon, they moved into a house Oscar had leased on the still fashionable Tite Street, a house that cost Oscar a stiff £ 5000 to decorate. They had been married a year when their first son, Cyril, was born; Vivyan, their second son, followed in 1886. Constance came from a well to do family, but Oscar’s spending habits meant that the monthly bills were a stretch, so she was relieved when he accepted a full time job editing a magazine in 1886. Circulation at The Woman’s World, a magazine for women of "sophistication and position," grew under Wilde’s direction, but magazine editing was hardly a job for a man who fancied himself a genius. Still, Wilde lasted for three years at his post, perhaps because he was finding satisfactions that had nothing to do with his job.

Like many writers, Wilde enjoyed a chorus of admiration from a group of acolytes that gathered around him. Young men with literary aspirations naturally sought his attention and advice, but one Oxford student, Robbie Ross, wanted more: he wanted to be Wilde’s lover. Ross’ overtures led to a passionate affair and though the two never fell in love, their relationship changed Wilde’s life. Affairs with other members of his coterie followed, and back at home, he and Constance agreed to forego sex, though she knew nothing of her husband’s new sexual inclinations. More important for his career, his initiation into homoeroticism provided grist for a novel he was working on, a book whose title character was named after one of his paramours.

Written by anyone else, The Picture of Dorian Gray would have been read as a warning against aestheticism, but Wilde probably gave the title character a bad end to confuse his critics. Dorian is a beautiful young man who attracts men and women alike. One day while Basil Hallward, a painter who is homoerotically enraptured with Dorian, paints his portrait, Dorian wishes that he might retain his beauty, and that his portrait should bear the marks of age in his stead. His wish is miraculously granted, and he lives a life devoted to beauty and pleasure at the expense of the men and women who are irresistibly attracted to him. As Dorian ages, he realizes that the portrait bears not just the marks of age, but reveals his narcissistic soul in hideous detail and he hides it under cover in a locked room. At the book’s climax, Dorian shows the portrait to Hallward, but he can’t stand to have his ugly interior exposed, so he kills the painter. The book ends when Dorian slashes the portrait in a fit of rage and then dies because the painting no longer represents, but has become his wicked soul.

The book is better than it sounds. When it appeared in 1890, the year after Wilde left The Woman’s World, critics praised its ingenious plot, though the novels’ blatant homoerotic elements offended them. Finally, Wilde had produced something that scored the critical approval he felt entitled to and the critics’ praise bolstered his confidence enough that he returned to playwriting, the craft he liked best. In 1891, he traveled to France to finish work on a play he called Lady Windemere’s Fan, and when he arrived in Paris, he was received warmly by the literati who had once ignored him. One magazine declared him the event of the season at Parisian literary salons, but in spite of his busy social calendar, he did manage to finish his play.

When he returned to England in 1892, rehearsals were starting for a London run of Lady Windemere’s Fan. The play opened to a full house in February, but this time the boos that had greeted Vera were replaced with applause. When calls of Author! Author! rang out, Wilde appeared on stage a cigarette scandalously dangling from his velvet-gloved hand. "I congratulate you on the great success of your performance," he told his audience, "which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself." Reviewers thought less of the play than Wilde did, but audiences loved it.

Renters

Wilde had many fans, but none would prove more important than a cute blond Oxford student named Lord Alfred Douglas, Bosie to his friends. Bosie had read Dorian Gray soon after it came out, and he was so awe-struck that he read it eight more times. He knew that his Oxford chum Lionel Johnson was a friend of the author, so he asked Johnson to arrange a meeting. He did, and Wilde invited the two for tea in July 1891. No one knows if Wilde’s jaw dropped when he

Bosie and Oscar         photo credits

met Bosie, but it probably did.  He was so attracted by Bosie’s slim frame and boyish good looks that when they parted, he gave Bosie an autographed copy of his novel along with an offer to tutor him for his Oxford exams.

According to Wilde’s version of the story, nothing much happened between the two until the next year, but in Bosie’s version, Wilde hounded him relentlessly for sex. No matter who started it, the two agreed that their affair blossomed when Wilde responded to a plea for help in the spring of 1892. Bosie was at his wits’ end because an indiscreet love letter he had written to another young man had fallen into a blackmailer’s hands. At 38, Wilde was an experienced man of the world and he knew just what to do. He had his lawyer pay the blackmailer £100 and Bosie was rescued.

When the affair began, Wilde didn’t know how involved Bosie was in London’s demimonde. One of Bosie’s friends, Alfred Taylor, had introduced him to several teenaged male prostitutes, called renters in English slang, and he was a regular customer. The knowledge that many of his renters had police records should have put him off, but instead it made them seem more exotic and alluring to a boy who had a sheltered aristocratic upbringing. The relationship between Bosie and Wilde was intensely romantic, but neither pretended that it was exclusive, so Bosie felt no compunction about introducing his lover to the wilder side of his life after they got to know each other. Before long, Wilde was enjoying the renters’ company almost as much as Bosie was.

In the eyes of their renters, Bosie and Wilde were easy marks with money in their pockets, but the two were naïve and mistook the renters’ feigned friendship for the real thing. Bosie was especially reckless when he gave Alfred Wood, one of his renters, a suit of his old clothes out of fondness. He had forgotten that several letters from Wilde were stuffed in the pockets. The letters were potentially incriminating because Wilde wrote about passionate kisses and undying love, quite enough to justify an investigation on a charge of Gross Indecency. When Wood discovered the letters, he plotted blackmail. Wilde managed to get out of the scrape with a one-time payment of £30, this time without his lawyer’s help. Wood assured him that the matter was resolved.

Bosie and Wilde didn’t try to conceal their relationship, so rumors about them began to swirl around London, but even worse, a copy of one of the letters Wood had seen found its way into the hands of the Marquess of Queensbury, Bosie’s father. Queensbury had probably heard the rumors, but when he saw Wilde’s note, he erupted. He shot a letter off to his son demanding that Bosie end his relationship with Wilde. Bosie hated his father to begin with, but when he read Queensbury’s letter, his hatred reached parricidal heights. What right did this petty provincial Lord, so boorish that his wife left him, so odd that he was shunned by his Scottish peers, to tell Bosie what to do? An exchange of letters followed and the language escalated. The Marquess, an accomplished boxer, threatened to thrash his son. Bosie responded with a promise to defend himself with a pistol.

Lord Queensbury had no way to know that Bosie had corrupted Wilde and not the other way round, and he was convinced that the playwright had led his son astray. When he learned that The Importance of Being Earnest, a new Wilde play, was scheduled to open in January, 1895, it seemed the perfect venue for a scheme Queensbury concocted to discredit the playwright. He planned to disrupt the performance by hurling rotten vegetables at the stage and creating a disruption that would inspire a press investigation and lead to a career ending scandal for Wilde. Luckily for Wilde, the theater manager was warned in advance and hired guards to foil the plot. When the Marquess arrived, he and his vegetables were turned away at the door. Opening night of this, Wilde’s most important play, was a sellout success in spite of Queensbury.

The Trials

Wilde was angry at Queensbury, but he had no plan to retaliate until Bosie manipulated him into fighting the decisive battle in his long-standing war with his father. Bosie proposed a plan that he had been thinking about for a long time, that Wilde sue Queensbury for libel. Queensbury had accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite" in an angry note he had sent the playwright, and in Bosie’s opinion that was enough to support a charge against his father. It was an absurd idea. Queensbury was a wealthy man who could afford to pay for a libel judgment many times over, and if his allegations were proven in court, Wilde could even be exposed to criminal prosecution. Bosie’s rage blinded him to the risks, but Wilde wisely nixed the plan. Wilde’s refusal made Bosie even more determined. He launched endless tirades and threw tantrums like a spoiled child until he wore Wilde down. In a staggering misjudgment, and against the advice of his friends, Wilde finally caved in.

When he was charged with libel in March, 1895, Queensbury seized his opportunity to turn Bosie and Wilde’s scheme against them. He hired Edward Carson, a respected lawyer, along with a private detective who discovered that Bosie’s friend Alfred Taylor had procured renters for them. The investigator chased down every lead, and ended up with a list of more than 12 young men and the dates of their encounters with Wilde. The playwright had heard rumors that Carson had discovered some of his missteps, but when he walked into the courtroom on the first day of the trial in April, 1895, he was in a chipper mood. He had no idea how strong Carson’s case was.

Carson began his arguments with an indictment of Dorian Gray as an immoral book, but quickly turned to the damning evidence the private investigator had uncovered. The trial’s climax came when, during Wilde’s cross-examination, Carson asked him about his relationship with one of Bosie’s servants. Carson asked if he had kissed the boy. Without thinking, Wilde answered "Oh dear, no. He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly…" Carson moved in for the kill. He asked what difference it made that the boy was ugly. Wilde sputtered. He knew that his own words implied that had the boy been good looking, he would have been happy to kiss him. After several false starts, Wilde finally answered that he had been flippant and unnerved, but everyone in the packed courtroom could see that he had exposed his own sodomitical inclinations. The trial lasted only a little while beyond the disastrous cross-examination before Wilde’s own lawyer told him that their case was hopeless. Wilde agreed, and his lawyer moved to drop the charges. With just a moment’s deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict: Queensbury was not guilty of libel.

Carson’s evidence was so compelling that Wilde could have been arrested on the spot, but the police didn’t have an arrest warrant ready, so the playwright was allowed to leave. He retreated to London’s Cadogan hotel where friends like Robbie Ross gathered around him. They urged him to flee to France where the Napoleonic Code would protect him from prosecution, but he was so overwrought that he couldn’t decide what to do. He was sitting in his room trying to calm his nerves with one wine spritzer after another when the last train that could take him to the Dover ferry left without him. Just after six o’clock, the police knocked on the door. The inspector in charge told the visibly tipsy Wilde that he was under arrest on a charge of Gross Indecency.

On April 26, 1895, after nearly a month in jail, Wilde appeared for the first day of his trial in a somber mood. Carson presented his list of witnesses again, and this time some of Wilde’s renters testified that they had committed "indecencies" with the playwright. The only strategy Wilde’s lawyer, Sir Edward Clark, could pursue was to discredit the witnesses. He caught one of the boys in a lie on the stand, and showed that several others were disreputable because of their criminal histories. The jury was not completely convinced, but Clark created enough doubt that they deadlocked. Since the first trial ended without a decision, a second trial was scheduled. The prosecutor checked his witnesses’ backgrounds more carefully before the second criminal trial, and easily won guilty verdicts on eight of nine counts of Gross Indecency. On May 24, the judge addressed the courtroom and complained that the law did not allow a severe enough sentence for such heinous crimes. With that, he sentenced Wilde to the maximum: two years at hard labor.

Prison

Wilde was taken to Pentonville prison where he was confined alone in a small whitewashed cell. During the first few nights, he couldn’t sleep on the wood boards that passed for a bed and at meal times he declined the stinking gruel he was offered. Only a little time passed before exhaustion cured his insomnia and he ate whatever the guards brought. Cramps from food poisoning followed his first prison meal, and like the other prisoners at Pentonville, he was cursed with chronic diarrhea. The cells lacked plumbing, so the once fastidious Wilde was forced to live with a pot of his own excrement that he could only empty when the guards permitted.

Regardless of his health, prison officials forced him to meet a daily work quota. At first he had to walk a treadmill six hours a day, but later he was assigned to work at oakum picking in his cell. A traditional workhouse task, oakum picking required that he untwist old rope into its constituent fibers, often until his fingers bled. Conditions improved a little in November 1895, when he was transferred to another prison, Reading Gaol. He still had to work, but now at bookbinding and gardening instead of oakum picking, and he was allowed pen and paper, a privilege denied him at Pentonville. Finally allowed to express himself, Wilde wrote de Profundis, a book length letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that indicted Bosie as the cause of his downfall.

What little news Wilde heard from outside was bad. Just after he was incarcerated, he learned that a sudden illness had killed Speranza. Public humiliation followed in November when he was hauled before a judge and declared officially bankrupt. Then he learned that Constance had changed her family surname to Holland to protect Cyril and Vivyan from their father’s reputation. Wilde had every reason to commit suicide and he thought of it often, but somehow he survived until his release on May 19, 1897.

Exile

When Wilde left prison, he realized that even though satire and bad press had boosted his career in the past, this time things had gone too far. His old literary friends would avoid him because his ruined reputation was as contagious as head lice. They feared contamination if they so much as sat next to him. London promised nothing but a friendless death, so Wilde finally sailed to the French exile his friends had urged on him two years before.

When the playwright got off the boat in Dieppe, a seaside resort town, Robbie Ross and a friend met him on the pier. Robbie thought Wilde looked good since he had slimmed down, and his conversation was still sprinkled with the sparkling wit Ross remembered. In truth, Wilde’s health was wrecked by two years of hard labor and contaminated food, and his apparent conviviality concealed a depressed mood. More than anything, he wanted to repair his shattered relationships with Constance and Bosie, but he wasn’t sure he could.

Soon after his arrival in Dieppe, Wilde wrote both Bosie and Constance, hoping for reconciliation. Even though he felt that Bosie was the cause of his fall, Wilde still loved him and the letters the two exchanged reignited their old friendship. In the fall of 1897, they arranged to meet in Naples and rent shared accommodations. Once there, they took up where they had left off, chasing the Neapolitan fisher boys with as much enthusiasm as ever, but Bosie’s mother didn’t want her son ruined by Wilde’s reputation. She controlled the allowance Bosie depended on and she used it as a threat. In a letter, she gave Bosie a choice: stop seeing Wilde or lose his stipend. Bosie eventually acceded to her demand, but it wasn’t just financial considerations that made him do it. The ardor in the relationship was cooling on its own; Bosie and Wilde were growing bored with each other. The outside pressure only hastened an inevitable breakup.

Wilde tried hard to restore his friendship with Constance, too, and the letters they exchanged were promising at first. Constance sent pictures of the boys and Wilde wrote of what little news there was, but when he tried to arrange a meeting with his wife, she put him off. Wilde had hoped the two would be more than pen pals, that a friendship might be salvaged, but Constance wasn’t ready. In April 1898, the possibility of reunion ended when Constance died from an unsuccessful spinal operation.

The next year saw Wilde wandering from place to place, living on money he borrowed from his friends, anesthetizing himself with growing doses of wine and absinthe. Finally, in 1900, he settled in Paris, but a nagging ear infection that started in prison was growing worse. On October 11, doctors tried an operation to drain the accumulating pus, but it did no good. Alone and bedridden, Wilde wrote Robbie Ross in London and asked him for help. Ross traveled to Paris to stay with his old friend. At times, Wilde perked up and Ross hoped for recovery, but when the infection began to ravage his brain, he grew so sick that nurses had to be called in to attend him. Early in the morning on November 30, the night nurse woke Ross and told him the end was near. Ross saw blood and foam dribbling from Wilde’s mouth and he knew the nurse was right. A little after one o’clock in the afternoon, Ross felt Wilde’s pulse start to flutter. At 1:50 p.m. it stopped.

Sources, Notes and Further Reading

Photo Credits

"Wilde as a Young Dandy" is reproduced courtesy of the Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums.  Berlin.  The photo originally appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld, 1930, Geschlechtskunde auf Grunddreissingjährur Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeit, Stuttgart:  Julius Püttman, Verlagsbuchhandlung.

"Oscar and Bosie" appears courtesy of the Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums.  Berlin.  The photo originally appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld, 1930, Geschlechtskunde auf Grunddreissingjährur Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeit, Stuttgart:  Julius Püttman, Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Notes:

Avoid Libel Suits

The tale of Mary Travers' libel case is told in Ellman, 1988.

A Brilliant Student

The quotation from Walter Pater is cited in Denisoff, 1997.    The "I'll be a poet" quotation is from a citation in Hyde, 1975, p. 38.

A Professional Aesthete

Two of Punch's cartoons lampooning dandy-aesthetes are reproduced in Denisoff, 1998, one under the title "Nincompoopiana."  The quotation from the New York Times' review is from a citation in Hyde, 1975, p. 49.  Wilde's telegram to Richard D'Oyly Carte is quoted in Ellman, 1988, p. 152.

Failure, Marriage, then Success

The reviews of Vera are quoted in Hyde, 1975, p. 89.   Wilde's description of Constance as a "violet-eyed Artemis" is from a letter to Lilly Langtry, cited in Ellman, p. 246. 

No one knows the exact date on which Constance and Oscar agreed to give up sex.  Whether it preceded his relationship with Ross, or was a consequence of it, is unknown, though it seems likely that Wilde gave up Constance in favor of Robbie.

Wilde's speech on the opening night of Lady Windemere's Fan is quoted in Hyde, 1975, p. 137.  Queensbury's "to pose as a thing" letter is quoted in Hyde, 1975, p. 192.

The Trials

Wilde's testimony under cross-examination is cited in Hyde, 1975, p. 219.   For edited transcripts of the trials, see Hyde, 1956.

Sources and Further Reading:

Ellman, 1988, is long, but the book is more balanced, scholarly and thorough than Hyde's 1975 bio.  For an introduction to the aesthetic movement and bibliographic resources, see the articles on Walter Pater, Decadence, Aestheticism, and Nineteenth Century English Literature in Summers' Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.

Denisoff, Dennis, 1997.  "Pater, Walter." in Claude J. Summers, ed., 1997.  The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.  New York:   Owl.

Denisoff, Dennis, 1999.  "'Men of My Own Sex":   Genius, Sexuality, and George Du Maurier's Artists" in Richard Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Ellman, Richard, 1988.  Oscar Wilde.  New York:   Knopf.

Hyde, H. Montgomery, 1975.  Oscar Wilde.  New York:   Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hyde, H. Montgomery, ed., 1956.  The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.  New York:  University Books.

Summers, Claude J., 1995.  "Wilde, Oscar."  in Claude J. Summers, ed., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.   New York:  Owl.

Wilde, Oscar, 1990.  The Importance of Being Earnest.  Mineola, NY:  Dover Publications.

Wilde, Oscar, 1992.  The Picture of Dorian Gray.  New York:  The Modern Library.

Wilde, Oscar, 1996.  De Profundis.   Mineola, NY:  Dover Publications.

© 1999 Andrew Wikholm All Rights Reserved