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The play was initially well received by the audience, but when the critics wrote lukewarm reviews, attendance fell sharply and the play closed a week after it had opened. She happened to be visiting Dublin in when Wilde was lecturing at the Gaiety Theatre. They had preached to others for so long on the subject of design that people expected their home to set new standards.
The couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde became the sole literary signatory of George Bernard Shaw 's petition for a pardon of the anarchists arrested and later executed after the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in In , while at Oxford, Wilde met Robert Ross. Ross, who had read Wilde's poems before they met, seemed unrestrained by the Victorian prohibition against homosexuality.
By Richard Ellmann 's account, he was a precocious seventeen-year-old who "so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce Wilde". Wilde had a number of favourite haunts in London. Criticism over artistic matters in The Pall Mall Gazette provoked a letter of self-defence, and soon Wilde was a contributor to that and other journals during — Although Richard Ellmann has claimed that Wilde enjoyed reviewing, [ 91 ] Wilde's wife would tell friends that "Mr Wilde hates journalism".
His flair, having previously been put mainly into socialising, suited journalism and rapidly attracted notice. With his youth nearly over and a family to support, in mid Wilde became the editor of The Lady's World magazine, his name prominent on the cover. Two pieces of fiction were usually included, one to be read to children, the other for adult readers.
Wilde worked hard to solicit good contributions from his wide artistic acquaintance, including those of Lady Wilde and his wife, Constance, while his own "Literary and Other Notes" were themselves popular and amusing. The initial vigour and excitement which he brought to the job began to fade as administration, commuting and office life became tedious.
Whilst Wilde the journalist supplied articles under the guidance of his editors, Wilde the editor was forced to learn to manipulate the literary marketplace on his own terms.
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During the s, Wilde was a close friend of the artist James McNeill Whistler and they dined together on many occasions. At one of these dinners, Whistler produced a bon mot that Wilde found particularly witty, Wilde exclaimed that he wished that he had said it. Whistler retorted "You will, Oscar, you will. The article alleged that Wilde had a habit of passing off other people's witticisms as his own — especially Whistler's.
Wilde considered Vivian's article to be a scurrilous betrayal, and it directly caused the broken friendship between Wilde and Whistler. London theatre director Luther Munday recounted some of Wilde's typical quips: Wilde said of Whistler that "he had no enemies but was intensely disliked by his friends", of Hall Caine that "he wrote at the top of his voice", of Rudyard Kipling that "he revealed life by splendid flashes of vulgarity", of Henry James that "he wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty", and of Marion Crawford that "he immolated himself on the altar of local colour".
Wilde had been regularly writing fairy stories for magazines. The only evidence for this is two supposed puns within the sonnets themselves. The anonymous narrator is at first sceptical, then believing, and finally flirtatious with the reader: he concludes that "there is really a great deal to be said of the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Though containing nothing but "special pleading" — it would not, he says "be possible to build an airier castle in Spain than this of the imaginary William Hughes" — we continue listening nonetheless to be charmed by the telling. Wilde, having tired of journalism, had been busy setting out his aesthetic ideas more fully in a series of longer prose pieces which were published in the major literary-intellectual journals of the day.
Having always excelled as a wit and raconteur, he often composed by assembling phrases, bons mots and witticisms into a longer, cohesive work.
Wilde was concerned about the effect of moralising on art; he believed in art's redemptive, developmental powers: "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
He wrote "Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.
It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment". At the same time, he stressed that the government most amenable to artists was no government at all. Wilde envisioned a society where mechanisation has freed human effort from the burden of necessity, effort which can instead be expended on artistic creation. George Orwell summarised, "In effect, the world will be populated by artists, each striving after perfection in the way that seems best to him.
This point of view did not align him with the Fabians , intellectual socialists who advocated using state apparatus to change social conditions, nor did it endear him to the monied classes whom he had previously entertained. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Wilde considered including this pamphlet and " The Portrait of Mr. The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as the lead story in the July edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine , along with five others. 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. Reviewers immediately criticised the novel's decadence and homosexual allusions; the Daily Chronicle for example, called it "unclean", "poisonous", and "heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction".
That is all. Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have postulated numerous possible sources of the story, a search Jershua McCormack argues is futile because Wilde "has tapped a root of Western folklore so deep and ubiquitous that the story has escaped its origins and returned to the oral tradition". The census records the Wildes' residence at 16 Tite Street , [ ] where Oscar lived with his wife Constance and two sons.
Not content with being better known than ever in London, though, he returned to Paris in October , this time as a respected writer. He had continued his interest in the theatre and now, after finding his voice in prose, his thoughts turned again to the dramatic form as the biblical iconography of Salome filled his mind. 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. Wilde, who had first set out to irritate Victorian society with his dress and talking points, then to outrage it with Dorian Gray , his novel of vice hidden beneath art, finally found a way to critique society on its own terms.
Lady Windermere's Fan was first performed on 20 February at St James's Theatre, packed with the cream of society. On the surface a witty comedy, there is subtle subversion underneath: "it concludes with collusive concealment rather than collective disclosure". The play was enormously popular, touring the country for months, but largely trashed by conservative critics.
His first hit play was followed by A Woman of No Importance in , another Victorian comedy, revolving around the spectre of illegitimate births, mistaken identities and late revelations. Peter Raby said these essentially English plays were well-pitched: "Wilde, with one eye on the dramatic genius of Ibsen, and the other on the commercial competition in London's West End , targeted his audience with adroit precision".
An intimate friendship sprang up between Wilde and Douglas and by Wilde was infatuated with Douglas and they consorted together regularly in a tempestuous affair. If Wilde was relatively indiscreet, even flamboyant, in the way he acted, Douglas was reckless in public. Douglas soon initiated Wilde into the Victorian underground of gay prostitution, and Wilde was introduced to a series of young working-class male prostitutes rent boys from onwards by Alfred Taylor.
These infrequent rendezvous usually took the same form: Wilde would meet the boy, offer him gifts, dine him privately and then take him to a hotel room. Unlike Wilde's idealised relations with Ross, John Gray , and Douglas, all of whom remained part of his aesthetic circle, these consorts were uneducated and knew nothing of literature. Soon his public and private lives had become sharply divided; in De Profundis he wrote to Douglas that "It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement I did not know that when they were to strike at me it was to be at another's piping and at another's pay.
Douglas and some Oxford friends founded a journal, The Chameleon , to which Wilde "sent a page of paradoxes originally destined for the Saturday Review ". Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry , was known for his outspoken atheism, brutish manner and creation of the modern rules of boxing.
In June , he called on Wilde at 16 Tite Street, without an appointment, and clarified his stance: "I do not say that you are it, but you look it, and pose at it, which is just as bad. And if I catch you and my son again in any public restaurant I will thrash you" to which Wilde responded: "I don't know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight".
He did not wish to bear Queensberry's insults, but he knew that confronting him could lead to disaster were his liaisons disclosed publicly. Wilde's final play again returns to the theme of switched identities: the play's two protagonists engage in "bunburying" the maintenance of alternative personas in the town and country which allows them to escape Victorian social mores.
Mostly set in drawing rooms and almost completely lacking in action or violence, Earnest lacks the self-conscious decadence found in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. The play, now considered Wilde's masterpiece , was rapidly written in Wilde's artistic maturity in late Both author and producer assiduously revised, prepared and rehearsed every line, scene and setting in the months before the premiere, creating a carefully constructed representation of late-Victorian society, yet simultaneously mocking it.
Premieres at St James's seemed like "brilliant parties", and the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest was no exception. 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. Wells wrote, "More humorous dealing with theatrical conventions it would be difficult to imagine.
Mr Oscar Wilde has decorated a humour that is Gilbertian with innumerable spangles of that wit that is all his own". Wilde's professional success was mirrored by an escalation in his feud with Queensberry. Queensberry had planned to insult Wilde publicly by throwing a bouquet of rotting vegetables onto the stage; Wilde was tipped off and had Queensberry barred from entering the theatre.
On 18 February , the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at Wilde's club, the Albemarle , inscribed: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [ sic ]". Queensberry was arrested for criminal libel , a charge carrying a possible sentence of up to two years in prison. Under the Libel Act , Queensberry could avoid conviction for libel only by demonstrating that his accusation was in fact true, and furthermore that there was some "public benefit" to having made the accusation openly.
The scene was witnessed by George Bernard Shaw who recalled it to Arthur Ransome a day or so before Ransome's trial for libelling Douglas in To Ransome it confirmed what he had said in his book on Wilde: that Douglas's rivalry for Wilde with Robbie Ross and his arguments with his father had resulted in Wilde's public disaster, as Wilde wrote in De Profundis.
Douglas lost his case. A team of private detectives had directed Queensberry's lawyers, led by Edward Carson QC , to the world of the Victorian underground. Wilde's association with blackmailers and male prostitutes, cross-dressers and homosexual brothels was recorded, and various persons involved were interviewed, some being coerced to appear as witnesses since they too were accomplices to the crimes of which Wilde was accused.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey in central London on 3 April before Justice Richard Henn Collins , a fellow Dubliner, amid scenes of near hysteria both in the press and the public galleries. The extent of the evidence massed against Wilde forced him to declare meekly, "I am the prosecutor in this case". He characterised the first as a "prose sonnet" and admitted that the "poetical language" might seem strange to the court but claimed its intent was innocent.
He claimed to regard the letters as works of art rather than something of which to be ashamed. Carson, who was also a Dubliner who had attended Trinity College Dublin , at the same time as Wilde, cross-examined Wilde on how he perceived the moral content of his works. Wilde replied with characteristic wit and flippancy, claiming that works of art are not capable of being moral or immoral but only well or poorly made, and that only "brutes and illiterates", whose views on art "are incalculably stupid", would make such judgements about art.
Carson, a leading barrister, diverged from the normal practice of asking closed questions. Carson pressed Wilde on each topic from every angle, squeezing out nuances of meaning from Wilde's answers, removing them from their aesthetic context and portraying Wilde as evasive and decadent. While Wilde won the most laughs, Carson scored the most legal points.
Oscar wilde books: Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde[a] (16 October – 30 November ) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early s.
Carson then moved to the factual evidence and questioned Wilde about his friendships with lower-class males, some of whom were as young as sixteen when Wilde had met them. Carson repeatedly pointed out the unusual nature of these relationships and insinuated that the men were prostitutes. Wilde replied that he did not believe in social barriers, and simply enjoyed the society of young men.
Then Carson asked Wilde directly whether he had ever kissed a certain servant boy, Wilde responded, "Oh, dear no. He was a particularly plain boy — unfortunately ugly — I pitied him for it. Wilde hesitated, then for the first time became flustered: "You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me; and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously".
In his opening speech for the defence, Carson announced that he had located several male prostitutes who were to testify that they had had sex with Wilde. On the advice of his lawyers, Wilde dropped the prosecution. Queensberry was found not guilty, as the court declared that his accusation that Wilde was "posing as a Somdomite [ sic ]" was justified, "true in substance and in fact".
After Wilde left the court, a warrant for his arrest was applied for on charges of sodomy and gross indecency.
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Both men advised Wilde to go at once to Dover and try to get a boat to France; his mother advised him to stay and fight. Wilde, lapsing into inaction, could only say, "The train has gone. It's too late. Events moved quickly and his prosecution opened on 26 April , before Mr Justice Charles. Wilde pleaded not guilty. He had already begged Douglas to leave London for Paris, but Douglas complained bitterly, even wanting to give evidence; he was pressed to go and soon fled to the Hotel du Monde.
Fearing persecution, Ross and many others also left the United Kingdom during this time. Under cross-examination, Wilde was at first hesitant, then spoke eloquently:. Charles Gill prosecuting : What is " the love that dare not speak its name "? Wilde: "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 elder and a younger man, when the elder 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.
Loud applause, mingled with some hisses.
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This response was counter-productive in a legal sense, for it only served to reinforce the charges of homosexual behaviour. The trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. Wilde's counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, was finally able to get a magistrate to allow Wilde and his friends to post bail. The final trial was presided over by Mr Justice Wills.
On 25 May , Wilde and Alfred Taylor were convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour. May I say nothing, my Lord? Although it is widely believed that the charges were related to Wilde's consensual activities, The Trials of Oscar Wilde , which includes an original transcript of the libel trial which came to light in , suggests that he took advantage of teenagers.
But even if his activities had led only to exposure and not to arrest, he would have been savagely pilloried in the media. Wilde was 39 when he seduced Alphonse Conway, and Conway was an inexperienced boy of 16". Another teenager who said he had engaged in sex acts with Wilde, Walter Grainger, who was 16 at the time, said Wilde had threatened him with "very serious trouble" if he told anyone about their relationship.
When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal.
It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else — the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver — would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy.
To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. Having been convicted in "one of the first celebrity trials", Wilde was incarcerated from 25 May to 18 May He first entered Newgate Prison in London for processing, then was moved to Pentonville Prison , where the "hard labour" to which he had been sentenced consisted of many hours of walking a treadmill and picking oakum separating the fibres in scraps of old navy ropes , [ ] and where prisoners were allowed to read only the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress.
A few months later he was moved to Wandsworth Prison in London. Inmates there also followed the regimen of "hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed", which wore harshly on Wilde's delicate health. His right ear drum was ruptured in the fall, an injury that later contributed to his death. Richard B. About five months after Wilde arrived at Reading Gaol, Charles Thomas Wooldridge , a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, was brought to Reading to await his trial for murdering his wife on 29 March ; on 17 June Wooldridge was sentenced to death and returned to Reading for his execution, which took place on Tuesday, 7 July — the first hanging at Reading in 18 years.
He had an affair with a younger man named Lord Alfred Douglas. This affair ruined his life. Wilde was born in Ireland in He went to school at Trinity College in Dublin.
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Then he went to the Magdalen College part of Oxford University. In London, he worked as a journalist for four years. He was very well known in his time. This was because he dressed well and was very good at conversation. He was also well known because he wrote a novel called The Picture of Dorian Gray. He also wrote plays. He wrote it in French while living in Paris.
No one could perform it in England, because there were characters from the Bible in it. This did not discourage him. He then wrote four comedic plays in the early s. He was one of the most successful playwrights of the time. His masterpiece was the play called The Importance of Being Earnest. When he was very famous, he sued his lover's father for libel lying about someone in print.
There were many trials. In the end, the court sentenced Wilde to two years of work in Reading Gaol jail. The crime was gross indecency sexual contact with other men. After he went to prison, his wife went to Switzerland with their children.
She changed their last names to Holland. While he was in prison, he wrote a long letter called De Profundis. Queensbury was arrested and so hired a private detective to find evidence that Wilde was involved in homosexual behaviour with young men. At the trial, Wilde defended himself with his usual wit and flippancy, but the counsel for the Marquees William Carson Esq.
Realising he had miscalculated, Wilde dropped his libel case but became liable for the financial cost which left him bankrupt. The trial moved to a quick conclusion and Wilde was found guilty. It is no understatement to say this experience deeply shocked and affected the previously ebullient Wilde. In some respects he never really recovered; on his release, he left for Paris where he lived in comparative anonymity.
However, he retained his wit and continued to write, heavily influenced by his chastening experiences. I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went With sails of silver by. The Life of Wilde was turbulent and volatile — never short of incident.
It reflected his own inner paradoxes and revolutionary views. In some ways, he was both a saint and sinner at the same time. Rightly or wrongly Wilde is remembered as much for his life as his writings. Before his conviction found guilty for homosexuality in , the scandal was essentially private. Wilde believed in the criminal mentality.
Wilde stressed that criminal tendency became criminal act. Dorian Gray was published in book form in The novel was a celebration of youth. Dorian, in a gesture typical of Wilde, is parentless. He does not age, and he is a criminal. Like all of Wilde's work, the novel was a popular success. His only book of formal criticism, Intentions , restated many of the views that Dorian Gray had emphasized, and it points toward his later plays and stories.
Intentions emphasized the importance of criticism in an age that Wilde believed was uncritical. For him, criticism was an independent branch of literature, and its function was important. Between and Wilde was an active dramatist writer of plays , writing what he identified as "trivial [unimportant] comedies for serious people. On March 2, , Wilde initiated a suit for criminal libel a statement that damages someone's reputation against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had objected to Wilde's friendship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas.
When his suit failed in April, countercharges followed. After a spectacular court action, Wilde was convicted of homosexual misconduct and sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor. Prison transformed Wilde's experience as extremely as had his introduction to homosexuality.