Oscar [Fingal O’Flahertie Wills] Wilde (1854-1900), was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, the second son of Sir William Wilde and Jane Francesca Wilde (“Speranza”), he was brought up in a mansion at 1 Merrion Square in an atmosphere of upper middle-class comfort, culture, and social scandal (due to his mother’s pronounced nationalist leanings and his father’s much-publicized affair with a female patient). Oscar followed his elder brother William to school at Portora at Enniskillen Co. Fermanagh, and proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1872. There his academic and literary talents were cultivated by the Anglo-Irish classicist and Kant scholar John Pentland Mahaffy, whose Social Life in Greece (1874), containing the first frank discussion of Greek homosexuality in English, appeared with a preface acknowledging Wilde’s help throughout. The two men were later to make a journey to Greece together in 1877. In his second college year Wilde won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek and, deciding to continue his studies at Oxford, matriculated at Magdalen with a classical scholarship in 1874. In 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry with “Ravenna’ and graduated with a double first, narrowly missing a college Fellowship in 1879.

At Oxford his chief mentor was Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) served as a gospel for the aesthetic movement. Strongly influenced by John Ruskin, and imbued with the thinking of Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman also, Wilde passed his Oxford years in an atmosphere where his intellectual and aesthetic interests and the conflicting claims of homo- and heterosexuality, freemasonry, and Catholicism, competed for his attention. In this climate he came to regard himself as putting into action Pater’s enthusiastic doctrine (‘to burn always with this hard gemlike flame’) while adopting an unconventional lifestyle that seemed to court social disgrace as a form of artistic martyrdom. Just such an intoxicating mixture of ecstasy and abasement characterizes his first book, Poems (1881), which though stylistically saturated with the mood of fin de siecle aestheticism hints already at the themes of homosexuality, individualism, and republican indifference to authority that were to suffuse all of his later works in varying proportions.

In 1879 Wilde set up in London as a self-styled “Professor of Aesthetics’ intent on a crusade to civilize the Philistine English through lectures and essays on the reform of English dress and on house-decoration, but also by the example of his own deportment. So considerable was the impact of his self-promotion that he was engaged to undertake a lengthy lecture tour of North America during 1882. His well-advertised itinerary was planned to cross paths with the company touring Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience , an operatic satire on the aesthetic movement, to the financial benefit of both. In his main lecture, “The English Renaissance in Art’, Wilde articulated the principles of the movement. A visit to San Francisco provided an opportunity to eulogize “Speranza’ among “The Irish Poets of “48’, and to compare his love for the Irish patriotic heroes to “the reverence of a Catholic child [for] the saints of the calendar’. Although Wilde camped up his public image considerably in this period (‘I have nothing to declare but my genius’), it was also a time when he consolidated the ideas which were to underpin the critique of late Victorian social and political conventions in his best satirical writings, soon to follow.

Returning from America, he settled down to the career of a man of letters and - while actively seeking appointment as a Schools Inspector - contributed a substantial body of reviews, articles, and stories to magazines and journals such as The Dramatic Review in 1885-86, The Pall Mall Gazette in 1885-90, and The Court and Society Review in 1887. For eighteen months he edited The Woman’s World (in 1887-1889), soliciting contributions from society ladies including his mother and his wife Constance Lloyd, a Dubliner whom he had married in 1884 and with whom he had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, born in 1885 and 1886. Together they made their Chelsea home at 16 Tite St. into the “House Beautiful’ with the help of artist friends such as James McNeill Whistler. Wilde’s unsatisfactory Russian melodrama Vera, or the Nihilists was produced in New York in 1883 and flopped immediately. His next play, The Duchess of Padua , did not find a taker until 1891, though written in 1882/3. His literary fortunes only began to rise in 1890 with the appearance of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Magazine, and this was followed by the publication of his collected essays and dialogues (including “The Decay of Lying’, “The Critic as Artist’, and “The Truth of Masks’) under the title of Intentions in 1891.

From 1886 Wilde had been having sexual relationships with men, beginning with Robert Ross, a Cambridge undergraduate who was to remain a faithful friend and ultimately to become his literary executor. In 1891 he met Lord Alfred Douglas, a petulant and beautiful young man sixteen years his junior, who temporarily displaced Ross as his lover. In their company Wilde ventured with increasing recklessness into the London world of boy-prostitution. At the same time, his writing began to deal more explicitly with homosexual themes - notably with the suggestion that paedophilia had inspired the sonnets of Shakespeare, in “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1889), an essay which did not however attract suspicion about his own proclivities. Wilde’s liberationist outlook was further developed in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), an aesthete’s version of the Marxist gospel in which he predicted that the utopia sought in vain by the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance, would be available to all as the “new individualism’ or “new Hellenism’ after a revolution against the capitalist institutions of property and marriage.

In 1891 and 1892, besides publishing Dorian Gray in book-form, Wilde issued Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other stories (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1892), both volumes of tales for a more adult audience than The Happy Prince (1888), which had originated in his children’s nursery. In 1891 he also wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan , inaugurating the drama of epigrammatic dandyism and moral paradox, on which his lasting fame is based. The performance of this play in the following year greatly increased his notoriety but also provided him the considerable income from the theatre which he was to enjoy for the remaining four years of his freedom.

Thereafter Wilde concentrated on three matters: the perpetuation of his stage success with A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest (both produced in 1895); a life of self-indulgence in London, Paris, Monte Carlo, and at the English and French resorts, principally in company with Douglas; and a series of melodramatic works of a quasi-religious nature which include notably his decadent play Salomé (in French 1893; in English 1894), as well as A Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane , but also “Constance’, which appeared in 1900 as Mr. and Mrs. Daventry over the name of Frank Harris, to whom in desperate straits he had sold it. In all his writings of the 1890s, Wilde was preoccupied with emotional and psychic themes that seem to reflect childhood anxieties: parents who have lost their children, children who have lost their parents, people who are not what they seem; the inevitability of tragedy; the inherent difference between “good women’ and aberrant men; puritanism, philanthropy, and hypocrisy; and the artist’s impetus towards self-discovery with sin and guilt as the unavoidable concomitant of experience.

In 1895, as Wilde was enjoying the success of The Importance of Being Earnest , he allowed himself to be lured into instigating an action for criminal libel against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who had objected strenuously to their relationship and had left a card in the Albemarle Club inscribed “To Oscar Wilde posing somdomite [sic]’. Forced to abandon the prosecution under cross-examination by Edward Carson, Wilde in turn was charged with gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1886), convicted by jury on 25 May 1895, and sentenced to two years penal servitude with hard labour. Though his life in the 1890s - a decade which he claimed to have “invented’ - had been flagrantly unconventional, the “sexual insanity’ to which he confessed after his imprisonment had been successfully camouflaged by his artistic persona until his denunciation by Lord Queensberry. The plays for which he was most applauded at the height of his career were those in which he most relentlessly mocked the morals and behaviour of the English upper classes.

Towards the end of his imprisonment at Reading, Wilde wrote an account of his relationship with Alfred Douglas in the form of a self-exculpatory letter addressed to him, and first published by Ross in abridged form as De Profundis (1905). After his release in 1897, Wilde immediately left England and, bankrupt and homeless, drifted aimlessly around France and Italy, sometimes with Douglas, sometimes with Ross, using the pseudonym “Sebastian Melmoth’. Writing nothing other than “The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, he indulged heavily in drink and sex. Wilde died at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris on 30 November, 1900, most likely of meningitis, and was buried in the cemetery of Bagneux. Later his body was reinterred at Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris under a large monument by Jacob Epstein.

A dramatist in the tradition of the Anglo-Irish comedy of manners, where his predecessors were Congreve, Farquhar, and R. B. Sheridan, Wilde’s literary influence has been pervasive, while the outrageous temper of his life and the irreverance of his writing have inspired sexual and social revolutionaries in the twentieth century. Wilde’s Works were edited by Robert Ross (1908; rep. 1969), his Letters by Rupert Hart-Davis (1962), his critical writings by Richard Ellmann (1969), and his shorter fiction by Ian Murray (1979). A bibliography of his writings has been compiled by Stuart Mason (new ed. 1967). Dramatic performances based on his life and art include Michael MacLiammoir, The Importance of Being Oscar (1963), and Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar (1989). Besides memories of Wilde in books by W. B. Yeats, Katharine Tynan, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and André Gide, accounts of him by contemporaries and near-contemporaries include those of Arthur Ransome (1912) and Frank Harris (1918), Arthur Symons (1930), and Alfred Douglas (1914, 1945) - the second-named containing a letter on Wilde from G. B. Shaw. Vyvyan Holland gives a personal account of family life before and after the scandal in Son of Oscar Wilde (1954).

See also Anne Clerk Amor, Mrs. Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance (1983). The standard biography is by Richard Ellmann (1987). See also Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (1946); St. John Ervine, Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal (1951); Philippe Julian, Oscar Wilde (1969); Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (1970); Christopher Nassaar, In the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde (1974); H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (1976); Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (1977); Katherine Worth, Oscar Wilde (1983); Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde and Irishness (1993); and Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (1994).

“The Critic as Artist(1890), an essay by Oscar Wilde in two parts. The first is in the form of a dialogue in which Wilde builds on aesthetic theories adopted from Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, developing the paradoxical position that criticism is actually the more creative art. In the second part he writes of criticism as a means of enhancing “the collective life of the race’ by promotion self-realisation. The essay was first published in The Nineteenth Century and then printed with other pieces in Intentions (1891).

Vera, or the Nihilists (1880) Oscar Wilde’s first play, produced in New York by Marie Prescott. The title-character is a Siberian peasant who leads a conspiracy to assassinate the Tsar and becomes the lover of the Tsarevitch, secretly one of their number. The republican nationalism of Vera owes much to Lady Wilde while its frequent secret mottoes are borrowed from freemasonry that Wilde dabbled in.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde’s only novel, first issued in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, it gives a melodramatic account of a beautiful youth who keeps his good looks while his portrait changes to reflect its subject’s every vice and profligacy. Encouraged to live purely for sensation by the amoralist Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian misuses Sibyl Vane, who kills herself, and later murders Basil Hallward, the painter of the portrait. When he tries to destroy the malignant painting, he himself dies of the stab wound he inflicts on it. The novel is thematically related to R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and the decadent style of writing is modelled on J. K. Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884). While ostensibly preaching self-control, the text consistently undermines sympathy for Dorian’s victims by heartless epigrams; and though the crimes are hardly specified, the atmosphere of evil is treated with some relish. Following Wilde’s first meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas it was reissued in book-form with six extra chapters and extensive rewriting incorporating allusions to Douglas’s beauty, as well as a preface which contains some of Wilde’s best-known epigrams. 

The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), an aphoristic essay by Oscar Wilde, first published in Fortnightly Review, it combines his preoccupation with aestheticism with a thesis about the utopian form of society which he sees emerging when capitalist property relations and bourgeois democracy are overthrown. Owing more to anarchism than to the Marx, it treats existing institutions as symbols only. While endorsing Thoreau’s prescription of civil disobedience, Wilde defines the new individualism as a disturbing and disintegrating force, representing Jesus as an exemplary figure for the artist, a theme resumed in “De Profundis’.

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), a melodrama set in London high-society and Oscar Wilde’s first theatrical success. The lady of the title is a young woman with ideals, in contrast to Mrs. Erlynne who left society after a liaison of which Lady Windermere had been the fruit, and who now attempts to blackmail Lord Windermere with the secret of his wife’s true parentage. In the crisis, however, Mrs. Erlynne stands in for Lady Windermere in Lord Darlington’s rooms and is detected in that compromising situation by Lord Windermere. She pretends to have stolen the fan that he discovers there and recognizes as his wife’s. In deciding to keep her daughter’s secret she is doubtless succombing to sentimentality but avers only that the admission of maternity would age her. The insubstantial plot is a vehicle for Wilde’s delight in moral paradox.

Salomé (published in French, 1893; in English, 1894), a one-act tragedy by Oscar Wilde; written in French and translated by Alfred Douglas. A superior English translation by Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland appeared in 1957. When the play was refused a licence due to a prohibition on the theatrical use of biblical subjects, Wilde threatened to leave England, and the ensuing publication of the text with Beardsley’s homo-erotic drawings caused an outcry. It was first performed in Paris during Wilde’s imprisonment in 1896, and in England privately in 1905. W. B. Yeats found the language of the speeches empty, sluggish and pretentious, but the baroque set-pieces in which Herod first cajoles and then pleads with Salomé, who is sensually and spiritually obsessed with Iokanaan (John the Baptist), inspired Richard Strauss to write his opera. Salomé received its first public performance at the opening of the Gate Theatre in 1928, and was successfully revived there in 1988.

An Ideal Husband ( 1895), a comedy by Oscar Wilde in which a “good woman’ defends her marriage against the machinations of Mrs Cheveley, who is blackmailing her husband, Sir Robert Chiltern, over his past involvement with the shady financier Baron Arnheim. This melodramatic plot is enlivened by Wilde’s witticisms at the expense of conventional morality and, while Sir Robert propounds the theory that it requires strength and courage to yield to temptation, society is exposed as being riddled with hypocrisy and pretence. Lord Gorey is the chief vehicle of the Wildean flair for paradox which had become by this date the hallmark of his plays, as of his prose.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a play by Oscar Wilde, subtitled “a trivial comedy for serious people’. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, two young men with private incomes, both pretend to be called Ernest in order to secure the affections of Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew. The girls are first led to think they are engaged to the same man, and then that neither of them is really Ernest. The ensuing confusions are resolved when it is discovered that Jack was indeed so named before being mislaid in the cloakroom of a London station by Miss Prism, a forgetful governess, and then adopted by Cecily’s father. In spite of the farcical plot (which Wilde acknowledged), the play derives great force from a brilliant fabric of epigram and paradox which barely masks a more rebarbitative attitude towards the conventions of the Victorian social order. The dominant personality of the play is the sphinx-like Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s mother, who extols the mating habits of the upper classes.

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ , a prison poem written by Oscar Wilde in 1897-98, after his release and during his self-imposed exile in France and Italy. Partly narrating the execution of a murderer, the poem also relates Wilde’s own reaction to his prison experience (more explicitly stated in letters to The Daily Chronicle ). The ballad was published anonymously in 1898 over Wilde’s prison number, C 3 3. Its sympathetic attitude towards prisoners influenced Brendan Behan’s play The Quare Fellow. Lines from the ballad were used on Wilde’s monument in Père Lachaise cemetary in Paris: “his mourners will be outcast men,/And outcasts always mourn.’

“De Profundis’ (1905), the accepted title of a long letter written by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol in January-March of 1897, originally conceived as “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis’, and addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had the homosexual affair that led to his trial and imprisonment. It is a bitter attempt at self-justification, accusing Douglas of meanness of spirit and shallowness, and finally suggesting that he and his father, Lord Queensberry, had played out their game of mutual hatred using Wilde’s soul as a dice. Wilde meditates on the plight of prisoners, and their neglect by society on their release. He also dwells on spiritual questions, and acknowledges his own emotional and artistic self-deception. One of two typescript copies made by Robert Ross, to whom Wilde entrusted the letter, was published by him in severely abridged editions between 1905 and 1949, when Vyvyan Holland published the second typescript copy in full. The original, differing significantly from these copies, was finally printed by Rupert Hart-Davis in The Letters of Oscar Wilde (l962), using the manuscript that Ross had lodged in the British Museum under a fifty-year embargo in 1909.