Oscar Wilde

⁠A Short History of Ancient Rome⁠ - the debut book from the Noiser Network is out now! Discover the epic rise and fall of Rome like never before. Pick up your copy now at your local bookstore or visit ⁠⁠noiser.com/books⁠⁠ to learn more. Oscar Wilde is remembered as one of the greatest Victorian writers, with diverse works including comedies, morality tales for children, biblical dramas and even a gothic novel. Wilde was also the originator of any number of witty quotes that can still be found adorning everything from posters, to mugs, to t-shirts. Alongside his literary renown, Wilde is revered as a martyr for LGBTQ+ rights. How did a young man from Dublin become such a famous author in England and beyond? What inspired Wilde's plays and poems? And how did he fall foul of Victorian moral sensibilities – and yet still come to enjoy the legacy he does today? This is a Short History Of Oscar Wilde. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Sos Eltis, Professor of English and Theatre Studies at Oxford University, and a fellow at Brasenose College. Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow | Produced by Kate Simants | Assistant Producer: Nicole Edmunds | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Get every episode of Short History Of… a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  It is a bitter January day in the year 1897.

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  In Reading, in the south of England, a harsh wind is blowing.

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  Though it is barely 3:00 p.m., the sky is already beginning to darken.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Despite the unforgiving conditions, a middle-aged man, clad only in a rough woolen jacket and trousers, is tending to a garden.

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  He digs up withered plants with a small trowel, pulling them out from the roots to make way for the new crops that will be planted in the spring.

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  It is hard going. The ground is almost frozen solid.

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  Pausing to catch his breath, he glances up at the tall wall surrounding him on all sides and the securely locked gate to the garden.

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  Because he is not in his own home, but in the grounds of Reading Jail.

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  Despite the cold, though, he is as content with this work as he can be under the circumstances. After all, every minute he spends digging in the frigid soil is a minute away from his cell.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Too soon, the solace of his work is brought to a close by the mournful tolling of the prison bell, and the warder standing guard gestures him to stand up. The inmate is marched back to the main prison, an imposing red brick edifice built just a few decades before.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  In silence, the two men head towards Ward C and make their way up to the third floor.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  The warder unlocks the third cell along, and the prisoner steps into the narrow room.

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  Most of the space is taken up by a low, uncomfortable bed, and the only natural light comes from a tiny window set high in the far wall.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Before re-locking the cell, the warder surreptitiously reaches into his pocket. He hands the prisoner a note written on cheap paper before quickly shutting and locking the heavy door.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Alone again, the man turns his attention to the note. It is a literary inquiry. The warder wants to know whether Charles Dickens is still considered a great writer. This is not a typical interaction between a guard and a prisoner, but then prisoner C dot three dot three is not a typical prisoner.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  He is the famous author Oscar Wilde, and his occasional conversations with this particular prison guard have become one of the few bright spots in his otherwise dark existence.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Wilde sits down at the small table in his cell. Picking up a pencil, he dashes off a quick answer about Dickens on the other side of the note before taking up the fresh piece of paper that has been left for him.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Then he closes his eyes for a moment. He is only permitted one sheet of paper a day, so each time he sits down to continue his work from the previous night, he must first remember where he left off. At last, he opens his eyes, places the tip of the pencil on the sheet, and begins.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Oscar Wilde is remembered as one of the greatest late Victorian writers and a leading light of 19th century London’s cultural scene. The author of diverse works including comedies, morality tales for children, biblical dramas, and even a Gothic novel. Wilde was also the originator of any number of witty quotes that can still be found adorning everything from posters to mugs to t-shirts.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Alongside his literary renown, Wilde is revered as a martyr for LGBTQ+ rights, famously convicted for so-called “acts of gross indecency” with other men. The two years of imprisonment he endured epitomise these dual legacies: his literary genius and his personal life, shaped by what his long-term lover called “the love that dare not speak its name”.

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  So how did a young man from Dublin become such a famous author in England and beyond? What inspired Wilde’s plays and poems? And how did he fall foul of Victorian moral sensibilities and yet still come to enjoy the legacy he does today?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  I’m John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of Oscar Wilde.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  By 1854, Ireland’s devastating Great Famine has only just ended, and the country remains under British rule. But though many are still destitute, it is into a household of privilege that Oscar, Fingal, O’Fleary, Wills, Wilde is born in Dublin in October. His parents, William and Jane, are prominent in the cultural and intellectual life of the city.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Soss Eltis is a professor of English and theatre studies at Oxford University and a fellow at Bray's Nose College.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  They were Anglo-Irish ascendancies, so sort of from Protestant roots in Ireland. As they moved up in the world, they moved to Merion Square in Dublin. His father was William Wilde, who was an eye surgeon. He was knighted for services to ophthalmology and was actually an eye surgeon to Queen Victoria. And his mother was Jane Wilde, who was an Irish nationalist poet, as well as a collector of fairy stories, as indeed was his father. So Jane Wilde wrote under the pen name Sparanza.

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  Jane and William Wilde are devoted to their three children, Willie, Oscar and Isola. The striking, six-foot-tall Jane is not only a writer but a political firebrand, campaigning for women's rights and calling for an armed insurrection against British rule. It is from her that Oscar inherits both his height and passion for literature.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Oscar enjoys a comfortable, upper-middle-class childhood. At the house in Merion Square, the family are attended by six live-in servants. When Oscar is young, his father builds a country retreat on a large plot of land in County Mayo. But though the family enjoy their summers there, shooting, fishing and examining local archaeology, the profligate spending on real estate will come back to haunt them. Back in the capital, his parents hold regular soirees at which the young Oscar mingles with the leading lights of Dublin's cultural scene.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  There are accounts of him sitting on the leading Irish playwright at the time, Dion Bosco's knee, at some of these literary soirees. So he was certainly mixing with different people.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  In later life, he will write that the best education he had was listening to the knowledgeable, entertaining conversations that took place around the dinner table at Merion Square. Both Jane and William Wilde are smart, sociable and fond of causing a sensation. Perhaps a young Oscar learns to be unconventional from his parents, too. He also receives a first-class formal education. After they outgrow their governesses, he and his older brother Willie are sent away to school in January 1864.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  He went to Portora School in Enniskillen. He was clearly a speed reader, almost had a photographic memory, which definitely helps when it comes to academic performance. So he won classical prizes at school and so on. But, you know, if you read the very few letters there are from school, they're mostly about "send more jam" or something. They're not the kind of letters of some extraordinary child prodigy in that sense.

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  It is in his last year at school that Oscar begins to shine academically, especially in classics. He also continues to read widely, devouring the works of Dickens, Austen, Poe, and Shakespeare, among others.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Some dark clouds mar this otherwise sunny childhood. When Oscar is 12, his beloved younger sister Isabella suddenly dies following a short illness. The family are understandably devastated by the death of their only daughter. In his grief, Oscar turns to writing poetry as a means to express his emotions. Though sadly, none of this juvenilia survives, it is the first time he turns to writing to get him through hard times, but it won't be the last.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  In October 1871, he joins Trinity College Dublin, just a few days shy of his 17th birthday. He studies classics, and though he is close to his professors and excels in class, he does not get on with his classmates, many of whom seem to prefer sex and drinking to intellectual pursuits.

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  In 1874, after three outstanding years, he wins Trinity's highest prize in Greek, the Barclay Gold Medal, together with a scholarship to study classics and ancient history at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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  In the 1870s, as today, Magdalen is an especially pretty college, bounded on one side by Deer Park and on the other by the tranquil River Chirwell.

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  In this new environment, Wilde reinvents himself, cropping his hair short and buying a new wardrobe of checked suits and jaunty hats.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  He becomes known for his sharp conversational skills, and in a departure from his attitude towards his Trinity classmates, throws himself into the social life of the college, perhaps too much so. He is often fined for breaking college rules, failing to attend lectures and going out drinking. In 1877, he takes a formative trip to Greece and misses several weeks of classes, after which the college authorities suspend him for a term.

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  Yet amidst the parties and holidays, Wilde is a dedicated student.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  He was, I think, quite clearly one of those really annoying undergraduates, who is very clever and makes a pose of never being seen to work, so that everybody can think you're thoroughly brilliant. So he did work reasonably hard, but mostly, I think, in secret, so that he could then make it all appear spontaneous, which was something that he cultivated through his later career, the idea of this kind of insuccion brilliance that's the product of extraordinary intelligence rather than hard work.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  More than the curriculum at Magdalen, Wilde's curiosity is stimulated by the wider intellectual currents at Oxford. In particular, he becomes influenced by what is known as the aesthetic, cultural and artistic movement.

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  I think the easiest way of defining or getting to the core of the aesthetic movement is the doctrine of art for art's sake. And that ultimately means art being valued not for its use, not for utilitarianism, not for, you know, how it relaxes you or how it brings communities together or something like that, and importantly, not for market value. And not for how it accords with public tastes, but rather art for beauty, for style, for design, for its intrinsic qualities and how they make the individual feel. But there are other aspects of aestheticism that are important to Wilde.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  And another kind of line comes through Ruskin and into William Morris. And that's the valuing of art as something, in a sense, ordinary, something that surrounds us and that isn't just for the elite, but for everybody. And it's going back to the idea of the craftsman and the designer. So the idea that we should surround ourselves with beautiful objects. It's not about acquiring a huge number of machine-made valuables and coating a mantelpiece in them, but rather selecting often very ordinary objects, chairs or glasses or whatever else, the ordinary paraphernalia of life, and that that too should be beautiful.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  But his university years are marked by tragedy when in 1876, his father William dies. In the aftermath, the family learn of his extensive debt. Wilde's response, however, is to return to Oxford, ignoring his now precarious financial situation.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  In the summer of 1878, he secures a double first from Maudlin, meaning that he has achieved the highest degree classification in both his first and final year exams. He also enjoys an early taste of literary success, winning the prestigious Newmarket Prize for his poem Ravenna, written after his first visit to the Italian city the year before.

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• 16:10Speaker 02

  After graduation, Wilde moves to London, chasing success, fame, and perhaps even notoriety. He wants, in his own words, "to eat the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world." Having just sold some houses left to him by his father, he has a small amount of money. But once this runs out, he will live largely on credit.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Not letting his uncertain financial future dampen his spirits, at twenty-four, Wilde is witty and charming, with a great sense of humour, although he has, by this point, lost his Irish accent. After his mother moves to London, despite her earlier political opposition to its government's control of Ireland, he begins to meet authors and artists at the literary salons she holds. Women in particular love him, and soon he is being invited to all manner of dinners, balls and tea parties. He becomes close to a succession of beautiful and famous women, including the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Langtry, mistress of the Prince of Wales. Wilde also begins to court the press.

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  Satirical cartoons have long parodied the aesthetic movement, caricaturing its followers as effeminate young men who live only for art and beauty. Wilde sets out to embody this stereotype.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Very early on, he is committed to becoming famous. He's interested in being a public figure, he's interested in being a name. If you're looking at Wilde's relation to aestheticism and the aesthetic movement, it was hugely convenient. So Wilde, with a lot of his sayings about, you know, "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china", and he gets a cello coat designed, so a coat where the back is in the shape of a cello, and wears this, you know, gets that specially custom-made for him, and then goes to kind of gatherings in London in it, the fact that he's there kind of opening exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery and so on.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  He uses the aesthetic movement to place himself as a kind of public figure as part of it, and that really helps advertise him.

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  He becomes a figure of gentle ridicule in magazines such as Punch, and his witticisms are widely reported and then repeated around London. He is even parodied by the masters of Victorian comic opera Gilbert and Sullivan in their Operetta: Patience, a satire of the aesthetic movement and its followers. It's thanks to his reputation as the living embodiment of aestheticism that in 1881 he receives an exciting offer from the theatre impresario Richard Doily Carte.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  When Doily Cart send patients on tour in America, they ask a young Oscar Wilde to accompany the tour and in effect go ahead of it lecturing on aesthetics and in effect advertising the movement that the opera then parodies. Wilde agreed to go on the tour of America with Doily Cart. Quite simply, at that point, he's looking for employment. And one of the things people don't know, some of the other things he was looking for, he applied to be a school inspector. He offered all sorts of translations of classical texts and so on. He applied for a fellowship and failed to get one. So Doily Cart offered plenty of money,

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  as well as status on the American tour, so he says yes.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  On Christmas Eve, 1881, after a farewell dinner with his closest friends, Oscar Wilde set sail from Liverpool on a ship bound for New York, hoping to find fame and riches across the sea.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Wilde spends nearly a year lecturing in North America. To begin with, he is not always well received.

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  At the beginning of the tour, he's not particularly successful at all. He tends to talk in a monotone. I mean, his subject matter, the English Renaissance of art, isn't necessarily of huge interest to the gathered audiences that come to hear him. And they can't necessarily hear him very well either. He talks for over an hour in this kind of rather flat monotone according to responses. And he ends up being parodied in the press to a large extent.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  He soon develops a less abstract talk, speaking on the decorative arts. It is a roaring success, and new dates are quickly added, some in surprising locations.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  It is the evening of the 14th of April, 1882, in Leadville, Colorado, a silver mining town nestled in the Rocky Mountains. A young miner sits in the vast 800-seat opera house built by the town's founder. He is surrounded on all sides by men like him, red-shirted and blond-bearded, with hands calloused from hard work.

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  The man lecturing them on art history in an upper-class English accent could not be more dissimilar. Dressed as he is, in immaculate black evening dress and a snowy silk cravat. As he begins to talk about Renaissance Italian architecture, someone from behind the miner shouts out that over here, they live in wooden houses. The crowd laughs. The speaker, Mr. Oscar Wilde, seems unperturbed by the heckle. And as his talk progresses, he wins the crowd over. Several times, the young miner even finds himself laughing at his humorous, incisive remarks.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  As Wilde finishes, the room breaks into a loud round of applause. Before the miner can leave, he is grabbed by a friend. The owner of the mine wants them to show Wilde the sights of Leadville. They head over to meet him, shaking hands and introducing themselves. Then the group head out into the night. But if their visitor was expecting high-class establishments, he was much mistaken. They lurch from bar to bordello, showing Wilde the best of what their town has to offer, an experience he seems to thoroughly enjoy.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  By the time it is fully dark, the group are staggering drunk down the main street. A few metres ahead of them, yellow light spills onto the street as the door to Pap Wyman's saloon swings open. The young miner grimaces as the familiar sound of the out-of-tune piano drifts out. But Wilde is entranced. He reads the sign above the door. "Please don't shoot the pianist, he is doing his best", and doubles over laughing, clutching the arm of his newfound friend for support.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Eventually, the group reach a four-wheeled cart hitched to two oxen parked at the end of the road. They climb aboard, several of them holding torches to light the dark road ahead.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  As they are swallowed up by the night, Wilde is forced to grip onto the sides of his seat. Soon, they reach their destination: the Matchless Mine.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  The young miner leads Wilde into the small wooden shack that has been built over the mineshaft. He rummages through clothing hanging at the far end of the room before handing a protective suit to the Irishman who struggles to put it on over his dandyish black evening wear.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  When he's finally ready, the miner takes him over to the large metal bucket that hangs over the mineshaft, attached to a winch and pulley mechanism, and helps his guest to climb in. He is a tall man, so it's a tight fit, but once he's installed, the writer crouches down and holds tightly onto the rope, his knuckles white. Then, visibly pale in the wan light cast by the torches, he is lowered into the yawning abyss.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  All in all, Wilde gives a total of 140 lectures in 130 places, covering over 15,000 miles. He speaks in major cities to audiences in the hundreds and sometimes thousands, as well as visiting much smaller and unassuming venues like that offered in Leadville, Colorado.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  That year, he becomes one of the most photographed people in America. Many of these images come to define not only how the public at the time see Wilde, but shape how we imagine him to this day.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Some of those famous photographs of Wilde, they're taken by Napoleon Serroni, who's one of the leading photographers in America at that time. And one set of them where he's in this great romantic sweeping cloak with a big floppy hat. There's another set where he's wearing his beloved large coat, and there are others where he's wearing the kind of knee breeches and silk stockings and looking sort of plaintive and dreamy. And there's a sense in which he's trying out different images there. And those become the images that are sort of attached to Wilde for, in fact, the next over a century.

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• 26:34Speaker 02

  When he arrives back in England in early 1883, he is a true transatlantic celebrity. Upon his return, he embarks on a UK lecture tour, regaling audiences with his impressions of the United States. But getting his literary career off the ground proves less straightforward. Though he'd published a volume of poems before he left for America, it was poorly reviewed. And he can't seem to get the two plays he now writes staged. When, in 1883, he finally has a dramatic work produced in New York, Vera or The Nihilists, a romantic drama about Russian revolutionaries. It is a resounding failure.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Though his professional life is suffering, the year proves luckier for Wild on the romantic front. He reestablishes his connection with a young woman whom he had first met in London a couple of years earlier.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Wilde met Constance Lloyd, who was the daughter of a barrister. Very intelligent woman. She writes in her own right. She publishes a collection of stories based on stories that her grandmother told her. She's a supporter of dress reform. More comfortable and less constricting and more practical dress for women and so on. At the same time as being beautiful dress. And it does seem to be a love match. I mean, Wilde before that was engaged to Florence Balcom, who then broke off the match to Wilde and married Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, which is another interesting kind of fork in the road of what might have happened.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Wilde proposes to Constance on the 25th of November. She immediately writes a letter to her brother, describing herself as perfectly and insanely happy to be engaged.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  When the pair are married the next spring, the bride's outfit features a variety of ancient Greek motifs, including a saffron-coloured veil and a myrtle wreath in her hair.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  After a Parisian honeymoon, the newlyweds settle in London in a house in Tight Street. They soon have two sons, Cyril, born in June 1885, and Vivian, who follows 18 months later. Although Constance has a reasonable income from her grandfather, neither of the pair are sensible with money, and financial precarity will be a constant theme in their marriage.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  In order to support his young family, Wilde writes book reviews and in 1887 is made the editor of the magazine Woman's World. Under his guidance, the magazine modernises and starts to publish literary reviews, serialised stories, travel accounts and pieces on various social issues.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  He also begins to write and publish his own essays, as well as collections of short fiction.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  He's writing short stories through the early 1880s into the later 1880s. They're probably commercially his biggest success before his plays. So The Happy Prince and Other Tales is the only one of his publications that sells out its print run and gets reprinted and carries on doing so. So those short stories are very popular. And he starts by the end of the 1880s, by sort of 1889, he's publishing these wonderful dialogues. So The Critic as Artist and The Decay of Lying, which are written in dialogue form with a kind of provocateur and a straight man in conversation. He also writes personally my favorite of his essays,

• 30:11Speaker 03

  which is The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which is a wonderful provocative, it's not so much propounding socialism as anarchism. In some ways, the idea that you cannot govern. And it's a superb manifesto for individualism and in many ways for modernism, for the freedom of the artist to reinvent forms and use art for their own self-expression.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  By now, Wilde has become a member of London's literary establishment with a growing body of work and a unique, authorial voice. But it's not long after he's settled down with Constance that he has his first gay relationship.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Tracing Wilde's same-sex relationships is difficult because it was illegal and so on. There's Robert Ross, who becomes a lifelong friend of Wilde's and stands with him and by him all the way through everything. He claims to have taken Wilde's sort of homosexual virginity in effect. He says he seduced Wilde. So that's around 1886. And he then has clearly some affairs, very close friendships, with the poet and writer John Gray, with Robert Ross, with, you know, various other people. He's then beginning to move in kind of gay circles.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Wilde is discovering his sexuality in a climate hostile to same-sex desire. Only a year or so before he meets Robbie, a law was passed making any sexual act between two men a criminal offence, punishable with two years imprisonment and hard labour.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Previously, only the act of sodomy had been illegal and was difficult to prosecute. But under the new legal regime, any sexual contact between two men, or even attempts to initiate intimacy, is criminalised. All of Wilde's same-sex relationships and encounters are thus conducted under the shadow of this legal persecution.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yet Wilde bravely begins to introduce homoerotic themes into his work. In 1889, he writes a short story, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., about the beautiful young boy to whom Shakespeare supposedly dedicated his sonnets. And a year later, he publishes the first version of his Gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. It tells the story of a handsome aristocrat who decides to commit himself to debauchery. While the eponymous Dorian stays forever young, his portrait shows the weight of his sins.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  As soon as it is out in the world, the novel attracts controversy.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  I think Dorian Gray of his writings is the one that creates the greatest furore in all sorts of ways. Because the narrative so closely follows Dorian, because there isn't really... There's no narrative voice saying, "And then Dorian did another terrible thing, but don't worry, he will pay for it." The beauty of the prose in which the novel's written kind of asks you, the reader, to take delight in exactly what Dorian's taking delight in. So the critics dislike of the novel, disapprove of the novel, is rooted in two things. One is this absence of a moral voice. They accuse the novel of kind of wallowing in the crimes of Dorian.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  And the other aspect is the worship of the painter Basil Hallward for Dorian's beauty. And there are various reviews that give kind of coded references to the homoeroticism subtext of homosexual desire that's within the novel.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Some shops refuse to stock the magazine in which the story is published. And yet Dorian Gray becomes a sensation. Soon Wilde produces a new extended edition and a response to his critics.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  He publishes separately a preface to Dorian Gray, which in some ways goes right back to aestheticism and so on. So it's a wonderful set of, you know, there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well or badly written, that is all. So there's a sense in which you can almost see the publication of Dorian Gray as a kind of conversation between Wilde and the critics about what is art? What's the role of morality in art? What does morality mean within it? What is a moral book? Is it a book that has a moral voice to it? Is it a book that has a moral, as in, you know, there's a kind of the good end happily, the bad unhappily? That is what fiction means, as Smith Prison says. Or is it a book that has a moral effect? And you never know what the effect of anything is going to be.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Oscar Wilde's attempts to question the purpose of art and satire the moral assumptions of his day continue into the 1890s as he begins to write the first of a series of modern comedies. He also meets the man who will come to define the rest of his life, for good and ill, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bozey.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  So Lord Alfred Douglas was the third son of the Marquess of Queensbury. The Marquess of Queensbury, of course, being the source of the Queensbury Rules for Boxing, about not hitting below the belt and all the rest of it. And Lord Alfred Douglas goes to Maudlin College. He co-edits a volume called The Spirit Lamp. And also The Chameleon is another kind of magazine he's involved with. And he writes a poem called The Two Loves, about the love that dare not speak its name. And he's very overt about homosexuality in a way that is very, very close to the acceptable edge of what you could maybe get away with. And he has a lot of protection in a way that Wilde doesn't.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Theirs is an intense, obsessive and turbulent love. They are also not discreet. Douglas is seen in Wilde's hotel room on at least one occasion by a servant. Constance seems to know something of the nature of their relationship and implores her husband to come home when he installs himself and Bosie at the Savoy Hotel for a month. Despite her pleas, within a short while, Bosie has drawn Wilde into the underground world of male sex work.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Douglas indulges in and seems to delight in much, much riskier behaviour, in much more sort of public flouting of norms of behaviour, who has him consorting with rent boys, teenage boys, he's paying for sex. And also, it's at that point that Wilde spends more and more time away from the family home, and there's a sense of a kind of loneliness, I think, for Constance.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  When he is not distracted by his lover, Wilde produces some of his best work as a playwright. Lady Windermere's Fan opens in February 1892 and goes on to have a ten-month run. It is followed in 1893 by A Woman of No Importance, and two years later by both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. All four plays are incredibly popular with audiences, though the critical response is far from glowing.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  What Wilde does with Lady Windermere's Fan and then with the other society comedies that follow is he takes very, very familiar, well-established, conventional theatrical forms of the day, but then does them slightly differently. And he does them so well and so beautifully and so wittily that they're a huge success, but they also leave a lot of critics uneasy and a lot of audiences. So Lady Windermere's Fan ends with secrets between husband and wife. An Ideal Husband ends with a politician who has sold a cabinet secret for money and was ready to do so again entering The cabinet, you know, the heart of British government. In the case of The Importance of Being Earnest,

• 38:13Speaker 03

  you have, you know, people who invent fictional lives and personas and identities and engagements and all the rest of it. You know, the young people in that play, all of them are lying through their teeth. All of them are having these kind of fantasy lives. And at the end of the play, they're rewarded by all the bits that they want to be true coming true.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  There will be no such happy ending for Wilde.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  At the height of his professional success, his relationship with Alfred Douglas begins to attract unwanted attention. Most troublingly, from Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, an eccentric politician and atheist.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  From 1894, Queensbury begins to scheme to end his son's relationship with Wilde. When Bosie refuses to end their affair, Queensbury cuts him off, then starts frequenting restaurants where the pair are known to dine, hoping to administer a beating to his son's partner. He even hires a private detective to see what can be dug up about Wilde's private life.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Soon, he is making his displeasure public.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  The situation comes to a head in February 1895, when Queensbury plans to disrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest. He is prevented from doing so when the manager cancels his ticket. But, as Wilde will soon discover, he is not a man who is easily thwarted.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It is the fourteenth of February 1895, and London is being battered by a heavy snowstorm. A thick layer of white blankets the streets, and snow continues to fall from the inky sky, fat flakes swirling in the breeze.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Outside the St. James's Theatre, an usher holds open a heavy door as a carriage pulls up outside.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  The driver hands out a woman, wrapped in a thick cloak, who quickly hurries up the steps of the establishment. She is followed by a man in smart evening dress. As he reaches the door, he knocks off the snow that has collected on the crown of his top hat, before nodding at the usher and following his companion into the cheery warmth and light of the lobby.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Letting the door fall closed, the usher rubs his hands together to get the feeling back into them. He looks longingly through the glass pane in the door at his colleagues standing in the warmth of the foyer, directing the large crowd of fashionably dressed guests to their seats. And it is a large crowd. No one wants to miss the premiere of Mr. Wilde's new play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  From deep within the building, the usher hears the sound of a gong being struck. Five minutes until curtain up. He waits a few moments more, then heads inside to warm up.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  A muffled round of applause filters through from the auditorium. He can hear laughter. The play has begun.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Suddenly, the front door bangs open. In marches, a middle-aged gentleman with thick sideburns and prominent eyebrows. He is followed by one of the largest men the usher has ever seen. Clearly, a prizefighter if his repeatedly broken nose is anything to go by.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  And he's carrying what appears to be a bouquet of overripe vegetables. The usher gently explains that there can be no admittance to the auditorium now that the show has started. But the smaller guest, loudly announcing himself as the Marquis of Queensbury, is having none of it, and demands to be let in.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  At the commotion, the manager comes out of his office. The usher watches the colour drain from his boss's face as he quietly tries to remonstrate with the furious aristocrat. Eventually, Queensbury is persuaded to leave, but not before directing the boxer to slam the pungent vegetables onto a small table in the foyer.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Those, he loudly proclaimed to the room, are for the playwright. With that, he strides off, angrily muttering to himself, shadowed by his giant of an associate.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  The usher follows them to the door and watches as they stomp down the steps and disappear into the storm.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Not satisfied with leaving his vegetables as an insult for the playwright, at the end of the month Queensbury significantly ups the ante. Though his handwriting and spelling are difficult to decipher, in a card he leaves for Wilde at London's fashionable Albemarle Club, he accuses the writer of being a sodomite. Bosie immediately urges Wilde to sue his father for libel, but neither of them realise the extent of the evidence that has been collected by the Marquess, thanks to the private investigators he has hired.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  The trial opens at the Old Bailey on the 3rd of April 1895, in a courtroom packed with barristers, journalists and other onlookers. From the moment the defence make their opening remarks, it is clear how much trouble Wilde is in. Queensbury and his investigators have bribed and bullied servants, hotel staff and sex workers into testifying about Wilde's sexual encounters with a number of young, working-class men. Wilde hastily drops the case, but it is too late.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  So Wilde has to drop that prosecution and at that point doesn't flee the country and sticks around and is arrested and then prosecuted for crimes of "gross indecency", and the first trial is actually a hung jury and the establishment decides to prosecute him again and then he's found guilty and sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labour, which is the highest sentence he could be given for that.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Bosie's aristocratic blood and connections seem to save him, and he is never prosecuted. But Wilde is sent first to Pentonville, then Wandsworth, and finally Reading jail.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  He gets transferred to Reading was actually a sort of clemency. It was because his health was going completely under hard labour. There's no sleep, the food's terrible, it's really punitive conditions. And the isolation, you know, it's solitary confinement and they're punished if they speak to each other in the prison yard.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  The more sympathetic prison governor at Reading excuses Wilde from hard labour, instead giving him the more genteel tasks of re-binding hymn books and working in the garden. Several of the guards begin to engage the writer in literary conversations. Mercifully, he is allowed access to books and paper, and one of the many things he writes is a long letter to Bosie about their relationship and Wilde's punishment for it. It is never sent, but is later published under the title "De Profundis", translating from Latin as "From the Depths". Even at Reading, Wilde experiences a brutal two years, during which his health suffers and he loses an alarming amount of weight.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Devastatingly, not only does Jane, his beloved mother, die, but Constance wants a separation. The alternative would be his wife suing for divorce on the grounds that he has committed sodomy with other men. A far more serious charge than the acts of gross indecency for which he has been convicted, it could lead to his re-prosecution. Faced with this choice, Wilde agrees to the separation and loses any rights to his sons.

• 46:13Speaker 00

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• 46:43Speaker 05

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• 47:13Speaker 02

  It is a different man who leaves Reading jail in May 1897, the night he is released Wilde sails for France. He will never return to England.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  So he goes into exile pretty much immediately. Robbie Ross meets him, other friends meet him. But he's very increasingly lonely. So he has an allowance from Constance, which is conditional on his not reassociating with Lord Alfred Douglas. And Wilde is very, very eager to see his sons again. And that's sort of held out as a if you behave well, in effect, you could have that. But he ends up reassociating with Bosie, lives with him in Italy and in France. And over the next two years, he's quite parapetetic. He's writing bits and pieces, but he can't write properly. And to some extent, he's dependent on charity friends.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  In the months after his release, Wilde writes The Ballad of Reading Jail, a poem drawing on his prison experience. It is published not under his name, but his cell number, C dot three dot three. After this, apart from a few letters to the papers decrying prison conditions and urging for reforms, Wilde struggles to write. He spends the last days of his life in Paris, frequently alone.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  On the 29th of November, 1900, Wilde is received into the Roman Catholic Church. He dies the next day of meningitis, with Robbie Ross holding his hand as he breathes his last.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Yet even while men like him continue to be criminalised, Oscar Wilde attains the status of a national literary treasure. Robbie Ross, who acts as his literary executor, publishes the authoritative edition of Wilde's works in 1908. Throughout the 20th century, his plays are performed to packed theatres and will later be adapted for film and television. Dorian Gray continues to be read and is adapted for a stage performance as early as 1913. And his stories for children never go out of print.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Even so, the law under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted remained in force until 1967. In that time, this draconian legal apparatus ruined the lives of countless people. The most famous of these was Alan Turing, the pioneer of technology and codebreaker, whose vital work at Bletchley Park helped crack the German Enigma code and shorten the Second World War.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  After Turing was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, campaigners began pushing for the same treatment for all those convicted of gross indecency.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  In 2017, over a century after his trial, Oscar Wilde was one of 50,000 men posthumously pardoned for homosexual acts. But the historical convictions of gay and transgender individuals prosecuted under different statutes still stand.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Today, Wilde's witticisms are ubiquitous, even if their connection to him has been lost. Whenever you hear anyone say, "I can resist everything but temptation", or find yourself drinking out of a mug proclaiming, "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast", or see a poster with the slogan, "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance", you are witnessing Oscar Wilde's inescapable legacy.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  I think all sorts of things that Wilde speaks to about the freedom of the artist, about self-expression, and a sort of individualism that is not a libertarian, right-wing individualism. It's a socialist, anarchist, compassionate, humanitarian, creative individualism. I think there's an idealism there that carries on speaking, that has a beauty to it and a value to it. I constantly meet students, and in every year there will be students for whom Wilde personally means a lot, and a way in which he's helped them find themselves. And as a writer to be able to do that, you know, over 100 years later, is incredible, but he does.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Next time on Short History, we'll bring you a short history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

• 51:43Speaker 06

  There's widespread interest in the competition for the hearts and minds of America between the private eye, who has a certain amount of glamour, and the western bandits of the 19th century era. The private detective is of his nature an ambivalence person. And that interests us because that's a widespread aspect of human nature, and we're all interested in that.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  That's next time.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Head to www-noiser.com/subscriptions for more information.

• 52:31Speaker 00

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• 53:01Speaker 07

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