Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), studied at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’. His flamboyant aestheticism attracted attention, much of it hostile; he proclaimed himself a disciple of Pater and the cult of ‘art for art's sake’ mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1881). Wilde undertook a lecture tour of the United States in 1882, after the publication of his first volume of verse, Poems (1881). In 1884 he married, and in 1888 published a volume of fairy- stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, written for his sons. In 1891 followed Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Gothic melodrama. Wilde claimed in his preface, ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’ He published A House of Pomegranates (1891), fairy- stories; and The Duchess of Padua (1891), a dull verse tragedy. He achieved theatrical success with his comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance (1893); An Ideal Husband (1895); and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Salomé (now known chiefly by Richard Strauss's opera), written in French, was refused a licence, but performed in Paris in 1896 and published in 1894 in an English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas with illustrations by Beardsley. Lord Alfred's father, the marquess of Queensberry, disapproved of his son's friendship with Wilde and publicly insulted the playwright. This started a chain of events which led to Wilde's imprisonment for homosexual offences in 1895. He was declared bankrupt while in prison and wrote a letter of bitter reproach to Lord Alfred, published in part in 1905 as De Profundis. He was released in 1897 and went to France where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), inspired by his prison experience. In exile he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, after the romance by Maturin. He died in Paris. His other writings include critical dialogues (‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist’, 1891) and The Soul of Man under socialism, a plea for individualism and artistic freedom, first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891.

A volume of letters, ed. R. Hart-Davis, appeared in 1962.