Oscar Wilde

It is a bitter January day, in the year 1897, in Reading, in the south of England, a harsh wind is blowing. Though it is barely 3pm, the sky is already beginning to darken. Despite the unforgiving conditions, a middle-aged man, clad only in a rough woolen jacket and trousers, is tending to a garden. He digs up withered plants with a small trow, pulling them out from the roots to make way for the new crops that will be planted in the spring. It is hard going. The ground is almost frozen solid. Pausing to catch his breath, he glances up at the tall walls surrounding him on all sides and the securely locked gate to the garden. Because he is not in his own home, but in the grounds of Reading jail. 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. Too soon, the solace of his work is brought to a close by the mournful tolling of the prison bell, and the water standing guard gestures him to stand up. The inmate is marched back to the main prison and imposing red brick edifice built just a few decades before. In silence, the two men head towards Ward's Sea and make their way up to the third floor. The water unlocks the third cell along and the prisoner steps into the narrow room. 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. Before re-locking the cell, the water surreptitiously reaches into his pocket. He hands the prisoner a note written on cheap paper before quickly shutting and locking the heavy door. Alone again, the man turns his attention to the note. It is a literary inquiry. The water 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.3.3 is not a typical prisoner. 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. 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. 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. 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. Alongside his literary noun, 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 epitomized these dual legacies. His literary genius and his personal life shaped by what his long-term lover called the love that did not speak its name. 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? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Oscar Wilde. 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, Fingle, or Flaherty, Will's Wilde is born in Dublin in October. His parents William and Jane are prominent in the cultural and intellectual life of the city. Soseltis is a professor of English and theatre studies at Oxford University and a fellow at Brazenose College. They were Anglo Irish ascendancies, so sort of from Protestant routes in Ireland. As they moved up in the world, they moved to Marion 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. 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. Oscar enjoys a comfortable upper middle-class childhood. At the house in Marion 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 swires at which the young Oscar mingles with the leading lights of Dublin's cultural scene. There are counts of him sitting on the leading Irish playwright at the time, Dion Boussico's knee at some of these literary swires, so he was certainly mixing with different people. 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 Marion 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. He went to Portora School in Enniskillin. 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 his, the very few letters there are from school, they're mostly about send more jam or something. They're not the kind of letters that have some extraordinary child prodigy in that sense. 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, Austin Poe, and Shakespeare among others. Some dark clouds mar this otherwise sunny childhood. When Oscar is 12, his beloved younger sister Isilla 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 juvenile survives, it is the first time he turns to writing to get him through hard times. But it won't be the last. 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. 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 Mordlin College Oxford. In the 1870s, as today, Mordlin is an especially pretty college, bounded on one side by Deer Park and on the other by the Tranquil River Sherwell. In this new environment, Wilde re-invents himself, cropping his hair short and buying a new wardrobe of checked suits and jaunty hats. 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. Yet amidst the parties and holidays, Wilde is a dedicated student. 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 he's 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 ensuesion brilliance that's the product of extraordinary intelligence rather than hard work. More than the curriculum at Modeling, 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. 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 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, 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 or 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. 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. In the summer of 1878, he secures a double first from Mordlin, 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 Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna, written after his first visit to the Italian city the year before. I'm David Sushe, and from the Noiser Podcast Network comes Charles Dickens' Ghost Stories. This Christmas, I'll be reading a selection of the author's most chilling short works, brought to life with sound design and original music. But first, Dickens' most beloved ghost story of all, a Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens' Ghost Stories, available wherever you get your podcasts. After graduation, Wilde moved 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. Not letting his uncertain financial future dampen his spirits, a 24-wild is witty and charming, with a great sense of humour, although he has, by this point, lost his Irish accent. After his mother moved 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 Langtree, mistress of the Prince of Wales. Wilde also begins to court the press. Satirical cartoons have long paraded the aesthetic movement, caricaturing its followers as effeminate young men who live only for art and beauty. Wilde sets out to embody this stereotype. Very early on, he is committed to becoming famous. He is interested in being a public figure, he is interested in being a name. If you are looking at Wilde's relation to aesthetic and aesthetic movement, it was hugely convenient. Wilde, with a lot of his sayings about, I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china, and he gets a cello coat designed. A coat where the back is in the shape of a cello, and wears this, gets that custom made for him and then goes to gatherings in London in it, the fact that he is there opening exhibitions at the Grove and a gallery. He uses the aesthetic movement to place himself as a kind of public figure as part of it, and that really helps advertise him. 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 paraded by the masters of Victorian comic opera Gilbert and Sullivan, in their opera "Patients", 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 emprasario Richard Doyley-Cart. When Doyley-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 Doyley-Cart, quite simply at that point he's looking for employment, and one thing 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 Doyley-Cart offered plenty of money as well as status on the American tour, so he says yes. 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. Wilde spends nearly a year lecturing in North America, to begin with he is not always well received. 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. 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. 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 blonde bearded with hands calloused from hard work. 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 in 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. 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 bodello, showing Wilde the best of what their town has to offer, and experience he seems to thoroughly enjoy. By the time it is fully dark, the group are staggering drunk down the main street. A few meters 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. Eventually, the group reach a four-wheeled cart, hitched two oxen parked at the end of the road. They climb aboard. Several of them holding torches to light the dark road ahead. 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. 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 dandy-ish black eveningware. 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 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 one light cast by the torches, he is lowered into the yawning abyss. 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. 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. Some of those famous photographs of Wilde, they're taken by Napoleon Cironi, 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 plain tith 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. 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 of the ground proves less straightforward. Though he'd published a volume of poems before he left 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. Though his professional life is suffering, the year proves luckier for Wilde on the romantic front. He re-establishes his connection with a young woman whom he had first met in London a couple of years earlier. 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, 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 matched world and married Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, which another interesting kind of fork in the road of what might have happened. 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. When the pair are married in the next spring, the bride's outfit features a variety of ancient Greek motifs, including a saffron colored veil and a myrtle wreath in her hair. After a Parisian honeymoon, the newlywed 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. 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 modernizes and starts to publish literary reviews, serialized stories, travel accounts, and pieces on various social issues. He also begins to write and publish his own essays, as well as collections of short fiction. 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 prints 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 1889, he's publishing these wonderful dialogues, so the critic is 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 favourite of his essays, 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. By now, Wild 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. Tracing Wild's same sex relationships is difficult, because it was illegal, and so on, there's Robert Ross, who becomes a lifelong friend of Wild and stands with him and buy him all the way through everything. He claims to have taken Wild's sort of homosexual virginity in effect. He says he's seduced Wild, 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. Wild 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 offense, punishable with two years imprisonment and hard labor. 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 criminalized. All of Wild's same sex relationships and encounters are thus conducted under the shadow of this legal persecution. Yet Wild bravely begins to introduce homoerotic themes into his work. In 1889, he writes a short story, The Portrait of Mr. WH, 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. As soon as it is out in the world, the novel attracts controversy. Dorian Gray of his writings is the one that creates the greatest fury in all sorts of ways. Because the narrative so closely follows Dorian, because there isn't really, there's no narrative voicing, and then Dorian did another terrible thing, but don't worry, he will pay for it. The beauty of the prose in which the novels written kind of asks you the reader to take delight in exactly what Dorian's taking delight in. 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. 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 homoroticism, subtext of homosexual desire that's within the novel. Some shops refuse to stock the magazine in which the story is published, and yet Dorian Gray becomes a sensation. Soon, Wild produces a new extended edition and a response to his critics. He publishes separately a preface to Dorian Gray, which in some ways goes right back to aestheticism itself. 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 Dorian Gray is a kind of conversation between Wild and the critics about what is art, what's the role of morality and art, what does morality mean within 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 end happily. It means, out with 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. Oscar Wilde's attempts to question the purpose of art and satirize the moral assumptions of his day continue into the 1890s as it 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 Bozy. So Lord Alfred Douglas was the third son of the Marquis of Queensbury, the Marquis of Queensbury, of course, being the source of the Queensbury rules for boxing, about knighting below the belt in all the rest of it. And Lord Alfred Douglas goes to Mordeling 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 they're not speak its name. He's very overt about homosexuality in a way that is very, very close to the acceptable age of what you could maybe get away with, and he has a lot of protection in a way that wild doesn't. There's 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 Bozy at the Savoy Hotel for a month. Despite her pleas within a short while, Bozy has drawn wild into the underground world of male sex work. 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 consulting 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. When he is not distracted by his lover, Wilde produces some of his best work as a playwright. Lady Windameer'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. What does with Lady Windameer's fan, and then with the other society comedy, is 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 very huge success. But they also leave a lot of critics uneasy and a lot of audiences, so Lady Windameer's fan ends with secrets between husband and wife. The ideal husband ends with a politician who has sold a cabinet secret for money and was ready to do so again, entering the cabinet, the heart of British government. In the case of the impolence being earnest, you have people who invent fictional lives and personas and identities and engagements and all the rest of it. The young people in that play, all of them are lying through their teeth, all of them are having these fantasy lives. They are rewarded by all the bits that they want to be true coming true. There will be no such happy ending for Wild. At the height of his professional success, his relationship with Alfred Douglas begins to attract unwanted attention. Most troublingly, from Bosie's father, the Marquis of Queensbury, an eccentric politician and atheist. From 1894, Queensbury begins to scheme to end his son's relationship with Wild. 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 Wild's private life. Soon, he is making his displeasure public. 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 Wild will soon discover, he is not a man who is easily thwarted. It is the 14th of February 1895, and London is being battered by a heavy snow storm. A thick layer of white blankets the streets, and snow continues to fall from the inky sky, fat flakes swirling in the breeze. Outside of these St. James's Theatre, an usher holds open a heavy door as a carriage pulls up outside. The driver hands out a woman, racked 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 is 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. 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. 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 than heads inside to warm up. A muffled round of applause filters through from the auditorium. He can hear laughter. The play has begun. 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 prize fighter, if his repeatedly broken nose is anything to go by. And he is 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 Queen Spree, is having none of it and demands to be let in. Atts 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 demonstrate with a furious aristocrat. Eventually, Queen Spree is persuaded to leave, but not before directing the boxer to slam the pungent vegetables onto a small table in the foyer. Those, he loudly proclaims to the room, are for the playwright. With that, he strides off, angrily muttering to himself, shadowed by his giant of an associate. The usher follows them to the door and watches as they stomp down the steps and disappear into the storm. Not satisfied with leaving his vegetables as an insult for the playwright, at the end of the month, Queen Spree significantly ups the ante. Though his handwriting and spelling are difficult to decipher, in a card he leaves for Wild at London's Fashionable Alba Mal Club, he accuses the writer of being a sodomite. Bozy immediately urges Wild to sue his father for libel, but neither of them realise the extent of the evidence that has been collected by the marquis, thanks to the private investigators he has hired. The trial opens at the Old Bailey on 3 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 Wild is in. Queen Spree and his investigators have bribed and bullied servants, hotel staff and sex workers, into testifying about Wild's sexual encounters with a number of young working class men. Wild hastily drops the case, but it is too late. So Wild 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, quote, gross indecency. And the first trial is actually a hung jury, and the establishment decides to prosecute him again, and then he found guilty and sentenced to two years of imprisonment. But Wild is with hard labour, which is the highest sentence he could be given for that. Bose's aristocratic bloods and connections seem to save him, and he is never prosecuted. But Wild is sent first to Pentonville, then Wonsworth, and finally Redding Jail. He gets transferred to Redding was actually a sort of clemency, it was because his health was going completely under hard labour. He goes to 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. The more sympathetic prison governor at Redding excuses Wild from hard labour, instead giving him the more gentile tasks of rebinding 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 Bose about their relationship and Wild's punishment for it. It is never sent, but is later published under the title "Day Profundis", translating from Latin as "From the Depths". Even at Redding, Wild experiences a brutal two years, during which his health suffers, and he loses an alarming amount of weight. 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's been convicted, it could lead to his reprosecution. Faced with this choice, Wild agrees to the separation and loses any rights to his sons. It is a different man who leaves Redding jail in May 1897. The night he is released, Wild sales for France. He will never return to England. He goes into exile pretty much immediately. Robby 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. Wild is very eager to see his sons again, and that sort of held out as if you behave well in effect, you could have that. But he ends up reassociating with Bozy, 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. In the months after his release, Wild writes The Ballad of Redding Jail, a poem drawing on his prison experience. It is published not under his name, but his cell number, c.3.3. After this, apart from a few letters to the papers to crying prison conditions and urging for reforms, Wild struggles to write. He spends the last days of his life in Paris, frequently alone. On the 29th of November 1900, Wild 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. Yet even while men like him continue to be criminalized, Oscar Wilde attains the status of a national literary treasure. Robbie Ross, who acts as his literary executor, publishes the authoritative edition of Wild's works in 1908. Throughout the 20th century, his plays are performed to packed theaters 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 story is for children, Neverguard of Print. 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 code breaker, whose vital work at Bletchley Park helped crack the German enigma code and shorten the Second World War. After Turing was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, campaigners began pushing for the same treatment for all those convicted of gross indecency. 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. Today, Wilde's witticisms are ubiquitous, even if their connection to him has been lost. Whatever you hear anyone say, I can resist everything but temptation. Find yourself drinking out of a mud proclaiming only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. Or see a poster with a slogan to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. You are witnessing Oscar Wilde's inescapable legacy. 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 a hundred years later is incredible, but he does. Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. There's widespread interest in the competition for the hearts and minds of America between the primate 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 ambivalent person. And that interests us because that's a widespread aspect of human nature and we're all interested in that. That's next time. Thank you.