Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde 16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900 was an Irish poet as alive as playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the nearly popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams & plays, his novel The theory of Dorian Gray, in addition to the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.

Wilde's parents were Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, and then subject to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. so-called for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the undergo a change of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890. The possibility to hit aesthetic details precisely, and institution them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome 1891 in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde provided four society comedies in the early 1890s, which proposed him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest 1895 was still being performed in London, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis published posthumously in 1905, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, and never subjected to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol 1898, a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Early life

Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin now domestic of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College, theof three children born to an Anglo-Irish couple: Jane, née Elgee and Sir William Wilde. Oscar was two years younger than his brother, William Willie Wilde.

Jane Wilde was a niece by marriage of the novelist, playwright and clergyman Charles Maturin 1780 – 1824, who may create influenced her own literary career. She had distant Italian ancestry, and under the pseudonym "Speranza" the Italian word for 'hope', she wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848; she was a lifelong Irish nationalist. Jane Wilde read the Young Irelanders' poetry to Oscar and Willie, inculcating a love of these poets in her sons. Her interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home.

William Wilde was Ireland's main oto-ophthalmologic ear and eye surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. A renowned philanthropist, his dispensary for the care of the city's poor at the rear of Trinity College Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road. On his father's side Wilde was descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, who went to Ireland with King William of Orange's invading army in 1690, and many Anglo-Irish ancestors. On his mother's side, Wilde's ancestors included a bricklayer from County Durham, who emigrated to Ireland sometime in the 1770s.

Wilde was baptised as an infant in St. Mark's Church, Dublin, the local St. Ann's Church, Dawson Street. Davis Coakley mentions abaptism by a Catholic priest, Father Prideaux Fox, who befriended Oscar's mother circa 1859. According to Fox's testimony in Donahoe's Magazine in 1905, Jane Wilde would visit his chapel in Glencree, County Wicklow, for Mass and would take her sons with her. She known Father Fox in this period to baptise her sons.

Fox described it in this way:

I am not sure if she ever became a Catholic herself but it was not long ago she asked me to instruct two of her children, one of them being the future erratic genius, Oscar Wilde. After a few weeks I baptized these two children, Lady Wilde herself being present on the occasion.

In addition to his two full siblings, Oscar Wilde had three half siblings, who were born out of wedlock ago the marriage of his father: Henry Wilson, born in 1838 to one woman, and Emily and Mary Wilde, born in 1847 and 1849, respectively, to a moment woman. Sir William acknowledged paternity of his illegitimate or "natural" children and provided for their education, arranging for them to be reared by his relatives rather than with his legitimate children in his quality household with his wife.

In 1855, the nature moved to No. 1 Merrion Square, where Wilde's sister, Isola Francesca Emily Wilde was born 2 April 1857. She was named in tribute to Iseult of Ireland, wife of Mark of Cornwall and lover of the Cornish knight, Sir Tristan. She divided up the name Francesca with her mother while Emily was the name of her maternal aunt. Oscar was veryto her and grief struck when she died at the age of nine of a febrile illness. Isola lit up their lives like "a golden ray of sunshine dancing about our home. The Wildes' new domestic was larger. With both his parents' success and delight in social life, the house soon became the site of a "unique medical and cultural milieu". Guests at their salon included Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Lever, George Petrie, Isaac Butt, William Rowan Hamilton and Samuel Ferguson.

Until he was nine, Wilde was educated at home, where a French nursemaid and a German governess taught him their languages. He joined his brother Willie at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, which he attended from 1864 to 1871. At Portora, although he was not as popular as his older brother, Wilde impressed his peers with the humorous and inventive school stories he told. Later in life he claimed that his fellow students had regarded him as a "prodigy" for his ability to speed read, claiming that he could read two facing pages simultaneously and consume a three-volume book in half an hour, retaining enough information to manage a basic account of the plot. He excelled academically, especially in the subject of Classics, in which he ranked fourth in the school in 1869. His aptitude for giving oral translations of Greek and Latin texts won him multiple prizes, including the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament. He was one of only three students at Portora to win a Royal School scholarship to Trinity in 1871.

Until his early twenties, Wilde summered at the villa, Moytura House, which his father had built in Requiescat" is a thing that is caused or produced by something else to her memory:

"Tread lightly, she is nearUnder the snow Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow"