Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was the most quotable man in London, sued for libel, and was in Reading gaol within three months. He came from a distinguished Dublin family, took a double first at Oxford, and arrived in London with no money and an enormous reputation for saying things. The American lecture tour of 1882, undertaken to publicise a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that satirised him, made him a transatlantic celebrity. The work came later and came quickly: The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, then Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, which was playing to full houses when he destroyed himself. The Marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at his club accusing him of sodomy; Wilde sued for criminal libel, the defence assembled evidence and witnesses, the case collapsed, and he was arrested the same day. Two trials produced a conviction for gross indecency and two years' hard labour, which ruined his health. He wrote De Profundis in prison and The Ballad of Reading Gaol after it, then lived in Paris as Sebastian Melmoth on borrowed money and died of meningitis at forty-six. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published under the number of his prison cell, C.3.3, rather than his name. His wife Constance changed her surname and their sons to Holland; the younger, Vyvyan, wrote about it decades later. He was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. Robert Ross, his literary executor, cleared the estate s debts and had his ashes moved to Pere Lachaise, where Epstein s tomb was defaced for indecency and later glassed in against lipstick. He was pardoned posthumously in 2017 under a law named for Alan Turing.

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