Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency. Wilde’s parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin.
About Oscar Wilde in brief
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts. Wilde’s parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. At university, Wilde read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, he moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London. 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, 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, never to return to Ireland or Britain, and died in Paris in 1900. He left a wife and three children, all of whom he left behind. His last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, is a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. His father was a renowned philanthropist for the care of the city’s poor at the rear of Trinity College Dublin.
His mother was a niece of the novelist, playwright and clergyman Charles Maturin, who may have influenced her own literary career. She had distant Italian ancestry, and under the pseudonym \”Speranza\”, she wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848; she was a lifelong Irish nationalist. 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 leading oto-ophthalmologic surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, the second of three children born to an Anglo- Irish couple: Jane, née Elgee and Sir William Wilde. He wrote Salome 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. The Importance of Being Earnest was still being performed in London. Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial forgross indecency with men. He died at the age of 46 in Paris, and never returned to Britain or Ireland. He had a son, Willie, who went with King William of Orange’s invading army in 1690.
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