Oscar Wilde

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25:56Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there. 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 off the ground proves less straightforward. Though he'd published a volume of poems before he left for 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.

26:43Though 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, a 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, at the same time as being beautiful dress. And it does seem to be a love match.

27:19I mean, Wilde before that was engaged to Florence Balcombe, who then broke off the match to Wilde and married Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, which is another interesting kind of fork in the road of what might have happened.

27:38Wilde 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 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 newlyweds settle in London, in a house in Tite 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.

28:27In 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 Prince and Other Tales is the only one of his publications that sells out its print run and gets reprinted and carries on doing so.

29:12So those short stories are very popular. And he starts by the end of the 1880s, by sort of 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.

30:01By now, Wilde 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 Wilde's same-sex relationships is difficult because it was illegal and so on. there's Robert Ross, who becomes a lifelong friend of Wilde's and stands with him and by him all the way through everything. He claims to have taken Wilde's sort of homosexual virginity, in effect. He says he seduced Wilde. 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.

30:49He's then beginning to move in kind of gay circles. Wilde 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 Wilde's same-sex relationships and encounters are thus conducted under the shadow of this legal persecution.

31:38Yet Wilde bravely begins to introduce homoerotic themes into his work. In 1889, he writes a short story, The Portrait of Mr. W.H., 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. I think Dorian Gray of his writings is the one that creates the greatest furore in all sorts of ways.

32:26Because the narrative so closely follows Dorian, because there isn't really, there's no narrative voice saying, and then Dorian did another terrible thing, but don't worry, he will pay for it. The beauty of the prose in which the novel's written kind of asks you, the reader, to take delight in exactly what Dorian's taking delight in. So 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.

33:07and there are various reviews that give kind of coded references to the homoeroticism subtext of homosexual desire that's within the novel.

33:21Some shops refuse to stock the magazine in which the story is published and yet Dorian Gray becomes a sensation. Soon Wilde 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. So it's 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 of Dorian Gray as a kind of conversation between Wilde and the critics about what is art, what's the role of morality in art, what does morality mean within it?

33:59What 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 ends happily, the bad unhappily, that is what fiction means, as Miss Prism 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 satirise the moral assumptions of his day continue into the 1890s, as he 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 Bosie.

34:38So Lord Alfred Douglas was the third son of the Marquess of Queensbury. The Marquess of Queensbury, of course, being the source of the Queensbury rules for boxing, about not hitting below the belt and all the rest of it. And Lord Alfred Douglas goes to Magdalen College. He 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 dare not speak its name. And he's very overt about homosexuality in a way that is very, very close to the acceptable edge of what you could maybe get away with.

35:17And he has a lot of protection in a way that Wilde doesn't. Theirs 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, Bosie has drawn Wilde 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.

36:04Who has him consorting 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 Windermere's fan opens in February 1892 and goes on to have a 10-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.

36:53What Walt does with Lady Windermere's fan and then with the other society comedies 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 they're a huge success. But they also leave a lot of critics uneasy and a lot of audiences. So Lady Windermere's fan ends with secrets between husband and wife. An ideal husband ends with a politician who has sold a cabinet secret for money and was ready to do so again, entering the cabinet. You know, the heart of British government.

37:36In the case of The Importance Being Earnest, you have, you know, people who invent fictional lives and personas and identities and engagements and all the rest of it. You know, the young people in that play, all of them are lying through their teeth. All of them are having these kind of fantasy lives. And at the end of the play, they're rewarded by all the bits that they want to be true coming true. There will be no such happy ending for Wilde. At the height of his professional success, his relationship with Alfred Douglas begins to attract unwanted attention, most troublingly from Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, an eccentric politician and atheist.

38:15From 1894, Queensbury begins to scheme to end his son's relationship with Wilde. 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 Wilde's private life. Soon, he is making his displeasure public.

38:44The 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 Wilde will soon discover, he is not a man who is easily thwarted.

39:06It is the 14th of February, 1895, and London is being battered by a heavy snowstorm. A thick layer of white blankets the streets, and snow continues to fall from the inky sky, fat flakes swirling in the breeze. Outside the St. James' 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.

39:54Letting 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, then heads inside to warm up. A muffled round of applause filters through from the auditorium.

40:35He 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 prizefighter if his repeatedly broken nose is anything to go by. And he's 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 Marquess of Queensbury, is having none of it, and demands to be let in.

41:20At 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 remonstrate with the furious aristocrat. Eventually, Queensbury 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.

42:10Not satisfied with leaving his vegetables as an insult for the playwright, at the end of the month, Queensbury significantly ups the ante. Though his handwriting and spelling are difficult to decipher, in a card he leaves for Wilde at London's fashionable Albemarle Club, he accuses the writer of being a sodomite. Bosie immediately urges Wilde to sue his father for libel, but neither of them realize 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 the 3rd of April 1895 in a courtroom packed with barristers, journalists and other onlookers.

42:52From the moment the defense make their opening remarks it is clear how much trouble Wilde is in. Queensbury and his investigators have bribed and bullied servants, hotel staff and sex workers into testifying about Wilde's sexual encounters with a number of young working class men Wilde hastily drops the case But it is too late So Wilde 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.

43:37And then he's found guilty and sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labor, which is the highest sentence he could be given for that. Bosie's aristocratic blood and connections seem to save him, and he is never prosecuted. But Wilde is sent first to Pentonville, then Wandsworth, And finally, Reading Jail. He gets transferred to Reading was actually a sort of clemency. It was because his health was going completely under hard labor. There's no 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.

44:23The more sympathetic prison governor at Reading excuses Wilde from hard labour, instead giving him the more genteel 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 Bosie about their relationship and Wilde's punishment for it. It is never sent, but is later published under the title Dei Profundis, translating from Latin as From the Depths. Even at Reading, Wilde experiences a brutal two years, during which his health suffers, and he loses an alarming amount of weight.

45:08Devastatingly, 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 has been convicted, it could lead to his re-prosecution. Faced with this choice, Wilde agrees to the separation and loses any rights to his sons.

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46:20Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. It is a different man who leaves Reading Jail in May 1897, the night he is released wild sales for France. He will never return to England. So he goes into exile pretty much immediately. Robbie 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. And Wilde is very, very eager to see his sons again. And that's sort of held out as a, if you behave well, in effect, you could have that. but he ends up reassociating with Bosie, lives with him in Italy and in France and over the next two years he's quite peripatetic.

47:11He'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, Wilde writes The Ballad of Reading 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 decrying prison conditions and urging for reforms, Wilde struggles to write. He spends the last days of his life in Paris, frequently alone. On the 29th of November, 1900, Wilde 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.

48:02Yet, 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 Wilde'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 stories for children never go out of print.

48:38Even 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 codebreaker, 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.

49:23But 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. Whenever you hear anyone say, I can resist everything but temptation, or find yourself drinking out of a mug 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.

50:08It'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 100 years later, is incredible, but he does.

50:47Next time on Short History, we'll 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 private 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.

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