Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Part I

In my student days I was a big fan of Oscar Wilde and enjoyed his plays, his poems and was very interested in his life.  The big drama of his downfall attracted my sympathy.  However I’m a middle aged lady now and I can see rather less to admire… there was a kind of wilful folly about him.

My partner who has just passed away, and whose poetry I have been posting... was also a fan.  but in latter years when we discussed Oscar, he would say that perhaps Oscar would have been a bit tiresome to live with, like Chandler in Friends or Hawkeye in MASH, constantly making jokes and expecting laughter.  I agreed, and felt that at times he seemed determined to be as stupid and wilful as possible....
Oscar was born in 1854, in Victorian Dublin, to a rather eccentric and literary minded lady called Jane Francesca Elgee, (her pen name was Speranza) and William Wilde, a doctor.  Wilde was an increasingly successful surgeon who specialised in eye complaints.  He was an intellectual who wrote about Irish history and mythology.  He operated on the King of Sweden and so gave the name Oscar to his second son.  Their first son was named Willie, and they also had a daughter Isola who died in childhood.  William Wilde was a womaniser who had several illegitimate children, and who often got involved in scandalous love affairs, including one with an eccentric patient Mary Travers.  Travers claimed that Wilde had raped her under anaesthetic and wrote a pamphlet publicising her “rape”.

Lady Wilde complained, and Mary brought an action for libel.  She won her case, but was only awarded a farthing in damages. She was seen as a slightly mad “woman scorned”. 

However the scandal affected the Wilde family and Sir William moved to the west of Ireland. After his death, the family were left badly off and Jane moved to London with her sons where she held a salon.

Initially the family were Anglo Irish, Protestants, comfortably middle class at a time when the native Irish were poor, and increasingly discontented with British rule.

Oscar was a highly intelligent young man, who went to Trinity College Dublin and then to Oxford. He believed that he could make his fortune, writing. His older brother became a journalist and Jane also wrote.  She was sympathetic to the Irish nationalist cause. Perhaps because of this, Oscar was always interested in Catholicism…

He had studied under Ruskin and Pater, and was devoted to the Aesthetic Movement and believed that books were not written to point a moral, and that they were to be judged on how well they were written, not on whether they were a bad or good influence on readers.  He made a living from his pen, with poetry and journalism.  He then undertook a lecture tour of America where he received mixed reviews.  He began to write plays and in 1884 he was doing well enough to consider marriage. He met Constance Lloyd -a very lovely young woman who had a modest fortune of her own and they married in late 1884.

The Oscar Wildes were expensive in their tastes and decorated their new house in Tite Street, Chelsea, beautifully but extravagantly.  Wilde had a post as editor of a woman’s journal “Woman’s World.”  He had liberal views, being a supporter of Irish Home Rule (Unlike many Anglo Irish) and an interest in socialism.