June 23, 2010 • 26 mins
The larger-than-life poet and novelist Oscar Wilde remains one of Ireland's most well-known authors, but his life wasn't all accolades and praise. Join Katie and Sarah as they explore the struggles and triumphs of Oscar Wilde in this podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And in our
Lily Langtry episode, we considered following up with a podcast
(00:21):
on Oscar Wilde, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor
of this, And it's probably because wild is a really
inspired dramatist, and he's a talented poet and essayist. He's
one of the best loved Irish writers, which is pretty
tough company, i'd say. But he's also a really amazing man,
and I think that's the main reason people are so
(00:43):
interested in hearing about him. He's this bizarre dresser, he's
a public wit. He's a famously brilliant conversationalist, which is
something that's a little bit harder to talk about, of
course than his works. But one indicator of that is
that Churchill chose him as the person he would most
like to talk with in the afterlife. He's also famous,
(01:04):
of course for his tragic downfall. A libel suit that
turned against him cost him two years in prison and
ruined his name and reputation for decades after his death,
and Since June is Pride month in the United States,
it seemed like the perfect time to discuss a man
who was so famously persecuted because of his sexuality. So
(01:24):
we will start at the beginning, as we always do.
Oscar fingal Oh Flaherty Will's Wilde was born in Dublin.
I don't have overtames, I know clearly neither of us do.
He was born in eighteen fifty four and his family
was of Dutch origin, and they were descended from an artist,
appropriately enough, but the family had been in Ireland since
(01:46):
the late seventeenth century, and since then they had mostly
either worked in land management or worked as doctors. His father,
Sir William Wilde, was a renowned ear and eye doctor
and even invented a surgery for cataracts. He operated on
the King of Sweden, and his mother was Lady wild
Jane Francesca l g who was an Irish nationalist and
(02:07):
wrote poems and articles under the name Speranza. I think
I want that to be my nom de plume if
I ever take one on. Oscar is the second son,
and his birth is followed by that of a sister
named Zola, and she dies as a young girl, and
it's a pretty tragic event in his early years, switching
to a happier aspect of his childhood. Wild is a
(02:30):
dedicated scholar from the very start. He may have later
kept a library that mingled philosophers with the silly books
and French pornographic writings that we might think of, but
to forget his classical scholarly training was a mistake. And
a fact that Sarah and I liked a lot was
that he would tear off the top corner of pages
(02:52):
in his books and eat it while he was reading.
So a different kind of consumer. And how much paper
did this man eat? I mean, he was a very
avid reader. One of Sarah's friends lent her an Oscar
wild book and told her to be very careful with it,
and she retorted that Oscar Wilde ate his own books,
so he didn't really know what to say back to them.
(03:14):
So Wild earns a scholarship to Trinity College, Devlin, which
we've talked about before because it's where the books kept,
and from there he goes to Magdalen College, Oxford, and
he wins prizes in English and classics, and also really
comes to love the philosophies of John Ruskin and Walter Pater,
and I was thinking, what English class doesn't start with
(03:35):
some essay on Peter. It seems they all do requisite reading,
for sure, but he takes Peter's teaching to love art
for art's sake a step further, and as his son
Vivian later describes, that, he set out to idealize beauty
for beauty's sake. So I think that's what we can
think of as Wild's philosophy in his writing. His dorm
(03:55):
room was also a little different from mine. He decorated
it with blue China and Prince by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and Edward Burne Jones, which again big change from all
the mc shure I remember seeing in My friends. And
he was also an estete, believing that beauty is the
ideal that we should all strive for. Yeah, tying back
(04:15):
into that motto that we mentioned a second ago, But
we're going to skip ahead now to London in eighteen
seventy nine. Wild has just arrived in the city and
he's going to be a writer and an editor, and
he's going to do it in style because he dresses
really flamboyantly, which is something that might be lost on
modern people. You might just think it's old fashioned, funny clothes,
(04:39):
but people did not dress in black silk stockings. That
was not your typical attire in this period. And people
weren't wearing fur lined coats and knee breeches. That was
an Oscar Wild exclusive. And this and his work and
his larger than life personality got him satirized in the
periodical Punch, and Gilbert and Sullivan added him to the routine,
(05:02):
basing their character Bunthorne on him. And he didn't mind
being linked to the ascetic movement. He published poems in
eighteen eighty one with his own money to help enhance
this connection. Yeah, he didn't even mind if it was
a mocking connection. In some cases. He has a pretty
good sense of humor himself. He writes a play Vera
(05:23):
shortly after this, which essentially uh is just putting it
in a nice way. It's no importance of being earnest
and it only runs in New York City for one week,
not at all in London. But by eighteen eighty two
he's on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada.
And this is really how he builds up his fame.
When he arrives in New York, he famously declares that
(05:44):
he has nothing to declare but his genius, which is
going to go down in history books for sure. Um
and then he makes a name for himself touring, giving lectures,
having conversations with people, and becoming famous from when coming
back from It a star. He got to work in
Paris on his next play, The Duchess of Padua, and
(06:07):
he's writing it. It's a commissioned work for the actress
Mary Anderson, but she turns it down and doesn't like it,
which of course isn't good for business. So he picks
up the lecture tour circuit again, this time in England,
but it doesn't last long. By eight four, he's settled
down in London to marry Constance Lloyd, and despite his
(06:28):
later trial and Constance is distancing of her family from
her husband, she changes her and her son's last names.
We shouldn't see their marriage as a sham, Vivian wrote
about it. Oscar was romantically in love with his beautiful
young wife, and for some years he was ideally happy,
and they have two sons together, Vivian, as we mentioned
(06:48):
in eighty six and a year before that, Cyril and
Oscar works a day job of sorts and versus, a
reviewer for the Paul Malgazette and then as an editor
for Women's World until eighteen eighty nine. But another important
point to make here is that marriage marks a pretty
big shift in his working style, and he had mostly
(07:09):
written poetry before it, and after he turns almost exclusively
to prose. And we have a quote from biographer Boris
Brazil noting that he began his literary career as a
composer of sonorous and pleasing verses, in which, however, as
he himself admitted, there was more rhyme than reason. Yet
(07:30):
as he grew older he seemed to have lost all
taste for poetry. And I also think it's important to
note that his only major major poem written after his
marriage is The Ballad of Reading Jail, written after his imprisonment,
and his major literary years where he's known so much
for his literary brilliance, is a pretty short span. It's
(07:52):
from eighteen eighty eight to eighteen ninety four. His first
major piece is The Happy Prince in eighteen eighty eight.
That's a collection of fairy tales, but very poetical despite
being prose there for kids and adults, and Sarah and
I would like a copy. And there are more stories
in Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and other Stories, and later
(08:12):
A House of Pomegranates and the Sphinx. But also in
one he has his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which first appeared in Lippincott's magazine and was condemned by reviewers,
and the idea for the novel was actually based in fact,
he had gotten it a few years before when he
visited the studio of the painter Basil Ward, and Ward
(08:35):
was painting this really lovely young man, and after the
sitter left, the two agreed that it was too bad
that this man's beauty would eventually fade and die, and
they wish that the painting itself could age and the
man could remain forever young. And Wild obviously thinks that
sounds like the makings of a great story. And he
(08:56):
also collects some of his philosophical essays eventually into Intentions.
So this is a really really productive span of a
few years here for Wild. Of course, he's also writing
drama like Lady Windermere's Fan, which he described as one
of those modern drawing room plays with pink lampshades. It's
(09:17):
the epitome of a well built play, although Katie admitted
she was not as it's not one of my favorites.
But he was called for after its debut performance and
gave a bit too smug of a speech. Speaking to
the actors, he said, I congratulate you on the great
success of your performance, which persuades me that you think
almost as highly of the play as I do, so
(09:39):
not terribly modest there. He then heads off to Paris
to write Salome in French and Sarah Bernhardt, one of
the greatest actresses of her day, wants to star in it,
and she sends it into rehearsals, but the play is
stopped by the censor because no Biblical characters are allowed
on the English stage, and Wild is really upset by this,
(10:02):
really annoyed, and even considers renouncing his citizenship and moving
to France, which he probably should have. Yeah, it's it's
unfortunate that he doesn't, but he continues writing these funny
plays that are great hits in England. In eighteen ninety two,
he puts out a Woman of No importance, and this
time when the audience cries for author on the stage,
(10:24):
he's a little a little cooler with his speech. By
January eight, he hits the big time when an ideal
Husband debuts and is attended by the Prince of Wales
and Royalty does not come to a play on opening night,
so it's a big deal. I guess they're waiting to
find out if it's good before they bother. His last
(10:45):
play was the best of All, The Importance of Being Earnest,
which debuted February fourteen to eight. But that's also when
his troubles come to Adad and the root of all
this trouble dates back to the start of this big
literary success actually in when he met the twenty two
(11:06):
year old poet Lord Alfred Douglas, who was known as Bozy,
which was originally derived from his mother's nickname Boise. And
they meet at a tea party and they become really
good friends. They dined together, they stay at each other's houses,
they traveled together, and the first issue with this relationship
(11:26):
comes up when Douglas gives one of his friends an
old suit and the friend discovers letters in the pocket
and their letters always check your pocket, Yeah, don't leave
your incriminating letters behind. So Wild is blackmailed because these
are rather incriminating letters, and this still isn't too big
(11:47):
of a problem though. The big issue comes later when
Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who absolutely hates the
friendship between these two men and may have been a
little mentally unhinged himself, goes after Wild, and aside from
his involvement in this whole affair, he's best known for
the Queensbury Rules of amateur boxing, so perhaps not a
(12:10):
great man to get and a tangle with guy to
have trouble with for sure. So as we mentioned, he
didn't like this friendship, but he feels a little bit
better about it after he meets Wild, who managed to
woo him over a long lunch. But in right, when
Wild's fame is reaching its heights, he's angry again with
the whole thing and demands his son stop seeing him.
(12:32):
He says, your intimacy with this man Wild must either
cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies.
I am not going to try to analyze this intimacy,
and I make no charge. But to my mind, to
pose as a thing is as bad as to be it,
and Douglas replies, rather witheringly, what a funny little man
you are in a telegram too. You can just imagine
(12:53):
how is Boluste father must have taken that. So Queensbury
starts to get pretty menace thing after this, and he
threatens hotel managers and restaurant managers who may be entertaining
the man harboring the men. And he shows up at
the house of Oscar Wilde with a prize fighter, and
Oscar tells him, I do not know what the Queensbury
(13:15):
rules are, but the Oscar wild rule is to shoot
on site, which is a very menacing warning from this
poet who his motto is beauty for Beauty's sake. And then,
in at the opening night of the Importance of Being Earnest,
Queensbury attempts to disrupt the show, so wild orders additional
(13:37):
protection around the theater and Queensbury's left outside for the
course of the performance. But the final blow is when
he leaves a card at the club that wild and
his wife belonged to that says to Oscar Wilde, posing
as a psalmbed might and I'm not saying that incorrectly.
He spelled it incorrectly, and Wild was grossly offended. He wrote,
(13:59):
I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My
whole life seems ruined by this man. I don't know
what to do. Yeah, he's worried that his reputation is
going to be affected. He's at the pinnacle of his
fame right now, and Douglas, who really hates his father,
urges Wild to sue Forliabel, and a lot of his
(14:19):
friends think this is a terrible idea. They tell him
that he'll have no hope winning it, and that he
should just get out of the country, move to France,
where it's more tolerant, and continue his writing career. But
he decides to go ahead with the suit and engages
Edward Clark to prosecute, and swears to him that there's
no basis to this libel. So that brings us to
(14:41):
our trial. April third. Wild is incredibly confident with his suit.
He testifies that I said to him, how dare you
say such things as you do about your son and me?
And he also faces off Queensbury's key piece of evidence,
a letter from Wild to Douglas. Clark urges the people
(15:01):
to remember that Wild as a poet, and that they
should take this letter as the expression of true poetic
feeling and nothing more than that. So while this letter
may seem really out there to you regular people, this
is a normal stuff for a poet exactly. And Wild
is really confident, as he said a second ago, he's
(15:22):
sure that his fame and his popularity are going to
carry this. And this even extends to his cross examination
by Edward Carson, who's representing Queensbury, and Wild's responses make
for really really good reading. They're witty, they're sharp. Sometimes
they contradict each other, so maybe it's not the best
(15:44):
best stuff to be saying on the stand, but it
does make for an inner tran read. The first part
of the questioning focused on his literary works, which Wild
defended against charges of immorality. He said, there's no such
thing as an immoral word. Books are well written or
badly written. That his cocky responses started to die down
(16:06):
when Carson asks about his relationships his presence to young men.
They're low intellectual capacity and perhaps unsuitability of some of
his friends. But while tried to play up his love
of youth, which was something he valued in his friends
above education or social standing. Yeah, so he tries to
(16:26):
make like he's an equal opportunity friend here and he
just loves youth. And things get really serious when Carson
announces that he'll be introducing a witness who had a
sexual relationship with Wild, and this is very dangerous territory
and Clark knows it. And that's because in eighteen nine,
the Criminal Law Amendment Act had passed which made it
(16:48):
illegal to commit gross indecency, which was essentially criminalizing homosexuality.
So it meant that this libel suit could become a
criminal one with Oscar Wild going to jail. So wild
counsel advised him to drop the suit and no jury
will convict Queensbury. It's just time to let all of
(17:11):
this go. But by the next afternoon, Queensbury's representation has
pushed the case ahead into criminal territory and the inspector
delivers the arrest warrant to Magistrate John Bridges, who adjourns
the court for a short period, which may have been
his way of trying to let Wild escape, you know,
heading out on the train to Europe, but he doesn't.
(17:34):
And his name comes off of the importance of being earnest. Yeah,
off of the playbills off the marquee, uh, and he
just feels like his life is absolutely crumbling, that this
the suit that he felt so confident about, has completely
backfired on him. And on April, his first criminal trial
(17:55):
begins and Wild is accused of gross indecencies and conspira
see to commit gross indecencies. Um, he's not prosecuted for sodomy,
but mail witnesses come to court and testify against him.
And when he himself appears, he's very different from how
he was in the earlier trial. He's quiet and respectful, yeah,
respectfully denying everything. And in Clark's closing statement, he echoes
(18:20):
most modern thoughts and says, clear from this fearful imputation
one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters
of today. And in clearing him, clear society from a
stain which we interpreted as meaning that this shouldn't even
be a crime. It shouldn't even be in court, and
they shouldn't even be having to respond to it. Well,
(18:42):
and how embarrassing to to put one of your biggest,
most famous citizens on trial for something like this. So
the jury can't reach a verdict, although they quit him
on one charge and he's released on bail before the
second trial begins, and you would think people would let
it be at this point that that would be the
(19:03):
end of it, and even Carson is urging people to
lighten up, but the Liberal government of England wants a conviction.
One theory is that there were political motives for pursuing
wild with this great intensity, and it's likely that the
Prime Minister, Archibald Primrose, who was the Earl of Roseberry,
(19:24):
had had an affair with the brother of Douglas, a
man named Francis, and Francis is likely to have killed himself,
and it's not long after he did so that his father,
Queensberry started going after Oscar Wilde so intensely starts this
manic attack on him, hoping to quote save his other son.
(19:47):
And it's possible that if Rosebery didn't go after wild
and didn't try to to see his prosecution through to
a conviction, that his own case, in his own crime,
may have been at supposed by Queensberry. According to Douglas Linder,
Roseberry had insomnia and depression during the trial, but it
disappeared afterward, which perhaps gives a little more credence to
(20:10):
that theory, but this time the prosecution is led by
Solicitor General Frank Lockwood, and While describes Lockwood's treatment of
him as an appalling denunciation of me, like something out
of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of
Savonarola's indictments of the popes of Realm, which we all
know what that's like. So the jury finds Wild guilty
(20:33):
on all counts but one, and he sentenced to two
years of hard labor. Most of this is served at
reading jail and his sons. This is a really sad
aspect of the story. His sons are sent to Switzerland
and they never see their father again. Their last name
is changed them. The wife of Oscar Wild is really
(20:54):
doing all she can to help shore up their reputation
for the future, but they're still actual discriminated against as
adults because of who their father was. And while he's
in jail, Wild right stuprofundus a letter to Douglas, and
when Douglas receives it, he destroys it after the first
few pages. And Sarah, you read some of that. It's
(21:16):
pretty brutal, and I think Douglas thought that it was
the only copy and he could just get this really
detailed account of their relationship and of all of the
things that went wrong, just erased from history. And it's
not just a regretful letter because the friendship resulted in
while being in jail. After all, he's writing this from prison,
(21:37):
But it's regretful because he feels like Douglas cost him
his art, and he's ashamed of how much money they spent,
and he accuses Douglas of loving his life, loving his uh,
all the glamorous sides of celebrity writer. Yeah, the play
premiers and the parties and the fame, but not having
(21:58):
any respect for the quiet labor that actually went into
all his writing, the daily drudgery of sitting down and
actually getting it on paper. Wild had also sent this
manuscript to his publisher, Robert Ross, intending to revise it later,
and parts of it were published in nineteen oh five.
(22:18):
Wild and Douglas reunited for a time after prison, but
after Wild's death, Douglas tried to get the manuscript from Ross,
but he instead presented it to the British Museum and
embargoed its contents for sixty years. So imagine when this
came out in nineteen sixty it was made quite a
big deal. Um So wild is bankrupt when he comes
(22:40):
out of jail and he goes to France to try
to kick start his writing career again. But the only
thing he really produces is the ballot of writing jail,
and he writes letters to editors in concern about prison
conditions though, so he's he's still out there, he's just
not producing it anywhere near the same frequency he was
(23:00):
before his trial. Oscar Wilde died of acute meningitis from
the ear infection November thirtie in Paris, and on his
deathbed he was received into the Catholic Church, which he
had long been interested in along with mysticism, and he's
buried at Parla Chaise in Paris. And interestingly, on the
(23:20):
same trip, I saw the memorial to him at Reading
and his tomb in Paris, and it's a pretty crazy contrast.
The Paris memorial is this huge winged figure and it
is covered with lipstick kisses. There's a little sign discouraging
people to go kiss Oscar Wilde's tomb, but clearly most
people are not following that. It's surrounded by flowers. He's
(23:44):
definitely got a lot of very devoted fans still, and
at least don't wear that indelible lipstick if you feel
like you have to pick a nice shade too. Eventually
it turns into a grief something that Wild would like.
He was very concerned with beauty um And we'd like
to end on a note that's a little less sad.
Sarah found a pretty cool article in the New York Times.
(24:06):
But though about Wild and copyright law. Yeah, weirdly enough,
you know the famous photo of him where he's wearing
that fur lined coat in the knee breeches and the
silk stockings. It was taken by a celebrity photographer named
Napoleon Seroni, and it did play a very important role
in copyright law in the United States. And that's because
(24:27):
the photo had been reproduced as part of this New
York Department stores advertising campaign after he got so famous
on his American tour, and Seroni sued and eventually the
Supreme Court ruled that his photo should fall under constitutional
copyright protection, and the ruling is still cited today and
(24:47):
disputes over copyright laws right the Borough Giles Lithographic Company
for since Sereni, there's a little known Oscar wild fact
for you and speaking of things of beauty that brings
us to listen our mail. Our beautiful objects for today
are two bookmarks that we received from listener Mary and Austin,
(25:11):
who is five days shy of turning thirteen, so I
guess she's thirteen by now. Happy birthday, Mary, and she
wrote suggesting we do a little bit of history on Texas,
specifically the Battle of the Alamo and a few other things.
You've been suggested Texas might be right for a series,
so let us know what you think. Yeah, I really
(25:32):
like the part in the back where she wrote Texas
loves you. So I'm just gonna go around today saying
that we're big in Texas. If you would like to
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(25:54):
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dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And in our
Lily Langtry episode, we considered following up with a podcast
(00:21):
on Oscar Wilde, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor
of this, And it's probably because wild is a really
inspired dramatist, and he's a talented poet and essayist. He's
one of the best loved Irish writers, which is pretty
tough company, i'd say. But he's also a really amazing man,
and I think that's the main reason people are so
(00:43):
interested in hearing about him. He's this bizarre dresser, he's
a public wit. He's a famously brilliant conversationalist, which is
something that's a little bit harder to talk about, of
course than his works. But one indicator of that is
that Churchill chose him as the person he would most
like to talk with in the afterlife. He's also famous,
(01:04):
of course for his tragic downfall. A libel suit that
turned against him cost him two years in prison and
ruined his name and reputation for decades after his death,
and Since June is Pride month in the United States,
it seemed like the perfect time to discuss a man
who was so famously persecuted because of his sexuality. So
(01:24):
we will start at the beginning, as we always do.
Oscar fingal Oh Flaherty Will's Wilde was born in Dublin.
I don't have overtames, I know clearly neither of us do.
He was born in eighteen fifty four and his family
was of Dutch origin, and they were descended from an artist,
appropriately enough, but the family had been in Ireland since
(01:46):
the late seventeenth century, and since then they had mostly
either worked in land management or worked as doctors. His father,
Sir William Wilde, was a renowned ear and eye doctor
and even invented a surgery for cataracts. He operated on
the King of Sweden, and his mother was Lady wild
Jane Francesca l g who was an Irish nationalist and
(02:07):
wrote poems and articles under the name Speranza. I think
I want that to be my nom de plume if
I ever take one on. Oscar is the second son,
and his birth is followed by that of a sister
named Zola, and she dies as a young girl, and
it's a pretty tragic event in his early years, switching
to a happier aspect of his childhood. Wild is a
(02:30):
dedicated scholar from the very start. He may have later
kept a library that mingled philosophers with the silly books
and French pornographic writings that we might think of, but
to forget his classical scholarly training was a mistake. And
a fact that Sarah and I liked a lot was
that he would tear off the top corner of pages
(02:52):
in his books and eat it while he was reading.
So a different kind of consumer. And how much paper
did this man eat? I mean, he was a very
avid reader. One of Sarah's friends lent her an Oscar
wild book and told her to be very careful with it,
and she retorted that Oscar Wilde ate his own books,
so he didn't really know what to say back to them.
(03:14):
So Wild earns a scholarship to Trinity College, Devlin, which
we've talked about before because it's where the books kept,
and from there he goes to Magdalen College, Oxford, and
he wins prizes in English and classics, and also really
comes to love the philosophies of John Ruskin and Walter Pater,
and I was thinking, what English class doesn't start with
(03:35):
some essay on Peter. It seems they all do requisite reading,
for sure, but he takes Peter's teaching to love art
for art's sake a step further, and as his son
Vivian later describes, that, he set out to idealize beauty
for beauty's sake. So I think that's what we can
think of as Wild's philosophy in his writing. His dorm
(03:55):
room was also a little different from mine. He decorated
it with blue China and Prince by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and Edward Burne Jones, which again big change from all
the mc shure I remember seeing in My friends. And
he was also an estete, believing that beauty is the
ideal that we should all strive for. Yeah, tying back
(04:15):
into that motto that we mentioned a second ago, But
we're going to skip ahead now to London in eighteen
seventy nine. Wild has just arrived in the city and
he's going to be a writer and an editor, and
he's going to do it in style because he dresses
really flamboyantly, which is something that might be lost on
modern people. You might just think it's old fashioned, funny clothes,
(04:39):
but people did not dress in black silk stockings. That
was not your typical attire in this period. And people
weren't wearing fur lined coats and knee breeches. That was
an Oscar Wild exclusive. And this and his work and
his larger than life personality got him satirized in the
periodical Punch, and Gilbert and Sullivan added him to the routine,
(05:02):
basing their character Bunthorne on him. And he didn't mind
being linked to the ascetic movement. He published poems in
eighteen eighty one with his own money to help enhance
this connection. Yeah, he didn't even mind if it was
a mocking connection. In some cases. He has a pretty
good sense of humor himself. He writes a play Vera
(05:23):
shortly after this, which essentially uh is just putting it
in a nice way. It's no importance of being earnest
and it only runs in New York City for one week,
not at all in London. But by eighteen eighty two
he's on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada.
And this is really how he builds up his fame.
When he arrives in New York, he famously declares that
(05:44):
he has nothing to declare but his genius, which is
going to go down in history books for sure. Um
and then he makes a name for himself touring, giving lectures,
having conversations with people, and becoming famous from when coming
back from It a star. He got to work in
Paris on his next play, The Duchess of Padua, and
(06:07):
he's writing it. It's a commissioned work for the actress
Mary Anderson, but she turns it down and doesn't like it,
which of course isn't good for business. So he picks
up the lecture tour circuit again, this time in England,
but it doesn't last long. By eight four, he's settled
down in London to marry Constance Lloyd, and despite his
(06:28):
later trial and Constance is distancing of her family from
her husband, she changes her and her son's last names.
We shouldn't see their marriage as a sham, Vivian wrote
about it. Oscar was romantically in love with his beautiful
young wife, and for some years he was ideally happy,
and they have two sons together, Vivian, as we mentioned
(06:48):
in eighty six and a year before that, Cyril and
Oscar works a day job of sorts and versus, a
reviewer for the Paul Malgazette and then as an editor
for Women's World until eighteen eighty nine. But another important
point to make here is that marriage marks a pretty
big shift in his working style, and he had mostly
(07:09):
written poetry before it, and after he turns almost exclusively
to prose. And we have a quote from biographer Boris
Brazil noting that he began his literary career as a
composer of sonorous and pleasing verses, in which, however, as
he himself admitted, there was more rhyme than reason. Yet
(07:30):
as he grew older he seemed to have lost all
taste for poetry. And I also think it's important to
note that his only major major poem written after his
marriage is The Ballad of Reading Jail, written after his imprisonment,
and his major literary years where he's known so much
for his literary brilliance, is a pretty short span. It's
(07:52):
from eighteen eighty eight to eighteen ninety four. His first
major piece is The Happy Prince in eighteen eighty eight.
That's a collection of fairy tales, but very poetical despite
being prose there for kids and adults, and Sarah and
I would like a copy. And there are more stories
in Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and other Stories, and later
(08:12):
A House of Pomegranates and the Sphinx. But also in
one he has his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which first appeared in Lippincott's magazine and was condemned by reviewers,
and the idea for the novel was actually based in fact,
he had gotten it a few years before when he
visited the studio of the painter Basil Ward, and Ward
(08:35):
was painting this really lovely young man, and after the
sitter left, the two agreed that it was too bad
that this man's beauty would eventually fade and die, and
they wish that the painting itself could age and the
man could remain forever young. And Wild obviously thinks that
sounds like the makings of a great story. And he
(08:56):
also collects some of his philosophical essays eventually into Intentions.
So this is a really really productive span of a
few years here for Wild. Of course, he's also writing
drama like Lady Windermere's Fan, which he described as one
of those modern drawing room plays with pink lampshades. It's
(09:17):
the epitome of a well built play, although Katie admitted
she was not as it's not one of my favorites.
But he was called for after its debut performance and
gave a bit too smug of a speech. Speaking to
the actors, he said, I congratulate you on the great
success of your performance, which persuades me that you think
almost as highly of the play as I do, so
(09:39):
not terribly modest there. He then heads off to Paris
to write Salome in French and Sarah Bernhardt, one of
the greatest actresses of her day, wants to star in it,
and she sends it into rehearsals, but the play is
stopped by the censor because no Biblical characters are allowed
on the English stage, and Wild is really upset by this,
(10:02):
really annoyed, and even considers renouncing his citizenship and moving
to France, which he probably should have. Yeah, it's it's
unfortunate that he doesn't, but he continues writing these funny
plays that are great hits in England. In eighteen ninety two,
he puts out a Woman of No importance, and this
time when the audience cries for author on the stage,
(10:24):
he's a little a little cooler with his speech. By
January eight, he hits the big time when an ideal
Husband debuts and is attended by the Prince of Wales
and Royalty does not come to a play on opening night,
so it's a big deal. I guess they're waiting to
find out if it's good before they bother. His last
(10:45):
play was the best of All, The Importance of Being Earnest,
which debuted February fourteen to eight. But that's also when
his troubles come to Adad and the root of all
this trouble dates back to the start of this big
literary success actually in when he met the twenty two
(11:06):
year old poet Lord Alfred Douglas, who was known as Bozy,
which was originally derived from his mother's nickname Boise. And
they meet at a tea party and they become really
good friends. They dined together, they stay at each other's houses,
they traveled together, and the first issue with this relationship
(11:26):
comes up when Douglas gives one of his friends an
old suit and the friend discovers letters in the pocket
and their letters always check your pocket, Yeah, don't leave
your incriminating letters behind. So Wild is blackmailed because these
are rather incriminating letters, and this still isn't too big
(11:47):
of a problem though. The big issue comes later when
Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who absolutely hates the
friendship between these two men and may have been a
little mentally unhinged himself, goes after Wild, and aside from
his involvement in this whole affair, he's best known for
the Queensbury Rules of amateur boxing, so perhaps not a
(12:10):
great man to get and a tangle with guy to
have trouble with for sure. So as we mentioned, he
didn't like this friendship, but he feels a little bit
better about it after he meets Wild, who managed to
woo him over a long lunch. But in right, when
Wild's fame is reaching its heights, he's angry again with
the whole thing and demands his son stop seeing him.
(12:32):
He says, your intimacy with this man Wild must either
cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies.
I am not going to try to analyze this intimacy,
and I make no charge. But to my mind, to
pose as a thing is as bad as to be it,
and Douglas replies, rather witheringly, what a funny little man
you are in a telegram too. You can just imagine
(12:53):
how is Boluste father must have taken that. So Queensbury
starts to get pretty menace thing after this, and he
threatens hotel managers and restaurant managers who may be entertaining
the man harboring the men. And he shows up at
the house of Oscar Wilde with a prize fighter, and
Oscar tells him, I do not know what the Queensbury
(13:15):
rules are, but the Oscar wild rule is to shoot
on site, which is a very menacing warning from this
poet who his motto is beauty for Beauty's sake. And then,
in at the opening night of the Importance of Being Earnest,
Queensbury attempts to disrupt the show, so wild orders additional
(13:37):
protection around the theater and Queensbury's left outside for the
course of the performance. But the final blow is when
he leaves a card at the club that wild and
his wife belonged to that says to Oscar Wilde, posing
as a psalmbed might and I'm not saying that incorrectly.
He spelled it incorrectly, and Wild was grossly offended. He wrote,
(13:59):
I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My
whole life seems ruined by this man. I don't know
what to do. Yeah, he's worried that his reputation is
going to be affected. He's at the pinnacle of his
fame right now, and Douglas, who really hates his father,
urges Wild to sue Forliabel, and a lot of his
(14:19):
friends think this is a terrible idea. They tell him
that he'll have no hope winning it, and that he
should just get out of the country, move to France,
where it's more tolerant, and continue his writing career. But
he decides to go ahead with the suit and engages
Edward Clark to prosecute, and swears to him that there's
no basis to this libel. So that brings us to
(14:41):
our trial. April third. Wild is incredibly confident with his suit.
He testifies that I said to him, how dare you
say such things as you do about your son and me?
And he also faces off Queensbury's key piece of evidence,
a letter from Wild to Douglas. Clark urges the people
(15:01):
to remember that Wild as a poet, and that they
should take this letter as the expression of true poetic
feeling and nothing more than that. So while this letter
may seem really out there to you regular people, this
is a normal stuff for a poet exactly. And Wild
is really confident, as he said a second ago, he's
(15:22):
sure that his fame and his popularity are going to
carry this. And this even extends to his cross examination
by Edward Carson, who's representing Queensbury, and Wild's responses make
for really really good reading. They're witty, they're sharp. Sometimes
they contradict each other, so maybe it's not the best
(15:44):
best stuff to be saying on the stand, but it
does make for an inner tran read. The first part
of the questioning focused on his literary works, which Wild
defended against charges of immorality. He said, there's no such
thing as an immoral word. Books are well written or
badly written. That his cocky responses started to die down
(16:06):
when Carson asks about his relationships his presence to young men.
They're low intellectual capacity and perhaps unsuitability of some of
his friends. But while tried to play up his love
of youth, which was something he valued in his friends
above education or social standing. Yeah, so he tries to
(16:26):
make like he's an equal opportunity friend here and he
just loves youth. And things get really serious when Carson
announces that he'll be introducing a witness who had a
sexual relationship with Wild, and this is very dangerous territory
and Clark knows it. And that's because in eighteen nine,
the Criminal Law Amendment Act had passed which made it
(16:48):
illegal to commit gross indecency, which was essentially criminalizing homosexuality.
So it meant that this libel suit could become a
criminal one with Oscar Wild going to jail. So wild
counsel advised him to drop the suit and no jury
will convict Queensbury. It's just time to let all of
(17:11):
this go. But by the next afternoon, Queensbury's representation has
pushed the case ahead into criminal territory and the inspector
delivers the arrest warrant to Magistrate John Bridges, who adjourns
the court for a short period, which may have been
his way of trying to let Wild escape, you know,
heading out on the train to Europe, but he doesn't.
(17:34):
And his name comes off of the importance of being earnest. Yeah,
off of the playbills off the marquee, uh, and he
just feels like his life is absolutely crumbling, that this
the suit that he felt so confident about, has completely
backfired on him. And on April, his first criminal trial
(17:55):
begins and Wild is accused of gross indecencies and conspira
see to commit gross indecencies. Um, he's not prosecuted for sodomy,
but mail witnesses come to court and testify against him.
And when he himself appears, he's very different from how
he was in the earlier trial. He's quiet and respectful, yeah,
respectfully denying everything. And in Clark's closing statement, he echoes
(18:20):
most modern thoughts and says, clear from this fearful imputation
one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters
of today. And in clearing him, clear society from a
stain which we interpreted as meaning that this shouldn't even
be a crime. It shouldn't even be in court, and
they shouldn't even be having to respond to it. Well,
(18:42):
and how embarrassing to to put one of your biggest,
most famous citizens on trial for something like this. So
the jury can't reach a verdict, although they quit him
on one charge and he's released on bail before the
second trial begins, and you would think people would let
it be at this point that that would be the
(19:03):
end of it, and even Carson is urging people to
lighten up, but the Liberal government of England wants a conviction.
One theory is that there were political motives for pursuing
wild with this great intensity, and it's likely that the
Prime Minister, Archibald Primrose, who was the Earl of Roseberry,
(19:24):
had had an affair with the brother of Douglas, a
man named Francis, and Francis is likely to have killed himself,
and it's not long after he did so that his father,
Queensberry started going after Oscar Wilde so intensely starts this
manic attack on him, hoping to quote save his other son.
(19:47):
And it's possible that if Rosebery didn't go after wild
and didn't try to to see his prosecution through to
a conviction, that his own case, in his own crime,
may have been at supposed by Queensberry. According to Douglas Linder,
Roseberry had insomnia and depression during the trial, but it
disappeared afterward, which perhaps gives a little more credence to
(20:10):
that theory, but this time the prosecution is led by
Solicitor General Frank Lockwood, and While describes Lockwood's treatment of
him as an appalling denunciation of me, like something out
of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of
Savonarola's indictments of the popes of Realm, which we all
know what that's like. So the jury finds Wild guilty
(20:33):
on all counts but one, and he sentenced to two
years of hard labor. Most of this is served at
reading jail and his sons. This is a really sad
aspect of the story. His sons are sent to Switzerland
and they never see their father again. Their last name
is changed them. The wife of Oscar Wild is really
(20:54):
doing all she can to help shore up their reputation
for the future, but they're still actual discriminated against as
adults because of who their father was. And while he's
in jail, Wild right stuprofundus a letter to Douglas, and
when Douglas receives it, he destroys it after the first
few pages. And Sarah, you read some of that. It's
(21:16):
pretty brutal, and I think Douglas thought that it was
the only copy and he could just get this really
detailed account of their relationship and of all of the
things that went wrong, just erased from history. And it's
not just a regretful letter because the friendship resulted in
while being in jail. After all, he's writing this from prison,
(21:37):
But it's regretful because he feels like Douglas cost him
his art, and he's ashamed of how much money they spent,
and he accuses Douglas of loving his life, loving his uh,
all the glamorous sides of celebrity writer. Yeah, the play
premiers and the parties and the fame, but not having
(21:58):
any respect for the quiet labor that actually went into
all his writing, the daily drudgery of sitting down and
actually getting it on paper. Wild had also sent this
manuscript to his publisher, Robert Ross, intending to revise it later,
and parts of it were published in nineteen oh five.
(22:18):
Wild and Douglas reunited for a time after prison, but
after Wild's death, Douglas tried to get the manuscript from Ross,
but he instead presented it to the British Museum and
embargoed its contents for sixty years. So imagine when this
came out in nineteen sixty it was made quite a
big deal. Um So wild is bankrupt when he comes
(22:40):
out of jail and he goes to France to try
to kick start his writing career again. But the only
thing he really produces is the ballot of writing jail,
and he writes letters to editors in concern about prison
conditions though, so he's he's still out there, he's just
not producing it anywhere near the same frequency he was
(23:00):
before his trial. Oscar Wilde died of acute meningitis from
the ear infection November thirtie in Paris, and on his
deathbed he was received into the Catholic Church, which he
had long been interested in along with mysticism, and he's
buried at Parla Chaise in Paris. And interestingly, on the
(23:20):
same trip, I saw the memorial to him at Reading
and his tomb in Paris, and it's a pretty crazy contrast.
The Paris memorial is this huge winged figure and it
is covered with lipstick kisses. There's a little sign discouraging
people to go kiss Oscar Wilde's tomb, but clearly most
people are not following that. It's surrounded by flowers. He's
(23:44):
definitely got a lot of very devoted fans still, and
at least don't wear that indelible lipstick if you feel
like you have to pick a nice shade too. Eventually
it turns into a grief something that Wild would like.
He was very concerned with beauty um And we'd like
to end on a note that's a little less sad.
Sarah found a pretty cool article in the New York Times.
(24:06):
But though about Wild and copyright law. Yeah, weirdly enough,
you know the famous photo of him where he's wearing
that fur lined coat in the knee breeches and the
silk stockings. It was taken by a celebrity photographer named
Napoleon Seroni, and it did play a very important role
in copyright law in the United States. And that's because
(24:27):
the photo had been reproduced as part of this New
York Department stores advertising campaign after he got so famous
on his American tour, and Seroni sued and eventually the
Supreme Court ruled that his photo should fall under constitutional
copyright protection, and the ruling is still cited today and
(24:47):
disputes over copyright laws right the Borough Giles Lithographic Company
for since Sereni, there's a little known Oscar wild fact
for you and speaking of things of beauty that brings
us to listen our mail. Our beautiful objects for today
are two bookmarks that we received from listener Mary and Austin,
(25:11):
who is five days shy of turning thirteen, so I
guess she's thirteen by now. Happy birthday, Mary, and she
wrote suggesting we do a little bit of history on Texas,
specifically the Battle of the Alamo and a few other things.
You've been suggested Texas might be right for a series,
so let us know what you think. Yeah, I really
(25:32):
like the part in the back where she wrote Texas
loves you. So I'm just gonna go around today saying
that we're big in Texas. If you would like to
send us email, you can at History Podcast at how
stuff works dot com. You can also follow us on
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to day basis at missed in History. You can also
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(25:54):
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feel free to check out our homepage at www dot
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