Except for Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, no 19th-century British writer is as familiar to people who aren’t literary specialists as Oscar Wilde.
Wilde’s 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a dissolute young man who makes a Faustian bargain to remain forever youthful and beautiful-looking while his face in his portrait ages hideously to reflect the ravages of his debauchery, may not be read as much nowadays. But everyone, especially in Hollywood, knows the “Dorian Gray” syndrome as a metaphor for the terror of losing one’s looks and the grotesque efforts to which one might go to keep them. Wilde’s play Salome, notable for the racy Decadent Movement illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in its 1896 printed edition, brought the phrase “dance of the seven veils” indelibly to the New Testament story of the young princess who asked her stepfather, Herod, for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Hardly a year goes by when there isn’t a revival somewhere of The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde’s witticism-packed society comedy that premiered in London in 1895.
And then there are Wilde’s endlessly quoted aphorisms, laugh-out-loud twists on hoary platitudes that he worked into the dialogue of his plays and (more often) uttered spur of the moment: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” “Work is the curse of the drinking class.” “I can resist everything except temptation.” He quipped during his last days, destitute and deathly ill from a metastasizing ear infection after his criminal conviction for “gross indecency with certain male persons” (in 1895, while Earnest was playing to sold-out audiences) resulted in a prison sentence, exile, permanent estrangement from his wife and sons, and the destruction of his finances and literary career: “I am dying beyond my means.”
That ruinous final act gave Wilde the aura of a tragic figure whose life had moved in a clear narrative arc from obscurity to greatness and then to crushing downfall, with premonitions of catastrophe at every stage. It was a myth perpetuated by the literary scholar Richard Ellmann, whose prizewinning, posthumously published 688-page biography of Wilde quickly achieved authoritative status, and in more than two dozen Wilde-centric novels, plays, and movies to date. Wilde’s latest mythic incarnation is as an LGBTQ saint, exemplified by such phenomena as The Oscar Wilde Temple art installation in New York featuring a haloed Wilde as Jesus on the way to his crucifixion.
This new biography of Wilde by Matthew Sturgis is a demythologizing effort and also an attempt to correct the record. Ellmann, in his rush to finish his book before succumbing to Lou Gehrig’s disease at age 69, made many errors of fact noted by other scholars. Furthermore, Sturgis had access to the full transcript, unearthed only in 2003, of Wilde’s libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry for publicly labeling him a “sodomite” because he (correctly) suspected that Wilde was homosexually involved with his son, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. Other letters and manuscripts by Wilde have similarly surfaced in recent years, not to mention more up-to-date historical assessments. Sturgis’s account of Wilde’s life approaches Ellmann’s in length at 667 pages plus an extensive apparatus, but it is eminently readable and indeed a page-turner because of its subject’s inimitable and often simultaneous penchants for self-dramatization and self-destruction. Instead of supplying a tragic arc to Wilde’s life, Sturgis writes, his aim is “to view him with a historian’s eye, to give a sense of contingency, to chart his own experience of life as he experienced it.”
For that reason, Sturgis devotes more space than most biographers to Wilde’s childhood and education. He was born in Dublin in 1854 to parents who were well-fixed and well-regarded members of the Anglo-Irish upper-middle class. His father, Sir William Wilde, knighted in 1864, was a noted eye and ear surgeon and amateur archaeologist (and also man about town, fathering three illegitimate children by two different mothers along with his three legitimate offspring, Oscar, an older brother, Willie, and a younger sister, Isola, who died at age 9). His 6-foot-tall mother, Jane, from whom he inherited his enormous height and heavyset physique, was a fervent Irish nationalist who wrote poetry under the nom de plume “Speranza” for an Irish radical weekly.
Young Oscar excelled at languages, especially classical languages, first at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Oxford. There he encountered “aestheticism,” the late 19th-century artistic and literary fashion that cultivated the “beautiful,” especially that of past ages, and especially as manifested in clothing and interior decoration. That suited Wilde’s burgeoning taste for the flamboyant, and he quickly became “aesthetic to the last degree,” as an acquaintance described him, decorating his rooms at Magdalen College with William Morris wallpapers, bouquets of lilies and sunflowers, rainbow-hued cut glass, and a treasured set of blue china. He grew his hair long and cultivated his signature sartorial look: velvet jackets and sweeping capes (the signature green carnation in his lapel was a later affectation, adopted during the 1890s).
Wilde was perhaps the first celebrity to become famous for being famous. Taking up residence in London after leaving Oxford in 1878, he produced no literary works beyond a volume of poems that he had expensively bound and a single failed play, The Duchess of Padua. He had no money, either, since his father, who died in 1876, had, like his younger son, believed in living large, and on loans after his capital ran out. Oscar survived for more than a decade on his wit and eloquence (which made him a valued social guest), his flair for networking in literary and theatrical circles, and desultory journalism, including editing a women’s magazine.
In 1882, at age 28, he was invited to do a North American lecture tour on aestheticism and related subjects. It was a roaring success, stretching out from its planned four months to nearly a year, with Wilde wowing silver miners in Leadville, Colorado, and ladies in Halifax. In 1884, he married Constance Lloyd, who had a little bit of money; the Wildes’ two sons were born in 1885 and 1886. It was not until the 1890s, with Dorian Gray and the production of the first of a series of hit plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in 1892, that he was earning enough to nearly support his increasingly extravagant lifestyle.
Astonishingly for a man whose early writings often extolled the beauty of boys and who had formed intense male friendships that were more like romantic attachments, Wilde had no homosexual experience until 1886, when he was in his thirties and met then-17-year-old Robert “Robbie” Ross. That first encounter brought Wilde the “joy, the delirium” (Wilde’s own words) of sexual liberation. But as Sturgis writes: “Henceforth his actions would demand secrecy and the elaborations of a double life.” There were more young men, quite a few more. In 1891, Wilde met Bosie, then an undergraduate at Oxford and an aspiring poet of distinctly less talent than Wilde (he coined the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”), and became infatuated. Bosie was a piece of work, vain, petulant, and whiny, even as Wilde, generous to a fault, showered him with expensive gifts and treats. It is difficult to decide who in the Queensberry affair was the worse: the brutish, vindictive marquess determined to destroy Wilde, or his self-centered, tantrum-prone son.
Bosie’s promiscuity was “voracious,” as Sturgis writes, and he introduced Wilde to a netherworld of boy prostitution: professional rent-boys and working-class teenagers willing to service older men for a good dinner or a suit of new clothes. Wilde liked to hand out silver cigarette cases, and he handed out a good many. Few of these erotic finds were over age 18, and at least one youth was only 14. Sturgis does not varnish over these episodes, and he paints quite a sordid picture. Those who think that Wilde’s two-year prison sentence for such activities was outrageous might consider what sort of sentence he might receive under current laws regarding paid sex with minors.
After his libel action against Queensberry failed, Wilde’s arrest was imminent, and friends urged him to leave the country. Wilde refused, a decision that some have attributed to a stance of heroic defiance but that Sturgis contends was mostly due to inertia. Two criminal trials followed, in which Wilde’s efforts to sidestep prosecutors’ questions with his customary witticisms made him look even worse. Victorian prisons were no joke, especially for a 40-year-old man used to luxurious living, and amid many other indignities, he fell and ruptured his right eardrum; the resultant chronic infection led ultimately to his death. He had always been but one step ahead of his creditors even when he was raking in money from his plays, and his conviction was followed by bankruptcy and the loss of his London house and all his possessions, including his manuscripts. Still, he was right back with Bosie within months after his release.
The day before Wilde died on Nov. 30, 1900, he was received into the Catholic Church. He had been fascinated by Catholicism his entire life, but the fascination seemed mostly to center on the church’s sumptuous rituals and its naked, bleeding martyrs, and every time he thought about conversion, which was often, he got distracted by something else. By the time a priest arrived, summoned by Ross to Wilde’s deathbed in Paris, he was drifting in and out of consciousness, but the priest was convinced (Sturgis isn’t so sure) that he possessed enough awareness to consent to a Catholic baptism and to try to repeat prayers of contrition for his sins.
Still, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a sometimes affecting, 109-stanza poem about the miseries of crime and prison Wilde wrote following his release, is laced with imagery of Christian forgiveness for even the weakest and lowest of condemned criminals: “How else but through a broken heart / May Lord Christ enter in?” Oscar Wilde was a man who knew very well that he could resist everything except temptation.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
