Oscar Wilde is one of the most famous writers in the world.
Oscar Wilde was an influential writer and a controversial personality, who created some of the best pieces of literature in the world. Let’s see more facts about him!
- His full name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde
- He was born on the 16th of November in 1854.
- He was an Irish poet and writer.
- He was the second of three children.
- Wilde’s parents were successful Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin.
- His mother had distant roots from Italy.
- Under the pseudonym “Speranza” (the Italian word for ‘hope’), she wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848.
- She was a lifelong Irish nationalist.
- She was interested in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home.
- His father was Ireland’s leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon.
- He was descended from a Dutchman.
- In 1864 he was knighted for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland.
- He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore.
- At a quite young age, he learned to speak fluent French and German. At university,
- Oscar Wilde left his birthplace to study at Trinity College.
- He studied there from 1871 to 1874.
- Trinity placed him with scholars.
- As a student, Wilde worked with professor Mahaffy on the latter’s book Social Life in Greece.
- Wilde, despite later reservations, called professor Mahaffy as his first and best teacher.
- About the scholarship, Oscar Wilde mentioned that it was the and the scholar who showed him how to love Greek things.
- For his part, Mahaffy boasted of having created Wilde.
- The University Philosophical Society also provided an education, as members discussed intellectual and artistic subjects such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
- Oscar Wilde quickly became an established member.
- Members of the Society mocked his emerging aestheticism.
- He demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford.
- He presented a paper titled “Aesthetic Morality”.
- At Trinity, he came first in his class in his first year.
- He won a scholarship by competitive examination in his second and, in his finals.
- In addition, he won the Berkeley Gold Medal in Greek, the University’s highest academic award.
- He was also encouraged to compete for a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford – which he won easily, having already studied Greek for over nine years.
- At Magdalen, he read Greats from 1874 to 1878.
- From there he applied to join the Oxford Union.
- He failed though to be elected.
- When Oscar Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met again Florence Balcombe.
- She was a childhood sweetheart.
- She became got engaged with another man and they got married in 1878.
- Oscar Wilde was disappointed bu wrote to her.
- He mentioned his memories from their sweet moments, while they were closed to each other.
- He also mentioned his intention to “return to England, probably for good.”
- This he did in 1878, only briefly visiting Ireland twice after that.
- Then he started searching for his next steps and he entered the Chancellor’s Essay prize of 1879.
- At this time of his life, he had been publishing lyrics and poems in magazines since entering Trinity College.
- He had been publishing pieces of his work, especially in Kottabos and Dublin University Magazine.
- In mid-1881, at 27 years old, he published Poems, which collected, revised and expanded his poems.
- An English impresario, invited Wilde to make a lecture tour of North America, simultaneously priming the pump for the US tour of Patience and selling this most charming aesthete to the American public.
- Wilde journeyed on the SS Arizona.
- He arrived on the 2nd of January in 1882.
- He disembarked the following day.
- Originally the journey was planned to last four months.
- It continued for almost a year due to the commercial success.
- Wilde sought to transpose the beauty he saw in art into daily life
- There he started becoming associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism.
- Aestheticism was led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin.
- Wilde and aestheticism were both mercilessly caricatured and criticized in the press.
- His earnings, plus expected income from The Duchess of Padua, allowed him to move to Paris between February and mid-May 1883. While there he met Robert Sherard, whom he entertained constantly.
- In August he briefly returned to New York for the production of Vera, his first play.
- This play was turned down in London
- . He reportedly entertained the other passengers with “Ave Imperatrix!, A Poem on England”.
- The play was initially well received by the audience.
- When the critics wrote bad reviews about it, attendance fell sharply and the play closed a week after it had opened.
- Wilde had to return to England.
- In England, he continued to lecture on topics including Personal Impressions of America, The Value of Art in Modern Life, and Dress.
- There he was introduced to his wife.
- Oscar Wilde and Constance Lloyd got married on 29th of Ma in 1884 at the Anglican St James’s Church, Paddington, in London.
- His wife was the daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy Queen’s Counsel, and his wife.
- Criticism over artistic matters in The Pall Mall Gazette provoked a letter in self-defense.
- Soon Oscar Wilde was a contributor to that and other journals from 1885 until 1887.
- He enjoyed reviewing and journalism.
- He could organize and share his views on art, literature, and life, yet in a format less tedious than lecturing.
- He was also the head editor of a woman magazine.
- He renamed it as The Woman’s World and raised its tone, adding serious articles on parenting, culture, and politics, while keeping discussions of fashion and arts.
- Two pieces of fiction were usually included, one to be read to children and another for the ladies to be read by themselves.
- The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as the lead story in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, along with five others.
- Reviewers immediately criticized the novel’s decadence and homosexuality.
- Wilde claimed the plot was “an idea that is as old as the history of literature but to which I have given a new form”.
- Due to his controversial theories and aestheticism, he had also been to some trials.
- He has also been to jail some times.
- Though Wilde’s health had suffered greatly from the harshness and diet of prison, he had a feeling of spiritual renewal.
- After jail, he ended up living in Paris.
- He was really poor and he used to spend all of his money on alcohol.
- By 25 November 1900, Wilde had developed meningitis.
- On the 30th of November in 1900 he died.
- Oscar Wilde was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris.
- His tomb was transferred in 1950.
- In 2011 the tomb was cleaned of the many lipstick marks left there by admirers and a glass barrier was installed to prevent further marks or damage.
- In 2014 Wilde was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ+ people who have “made significant contributions in their fields”.
- In 2017, Wilde was among an estimated 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts that were no longer considered offenses under the Policing and Crime Act 2017.
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