87 facts about Oscar Wilde!

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!

1. His full name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde
2. He was born on the 16th of November in 1854.
3. He was an Irish poet and writer.
4. He was the second of three children.
5. Wilde’s parents were successful Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin.
6. His mother had distant roots from Italy.
7. Under the pseudonym “Speranza” (the Italian word for ‘hope’), she wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848.
8. She was a lifelong Irish nationalist.
9. She was interested in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home.
10. His father was Ireland’s leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon.
11. He was descended from a Dutchman.
12. In 1864 he was knighted for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland.
13. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore.
14. At a quite young age, he learned to speak fluent French and German. At university,
15. Oscar Wilde left his birthplace to study at Trinity College.
16. He studied there from 1871 to 1874.
17. Trinity placed him with scholars.
18. As a student, Wilde worked with professor Mahaffy on the latter’s book Social Life in Greece.
19. Wilde, despite later reservations, called professor Mahaffy as his first and best teacher.
20. About the scholarship, Oscar Wilde mentioned that it was the and the scholar who showed him how to love Greek things.
21. For his part, Mahaffy boasted of having created Wilde.
22. The University Philosophical Society also provided an education, as members discussed intellectual and artistic subjects such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
23. Oscar Wilde quickly became an established member. 
24. Members of the Society mocked his emerging aestheticism.
25. He demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford.
26. He presented a paper titled “Aesthetic Morality”.
27. At Trinity, he came first in his class in his first year.
28. He won a scholarship by competitive examination in his second and, in his finals.
29. In addition, he won the Berkeley Gold Medal in Greek, the University’s highest academic award.
30. 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.
31. At Magdalen, he read Greats from 1874 to 1878.
32. From there he applied to join the Oxford Union.
33. He failed though to be elected.
34. When Oscar Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met again Florence Balcombe.
35. She was a childhood sweetheart.
36. She became got engaged with another man and they got married in 1878.
37. Oscar Wilde was disappointed bu wrote to her.
38. He mentioned his memories from their sweet moments, while they were closed to each other.
39. He also mentioned his intention to “return to England, probably for good.”
40. This he did in 1878, only briefly visiting Ireland twice after that.
41. Then he started searching for his next steps and he entered the Chancellor’s Essay prize of 1879.
42. At this time of his life, he had been publishing lyrics and poems in magazines since entering Trinity College.
43. He had been publishing pieces of his work, especially in Kottabos and Dublin University Magazine.
44. In mid-1881, at 27 years old, he published Poems, which collected, revised and expanded his poems.
45. 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.
46. Wilde journeyed on the SS Arizona.
47. He arrived on the 2nd of January in 1882.
48. He disembarked the following day.
49. Originally the journey was planned to last four months.
50. It continued for almost a year due to the commercial success.
51. Wilde sought to transpose the beauty he saw in art into daily life
52. There he started becoming associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism.
53. Aestheticism was led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin.
54. Wilde and aestheticism were both mercilessly caricatured and criticized in the press.
55. 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.
56. In August he briefly returned to New York for the production of Vera, his first play.
57. This play was turned down in London
58. . He reportedly entertained the other passengers with “Ave Imperatrix!, A Poem on England”.
59. The play was initially well received by the audience.
60. When the critics wrote bad reviews about it, attendance fell sharply and the play closed a week after it had opened.
61. Wilde had to return to England.
62. In England, he continued to lecture on topics including Personal Impressions of America, The Value of Art in Modern Life, and Dress.
63. There he was introduced to his wife.
64. Oscar Wilde and Constance Lloyd got married on 29th of Ma in 1884 at the Anglican St James’s Church, Paddington, in London.
65. His wife was the daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy Queen’s Counsel, and his wife.
66. Criticism over artistic matters in The Pall Mall Gazette provoked a letter in self-defense.
67. Soon Oscar Wilde was a contributor to that and other journals from 1885 until 1887.
68. He enjoyed reviewing and journalism.
69. He could organize and share his views on art, literature, and life, yet in a format less tedious than lecturing.
70. He was also the head editor of a woman magazine.
71. 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.
72. Two pieces of fiction were usually included, one to be read to children and another for the ladies to be read by themselves.
73. 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.
74. Reviewers immediately criticized the novel’s decadence and homosexuality.
75. 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”.
76. Due to his controversial theories and aestheticism, he had also been to some trials.
77. He has also been to jail some times.
78. Though Wilde’s health had suffered greatly from the harshness and diet of prison, he had a feeling of spiritual renewal.
79. After jail, he ended up living in Paris.
80. He was really poor and he used to spend all of his money on alcohol.
81. By 25 November 1900, Wilde had developed meningitis.
82. On the 30th of November in 1900 he died.
83. Oscar Wilde was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris.
84. His tomb was transferred in 1950.
85. 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.
86. 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”.
87. 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.