WILDE, OSCAR FINGALL O'FLAHERTIE WILLS (1856-190o), English author, son of Sir William Wilde, a famous Irish surgeon, was born in Dublin on Oct. 15, 1856; his mother, Jane Francisca Elgee, was well known in Dublin as a graceful writer of verse and prose, under the pen-name of "Speranza." Having distinguished himself in classics at Trinity college, Dub lin, Oscar Wilde went to Magdalen college, Oxford, in 1874, and won the Newdigate prize in 1878 with his poem "Ravenna," be sides taking a first-class in classical Moderations and in Literae Humaniores. At Oxford he adopted what to undergraduates ap peared the effeminate pose of casting scorn on manly sports, wearing his hair long, decorating his rooms with peacock's feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art, which he de clared it his desire to "live up to," affecting a lackadaisical man ner, and professing intense emotions on the subject of "art for art's sake"—then a newfangled doctrine which J. M. Whistler was bringing into prominence. Wilde made himself the apostle of this new cult. At Oxford his behaviour procured him a duck ing in the Cherwell, and a wrecking of his rooms, but the cult spread. Its affectations were burlesqued in Gilbert and Sullivan's travesty Patience (1881). As the leading "aesthete," Oscar Wilde became one of the most prominent personalities of the day ; his affected paradoxes and his witty sayings were quoted on all sides, and in 1882 he went on a lecturing tour in the United States, where he wrote a drama, Vera, which was produced in New York. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd. He had already published in 1881 a selection of his poems, which, however, only attracted admiration in a limited circle. In 1888 appeared The Happy Prince and Other Tales, illustrated by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood. This. charming volume of fairy tales was followed up by Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories (1891), and later by a second collection of fairy stories The House of Pome granates (1892), acknowledged by the author to be "intended neither for the British child nor the British public." The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) was the mirror of the new aesthete. In 1891 his tragedy in blank verse, The Duchess of Padua, was pro duced in New York. But Wilde's first real success with the larger
public as a dramatist was with Lady Windermere's Fan (St. James's Theatre, 1892), followed by A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The wit and brilliance of these pieces helped them to keep the stage, and they are still occasionally revived. In 1893 the licenser of plays refused a licence to Wilde's Salome, but it was printed in French in 1893, and produced in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1894, and was translated into English in the same year by Lord Alfred Douglas.
His success as a dramatist had by this time gone some way to disabuse hostile critics of the suspicions as regards his personal character which had been excited by the apparent looseness of morals which since his Oxford days it had always pleased him to affect ; but to the consternation of his friends, who had ceased to credit the existence, of any real moral obliquity, in 1895 came fatal revelations as the result of his bringing a libel action against the marquis of Queensberry; arid at the Old Bailey, in May, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for offences under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. He went bankrupt soon after. It was a melancholy end to a singularly brilliant career. After leaving prison in 1897 he lived mainly on the Continent, at Berneval and later in Paris under the name of "Sebastian Melmoth." He died in Paris on Nov. 30, 1900. In 1898 he published his powerful Ballad of Reading Gaol. His Collected Poems, containing some beautiful verse, had been issued in 1892. While in prison he wrote an apology for his life which was placed in the hands of his executor and published in 1905.
Wilde's works were edited in 13 vols. (1908) by Robert Ross, and two small collections of letters to Ross, After Reading (1921) and After Berneval (1922), were published. See also A. Gide, Oscar Wilde (19o5) ; A. Ransome, Oscar Wilde (1912) ; B. Fehr, Studien zu Oscar Wildes Gedichten (1918) ; F. Harris, Oscar Wilde, his life and confessions (2 vols., N.Y. 1918) ; E. Bendz. Oscar Wilde: a retrospect (Vienna, 1921).