10 Ways Of Thinking About Oscar Wilde

With thanks to Seán Doran, Founder of Happy Days Enniskillen.

1. Oscar Wilde was a descendent, on his father’s side, from Dutchman Colonel de Wilde who came to Ireland in 1690 to fight for William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. His father, William Wilde, was knighted the year Oscar arrived in Enniskillen, 1864. His mother, Jane Wilde, wrote under the penname of Speranza (Hope, she had distant Italian ancestry) and was a lifelong Irish Nationalist. His father was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon and fatefully, it was through an ear injury incurred in a fall whilst in prison that later brought about Oscar Wilde’s death in Paris at the age of 46 (d.1900).
2. Portora Royal School Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, Ireland, was Oscar Wilde’s first formal school. Up to the age of 9 he was home-schooled in Dublin with the support of a French nursemaid and German governess, making him fluent in both languages. His love of the Greek and Latin classics was nurtured at Portora. His seven years spent in Enniskillen (1864-71) was the longest he lived anywhere outside of Dublin, his birthplace, and London, where he lived most of his adult life. It was from the dormitory window of Portora that Wilde could look across the island town of Enniskillen to the hill on which stood Cole’s Monument. The statue at the top (a model for Nelson’s monument in Trafalgar Square) sparked his imagination for The Happy Prince.
3. Wilde’s young sister, Isola (lit. island), whom he dearly loved died at the age of 9 while Oscar was at Portora. He later wrote one of his most touching poems, Requiescat (1881), in memory of Isola. His ‘Tread lightly…’ pre-echoes W B Yeats’ 1899 poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven with the line ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. (Oscar Wilde, Requiescat)
4. Unlike Samuel Beckett, who attended Portora 50 years later, Wilde did not take to sports. He did however learn some boxing at Portora which served him well at Oxford University when, to his fellow students’ surprise, he successfully beat off several attackers. At Oxford however he preferred to be more active in Freemasonry, loving its dress, secrecy and ritual. Ironically, many years later in 1895 the instigator of his downfall, The Marquess of Queensbury, endorsed the rules of boxing that were named after him – The Queensbury Rules.
5. Although born into the Church of Ireland, Catholic theology and liturgy were a lifelong interest of Wilde’s. He fell speechless on meeting Pope Pius IX. In Reading Gaol he requested, as part of his book quota, St. Augustine’s Confessions plus work by Cardinal Newman. After his prison release in 1897 he wrote to The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) requesting that he be allowed to attend a six-month retreat. On being turned down, he wept. On his death-bed in Paris (1900) he was finally baptised into the Catholic faith by a member of the Passionist order and given the last rites.
6. Wilde’s first love in Dublin was Florence Balcombe who later went on to marry Bram Stoker. Wilde loved his wife, Constance – with whom he had two sons – even though he led a double bisexual life.
7. Wilde’s first three books were all fairy tales. He was a poet, a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a reviewer and a journalist. As editor of The Woman’s World he wrote a series of astute columns defending Charles Stewart Parnell when he was accused of inciting murder.
8. Wilde believed in the redemptive, developmental power of the arts, writing, If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly will see its moral lesson. He was a passionate follower of the Victorian writer John Ruskin who wrote, The importance of art lies in its potential for the betterment of society. Ruskin admired beauty but believed it must be allied with, and applied to, moral good.
9. Wilde was the sole literary signatory of George Bernard Shaw’s petition for the pardon of the anarchists arrested (and later executed) after the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. Wilde’s last work was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and a stanza from the poem became Wilde’s epitaph on his tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris:
   ‘And alien tears will for him / Pity’s long-broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men, / And outcasts always mourn.’
10. In 1995, on the centenary of Wilde’s imprisonment, a stained-glass window was installed in his name at Westminster Abbey. In The Guardian in 2014, literary critic Robert McCrum rated The Portrait of Dorian Gray as the 27th best novel ever written in English. In 2017, Wilde was among 50,000 homosexuals pardoned by The Crown under what was known as the Alan Turing Law.