This inexpensive coffee-table book contains a brief life of Oscar Wilde and well-chosen illustrations. The author of the text, Martin Fido, taxes Wilde with being a minor writer, although he grants that the novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and his poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” are masterpieces. The plays—notably “The Importance of Being Earnest”—were the best contribution to the British stage since the Restoration comedies and taught Wilde’s fellow Irish Protestant, Shaw, a thing or two about witty dialogue. And the book-length, spleen-filled epistle to his “Bosie,” Sir Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, gets a high rating as well.
Wilde’s fame rests more, however, on his downfall. As Fido casts it, Wilde became the victim of his own hubris in having Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, arrested and put on trial for libel. That vigorous but eccentric exemplar of British manhood, remembered today for codifying the rules of boxing, had accused Wilde of being a “sondomite” and blamed him for corrupting his son, Alfred (although it was far too late for that by the time the two met).
The suit led to Wilde’s sentencing to two years’ hard labor in prison, from which he emerged a broken man. His wife changed her name and took their two sons to the continent to escape notoriety. As Fido tells it, the severe sentence led to a slackening of the hounding of homosexuals in Britain for a half-century. When it flared up again after World War Two (Alan Turing, for example), another wave of revulsion over the penalties set in, leading to decriminalization.
This then is the legacy of Oscar Wilde. His success during his lifetime was not primarily literary, but social. He was a brilliant dinner guest, sought after by aristocrats not because they thought of him as one of their own (as Wilde wished to believe) but as witty entertainment for their other guests. When lampooned in Punch and by Gilbert and Sullivan, he took it in good nature. Among his deepest friendships were leading actresses and beauties of the day, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, and Lily Langtry. Fido stresses Wilde’s qualities of generosity and sympathy.
All in all, this book is a good introduction to the life and times of a pop star from the last years of the Victorian era.