The downfall and end of Oscar Wilde

Let that be a lesson to all witty cocksuckers!

I know just how he must have felt.

Bosie was the original bitchy bottom.

LOVED OSCAR

What a fabulous mind i wish i had known him.

The lesson is to not take up with pretty twinks who have daddy issues out the wazoo.

It really is a tragic story; I imagine Wilde as someone like Stephen Fry (though clearly not so old & ugly), very charming & witty but also mentally ill & destructive

No, the moral of the story is don’t sue someone for libel when they’re not actually lying about you.

It worked for me!

[quote]No, the moral of the story is don’t sue someone for libel when they’re not actually lying about you.

Yes, but you can kind of see the rationale: Wilde viewed himself as a celebrity, loved by the gentry and therefore untouchable, only to discover that didn't get him as far as he thought. He's an early cautionary tale about believing your own hype

Not all that early.

Matthew 23:12

Victorians and Edwardians were largely a bunch of hypocrites on many levels.

Oscar Wilde's sin wasn't being gay. It was the scandal that followed from his legal and criminal justice woes that caused his downfall from society.

Something said in one British television drama about life of Oscar Wilde sums things up; "people can do anything long as it doesn't frighten the horses....."

Among upper classes far as Victorians and Edwardians were concerned it was more important that appearances be kept up. What happened in one's private life to some extent wasn't anyone's business.

Lord Risley in "Maurice" was an Oscar Wilde sort of character. His lifestyle or whatever wasn't exactly a problem until he was busted while cruising for gay sex. That brought public confirmation of his vices which of course meant he was no longer received. Society that once welcomed him shunned Lord Risley

Going by the ample amount of porn (including gay) we know what Victorians and Edwardians fancied. It just had to be kept under wraps.

John Saul scandal showed just how many men in highest reaches of British society were gay. That was one reason JS wasn't prosecuted, no one wanted to risk that lose cannon going off resulting in scores of men in highest positions (or adjacent to) suffering similar fate as Oscar Wilde.

I recommend The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde for a no holds barred description of Oscar's sex life. He loved rough trade!

[quote] Yes, but you can kind of see the rationale: Wilde viewed himself as a celebrity, loved by the gentry and therefore untouchable, only to discover that didn't get him as far as he thought. He's an early cautionary tale about believing your own hype

No, there no rationale! When you have love letters written to men and rent boys identified and witnesses ready to testify and ponce all over town with a green carnation, you can’t pull the old “I’m shocked, shocked!” excuse out of your drawers.

[quote] I imagine Wilde as someone like Stephen Fry…

He wishes! Stephen Fry has not written a sentence nor given a performance of greatness. He’s a professional Englishman.

Fry must have a third leg…doesn’t he have a really hot boyfriend?

I remember watching Wilde and been surprised the wife didn't know. For some reason, I thought she would've been supportive.

Stephen Fry has a much younger husband, but no one would consider him *hot*. Well besides the man he married anyway...

More recent picture of the happy couple...

Last one....

OP: Cautionary

Fuck you, OP. What's wrong with you?

Wilde is overrated. He destroyed himself. He was a prisspot and a tremendous snob, his effeminate flowery language is embarrassing. He thought he was beyond reproach and too clever and witty to be put away. He was pathetic in his downfall and last years, he was also most probably a pedophile or a pederast at best.

There was something in him that was rushing toward self-destruction with arms opened wide . . .

Bosie claimed that he never bottomed for Oscar.

How did that twink get a town in Idaho named after him?

I just went to the hotel where he died "beyond his means" in June. Too bad it was closed. Beautiful little street near the Pont des Arts. The bitch had taste. I had a whole Oscar Wilde period in college. Got a LOT of good ass dressed and coifed sort of like that and this was the mid to late 1990's.

[quote]he was also most probably a pedophile or a pederast at best

Pedophile and pederast are the same things.

There's no compelling evidence that he was a pedo; the ages of the boys in question have been generally established to have been 15 at the youngest.

R27, one of the most damning things I've read about the Victorian era was that prostitution was hardly the worst way to earn a living, even if you were underaged.

“There is only one thing worse in the world than being talked about, and that is, not being talked about.”

Trenchant, accurate and bitterly amusing.

Apocryphal last words from his bed in Paris:

"Either that wallpaper goes or I do."

This discussion made me want to check in our modern day dandy, the guy that dresses in period costume.

“This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”

We're words Oscar Wilde said few weeks before dying. His actual last words were some mumbled bits of a Catholic prayer.

"However, according to the book "Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years," he said this to a visiting friend a few weeks before he passed away in Paris in 1854."

Nobody in the government and upper class wanted to prosecute him. The things that came out at the libel trial had been distastefully scandulous and disastrous enough. The prosecutor deliberately waited over two days to send the police to arrest him on the morals charge. That was more than enough time for for him to escape to the continent, which is what they hoped and expected him to do.

Instead, he CHOSE to remain and make a martyr out of himself.

So, r22

[quote]It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you place the blame.

Is effeminate flowery language to you?

How on earth is it cautionary? He lived and died a hundred years ago. LOL. What's the warning... don't wear a green carnation with a pink cravat?

He was a pervert, even I thought so

R33

Oscar Wilde didn't flee to France because he decided to bring legal action against Marquess of Queensberry (who left his calling card at Wilde's club addressed to “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]."

Apparently no one ever sat Oscar Wilde down and explained how libel laws work. You can't (or shouldn't) sue someone for slander or whatever if what they've said is true. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual, and he was messing about with the Marquess of Queensbury's son.

Worse Queensbury's defence team produced a number of witnesses who accused Wilde of soliciting young men/boys for sex...

After about three days of trial Wilde's lawyers withdrew their case, but by then it was too late. Queensbury's legal team pressed to have Oscar Wilde arrested for "gross indecency".

Again Wilde's friends and supporters urged him to flee, but the man would have none of it and decided to defend his name and reputation against criminal charges at trial. Stupid move, but there you are.

IMHO Wilde perhaps was thinking about not just his reputation but fact he was a married man with two children. To flee implies guilt, and where would that have left Mrs. Oscar Wilde and her children? So he took two legal gambles that both failed grandly.

Cautionary, OP, only if you live in Victorian England in 1900. Luckily, we don't.

Let's see your own literary equivalent to "The Importance of Beinf Ernest," R22. Overrated? Fuck outta here, you idiot. And he wasn't a pedo or a pedarast. You're full of shit in a few ways.

And R27, the two terms are not the same.

*pederast

*Earnest

He looked like Carnie Wilson.

A 40 year old man who fucks 15 year olds is pretty much the definition of pederast R39.

You said what I said, r37. There were two trials. First, Wilde's libel trial against the Marquess, where the Marquess produced solid evidence of Wilde's sodomy. Wilde should have been arrested immediately when he dropped the case. Instead, everyone just wanted the entire sordid business to go away and he was given a chance to flee. Instead, he perversely chose to stay and face trial for sodomy -- an incredibly stupid decision since evidence of his guilt was already there in the judicial record and there was virtually no chance of anything less than a guilty verdict and a sentence of hard labor.

R37, all of his friends told him not to sue for libel; he was warned repeatedly. It was not a rational decision. His decision not to leave the country after the decision in the first trial also was irrational.

R43, a pederast is defined as sex between a pubescent or adolescent boy. A 15-year-old is neither a a pubescent or adolescent but a teenager. Not the same thing, but go ahead and quibble.

R44, the "sordid business" you so prissily describe to Wilde's situation makes you sound like you're from 1895. It was a foolish decision he made but a brave one.

Are we actually retrying Wilde in 2021?

"Are we actually retrying Wilde in 2021?"

On a gay site, no less.

R47

You have something better to do?

"pederasty is defined as sex between a pubescent or adolescent boy."

Fixed.

An adolescent is aged 10-19, R46.

R48 misses the point.

Btw, OP, Oscar Wilde's end (his life anyway) was just the beginning of a reappraisal of his art and life that continued all through the last century, until he was reestablished as the genius he was. His work lives on beyond his time and his torturers.

Then what's a teenager, R46?

R53 was for R50.

R46 would have us believe a 17- or 18- or 19-year old is an adolescent.

R50 would have us believe a 17- or 18- or 19-year old is an adolescent.

Nevertheless, sixteen will still get you twenty.

No, it actually won't, R57.

No-one would have you believe anything, R56. The word adolescence is a scientific term that is well established and well known.

Teenager and adolescent are terms that did not really exist in the 19th century. There was basically child and adult, and for the most part even the concept of childhood was a relatively new thing at the start of the 19th century, and you can even say childhood was an invention of the Victorian Age. Child abuse laws came only after animal abuse laws, animals were considered property and worth protecting, children not so much. The first child abuse cases were done under animal protection laws.

Which means nothing, R59. Someone who's 18-year or 19-year old, R59, is considered an adult, legally. Who considers a 19-year-old an adolescent?

R61 All doctors, all scientists, basically everyone who knows what the word adolescent means.

Ah, so "science" determines a 19-year-old is still and adolescent, R62. So adolescents can vote for president and go to war.

Eighteen years old is considered adult everywhere.

The "adolescent" 18- or 19-year-old is also an adult in the eyes of the law.

Yes, the third stage of adolescence is usually when people become legal adults.

And are free to have sex with any adult they want, R66. And no one considers them adolescents.

I'd think the people who know what adolescence means certainly consider them adolescents, R67.

And I'd think the people who live their lives in the actual world certainly consider 18- and 19-year-olds adults, R68. By law people do, anyway.

I rather think he suffered from some sad and twisted Martyr complex

No, R70, he didn't. He was a highly successful and celebrated playwright and novelist who mistakenly thought his fame and brilliance would buffer him.

R69 You've already had the meaning of adolescence explained to you several times. What you choose to do with that information is entirely up to you, but it seems an awful lot of hoop jumping to try and somehow prove that Oscar Wilde wasn't a pederast despite knowing what pederast means, knowing what adolescence means, and knowing he had numerous well-documented sexual relationships with adolescents (in the range of 14-16 as well as 19-21) and associated with known, and open, actual paedophiles.

I have no idea what you're trying to defend here.

r70 he told himself he was dying for the noble Uranian cause of men loving other men, and that in that respect he was like the ancient Greeks, blah, blah, blah...if he were alive today he'd be dismissed as a narcissistic prisspot and laughed at,

novelist? he wrote one book

One more than you've written, R74. And it was a significant novel.

As for you, R72, it's pretty clear what you're trying to do: retry Wilde as some kind of Polanski-type villain. At least that's what it sounds like. And it's been explained to you, numerous times, that society's definition, and the legal definition, of what adolescence and adulthood are, is fairly well established.

R73, actually he's recognized and appreciated as a brilliant wit. You, on the other hand...

Only on DL do eighth-rate minds like R73 feel they can weigh in on a bona fide comic genius whose plays are still being performed 130+ years after he wrote them.

Oscar: Bosie dear boy, climb upon my wretched phallus and I will impale you with my great love and fill you with the seed of my longing Bosie: Fuck off Oscar you great fat cunt

That's remarkable.

It was Bosie who was the cunt, R78. DL and many on this thread can identify with him, no doubt.

Bosie was also a talentless cunt.

I wonder was Bosie looking for a father figure in Oscar cause his own was such a callous brute?

Margaret Cotta, a chambermaid at the Savoy Hotel, testified at Wilde’s trial that while Wilde’s lover Alfred Douglas was visiting, she discovered a 14-year-old boy in Wilde’s bed. Cotta said Wilde’s sheets “were always in a most disgusting state…with traces of Vaseline, soil and semen.”

Quoting from the right-wing Federalist, R83? Fuck outta here, you fucking Trumper. FF.

r84 you didn't even have time to read it. Facts are facts

[quote]traces of Vaseline, soil and semen

Soil? He was a scat queen too?

The testimony of a chambermaid in homophobic Victorian England is undisputed fact, R85? I repeat. You're a fucking MAGAt.

There are 2 biographies on Wilde. Those books have facts. But you'd have to be able to read them to absorb the facts. Fuck off, Trumper. On ignore.

Great men have great faults.

A large part of this thread disappears when you put the MAGAt Trumper on ignore.

Oscar Wilde's sodomy is tearing us apart!

Hmm r87. you know my political affiliations because I see Oscar Wilde for what he was. I never said he wasn't a good writer, just that he was perverted. I'm not a Trump supporter, I don't live in the US, I'm not an American citizen and I don't care for politics. Your use of foul language and the rage you display makes you appear unhinged.

Dear Lord in heaven!

Likewise, when you block the raging foulmouthed prisspot, a lot of this thread disappears

Simeon Solomon was a gay Jewish pre-Raphaelite painter whose career was destroyed following an arrest for sodomy in a public restroom.

Solomon was born into a prominent Jewish family. He was the eighth and last child born to merchant Michael (Meyer) Solomon and artist Catherine (Kate) Levy. Solomon was a younger brother to fellow painters Abraham Solomon (1824–1862) and Rebecca Solomon (1832–1886).

Born and educated in London, Solomon started receiving lessons in painting from his older brother around 1850. He started attending Carey's Art Academy in 1852. His older sister first exhibited her works at the Royal Academy during the same year.

As a student at the Royal Academy Schools, Solomon was introduced through Dante Gabriel Rossetti to other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, as well as the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and the painter Edward Burne-Jones in 1857. His first exhibition was at the Royal Academy in 1858. He continued to hold exhibitions of his work at the Royal Academy between 1858 and 1872. In addition to the literary paintings favoured by the Pre-Raphaelite school, Solomon's subjects often included scenes from the Hebrew Bible and genre paintings depicting Jewish life and rituals. His association with Swinburne led to his illustrating Swinburne's controversial novel Lesbia Brandon in 1865.

In 1873 Simeon was arrested for soliciting in public restrooms and having sex with a 60-year-old stableman named George Roberts. Both men were charged with indecent exposure and an attempt to commit buggery. Both were found guilty, fined £100 and sentenced to 18 months hard labour. He was arrested again in 1874 in Paris on a similar charge, after which he was sentenced to spend three months in prison.

After his prosecutions he no longer exhibited, but his work was collected by such figures as Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Count Eric Stenbock, and Walter Pater.

In 1884 he was admitted to the workhouse where he continued to produce work, but his life and talent were blighted by alcoholism. Twenty years later in 1905, he died from complications brought on by his alcoholism. He was buried at the Jewish Cemetery in Willesden.

Well, that's cheering.

Does this Oscar Wilde have an Instagram account? Ain't never heard of him.

Sued someone for libel for saying something about him that was absolutely, completely true, and could be verified.

I imagine Wilde to be a cross between Elton John and Stephen Fry

Que sera, sera.

[quote]I imagine Wilde to be a cross between Elton John and Stephen Fry

With too much Greg!

Bosie was a disgusting pedo who even thought about molesting Wilde's son Cyril. He also hooked up with a 14 year old boy named Ali in Algiers and threw a hissy fit when said boy hooked up with a woman.

In fairness he hooked up with a young Patsy Stone and that matter has never been settled to anyone's satisfaction.

I think the whole point of going to Algeria was the boys, when in Rome..

But let’s bear in mind people died much younger back then.

And therefore they needed a head start.

My great grandparents got married at around the turn of the century, and they were 16 and 15 respectively. She went on to produce 17 [!] kids, and died at the ripe old age of 52.

r104 the poor bitch died of exhaustion

It's important to remember that during the Victorian Era, the age of consent was 14 for a boy and 12 for a girl. Many of the prostitutes were young teenagers, and they were usually dead or out of the game by the time they hit 20.

That's called parenting, R106.

So what did Wilde do that Catholic priest's haven't done for centuries? And other males to underage girls and boys?

The fact is that most parents don't want grown-ups seducing their children, no matter how alluring they may be. That's why there are age of consent laws. Wilde was living dangerously on the edge, flaunting convention and taking risks.

I have greatly enjoyed Oscar Wilde's work over the years and have read a couple of biographies about him. He was brilliant and fascinating. Part of what's interesting about his life is the era in which he lived. So many secrets, so many lies, so many living double lives. Old stories that go on and on.

R108 again. Just read p R106. Age of consent for boys may have been 14, but homosexual acts were illegal at the time.

In 1855 the "Buggery Act" proclaimed that there would no longer be death as a punishment for sodomy.

Some claim that the semantic difference between pedophile and pederast is that a pedophile is sexually attracted to children, while a pederast has actually had sex with children, but in reality the terms are used interchangeably. There's also no hard-and-fast definition for "pederasty," for complicated reasons.

It doesn't make any sense to say "he was a pedophile or a pederast at best." It MIGHT make sense if you reversed the terms, i.e. said "he was a pederast (had sex with children) or a pedophile (merely wanted to have sex with children) at best."

For all intents and purposes, however, the terms are interchangeable.

The story of Oscar and Bosie procuring a "boy" in Algiers doesn't recount the boy's age, and the boy was apparently Bosie's and their friend Andre Gide's, not Oscar's. There is a review of Fryer's book from 1997 by Simon Callow where he recounts the "sexual tourism" involved 12- and 13-year-old boys, but he gives no source, though I presume there is one in the book.

There was also another odd subtext to the Wilde trials - the British prime minister in 1894-95 was Lord Rosebery. Bosie's older brother, Francis Douglas, had become Rosebery's private secretary in 1892, and once Rosebery became prime minister, he created a peerage for the 26-year-old Francis in 1893. There were rumors that they were lovers. As he later did with Wilde, the Marquess of Queensbury denounced Rosebery. In October 1894. Francis Douglas died of gunshot wounds during a country hunting party. It may simply have been an accident, or possibly suicide or homicide. The circumstances of his death were never made clear.

The Rosebery government was thus frantic to avoid any suggestion that they were being 'soft' on the Wilde case, and so the prosecution and judgement was especially harsh.

The Liberal government fell in June, 1895, and Rosebery was no longer prime minister, but Wilde's trials were in April and May of that year. He was imprisoned on May 25.

^^^ Correction - it was when Rosebery became Foreign Secretary that he arranged to elevate Douglas to the peerage/

Uh, didn't seem anyone cared when he got his teenage wife pregnant or bragged to his pals about how good it felt...just that pesky homo sex...freaking out DL-ers over a century later.

The government and the upper classes were afraid of things being revealed that had been successfully concealed during the Cleveland Street scandal and trial. Plus the whole thing was so unsavory and disgusting for the men who had to prosecute. Nobody wanted to deal with any of it.

That's why Wilde was given every opportunity to escape and why the government came down so harshly on him when he refused to flee.

R87 The Savoy chambermaids' sworn testimony is in Wilde's trial transcripts. What the hell Trump has to do with this fact is entirely beyond me.

“It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don’t believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it.”

As the real Mrs. Patrick Campbell said "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do, so long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses?"

Wilde demanded to frighten the horses.

Why are people bringing up the "sworn testimonies" of certain people in a trial that was designed to disgrace and humiliate Wilde? I don't take anything said against him in his trials as cold, hard fact.

Have you read the thread r119? There were two trials and Wilde initiated the litigation. No one else was interested in pursuing any of it but Wilde forced it on everyone.

R120 Either way, the goal of the prosecution was to smear his name beyond convicting him. All that's proven is that he was homosexual, all the stuff about pedophilia and sex tourism seems like stuff to just ruin his name further.

At the time, just being homosexual time was enough to ensure years at hard labor but he was the only one who demanded it be pursued. Nobody else, including the Crown and its prosecutors, wanted anything to do with it but he deliberately forced their hands. Yes, there may have been a certain element of vituperation in their response when he forced them into a situation they wanted nothing to do with and had given him every opportunity from which to escape.

On Constance Wilde's grave it just says 'Constance Lloyd', with 'Wife of Oscar Wilde', added later. Cleary she/her family wanted to distance themselves from the scandal, also changing the boys' surname to Holland.

If Wilde had had a male lover his own age, and conducted the affair privately, it wouldn't have been as scandalous. But he was cavorting with rent boys and common young men outside his class, using them, grooming and abusing them.

He wasn't grooming them. They were prostitutes, they didn't need grooming.

not all of them were rent boys, read the court transcripts, he was harassing and grooming all types of young men from the working class

Oscar Wilde didn't just cause his own downfall, there was help in form of "Bosie" and to some extent Constance Wilde.

That being said it was Constance Lloyd Wilde who paid Oscar Wilde's expenses when he was released from prison. Constance Wilde wrote to her husband all during his confinement, and the two planned for a reunion after Oscar Wilde's release. Boise put a damper on those plans among other bits of nasty work that is largely reason today Constance Lloyd remains seen as some sort of cold villainess

On another note one of Oscar Wilde's grandsons put to rest the lie Constance Lloyd died from a STD she caught from her husband.

Cause of death likely was multiple sclerosis, but the quack Italian physician Constance Lloyd Wilde sought out only had one cure for any female illness, and operation. Constance Wilde died shortly after under going said surgery.

More:

Does Wilde have any living direct descendants?

r129 rhmmm, read the article above hun

Constance Wilde died of shame and embarrassment

Decades earlier Oscar’s mother was herself involved in a trial over libel with a young woman who said she was slandered by Oscar’s mother and claimed his father chloroformed and raped her. Like her son, she lost the case as well.

Anybody have access to this and can cut and paste the text?

If he didn’t mean so much to so many people, he would be absolutely cancelled today. Fucking with 15-year-old employees is Spacey-esque. But, like David Bowie, the Right Sort Of People like him (and they don’t like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen who are Bowie-comparative giants in film) so he won’t be cancelled.

Nor should he be. Anyone who wrote the following needs to be celebrated:

[quote] 'It is not for Him that I am weeping, but for myself. I too have changed water into wine, and I have healed the leper and given sight to the blind. I have walked upon the waters, and from the dwellers in the tombs I have cast out devils. I have fed the hungry in the desert where there was no food, and I have raised the dead from their narrow houses, and at my bidding, and before a great multitude, of people, a barren fig-tree withered away. All things that this man has done I have done also. And yet they have not crucified me.'

[quote]So, R12, you're basically saying that sins, or perceived sins, were no problem in Victorian and Edwardian society -- and are no problem in any other society -- as long as they're kept under wraps.

Amazing how you managed to arrive at this truly brilliant conclusion. You idiot.

Sorry about my mis-coding above. I do wish there was an edit function for these posts. Should have been:

So, [R12], you're basically saying that sins, or perceived sins, were no problem in Victorian and Edwardian society -- and are no problem in any other society -- as long as they're kept under wraps.

Amazing how you managed to arrive at this truly brilliant conclusion. You idiot.

[quote]Margaret Cotta, a chambermaid at the Savoy Hotel, testified at Wilde’s trial that while Wilde’s lover Alfred Douglas was visiting, she discovered a 14-year-old boy in Wilde’s bed. Cotta said Wilde’s sheets “were always in a most disgusting state…with traces of Vaseline, soil and semen.”

Imagine if she had worked in that hotel where they found Andrew Gillum.

If only he had lived in our time.

I can’t believe that Bosie is considered to be so good looking. What did I miss?

Oscar was not bad looking. I perceive his mannerisms, though, were quite feminine.

Sad his later years were so painful.

His writings are awesome.

if Wilde was alive today you'd all find him insufferable

I’m more intrigued about the post-prison Paris years. It makes such a simple end of story to say he was exiled to Paris and died a “broken” man. But I’ve never accepted the “broken” cliche. He consciously dedicated himself to self-destruction in an almost exact copy of his behavior pre-trial. It’s like he just said “I want to die”. He never tried to work, he literally begged off people on the street for alcohol money, he became a pathetic whiner and made no attempt to save himself. I find the absence of “fight” in him to mitigate his idolization as a gay rights icon. He acted and joked when he thought he was above it all - but when he had to deal with the real world challenges of being gay as a common man, he folded.

You bitches, Stephen Fry IS Oscar Wilde. Fry played Oscar in 1997’s “Wilde” which co-stared DL fave Jude Law as Bosie. I reviewed it for the newspaper I was writing for at the time. I remember being somewhat entertained, and it was obvious Fry was made to play the role. Judy was perfectly cast as a fresh-faced twink dandy.

Michael Sheen showed his perky butt in Wilde!

Nobody wanted to publish the work of a disgraced homosexual. Oscar could have repented, gone back to Constance, and spent the rest of life with a modicum of respectability. He chose to openly as a gay man.

^live openly

Judy played Bosie? Who knew!

"Three months before Oscar Wilde was released from prison, in February 1897, his wife Constance obtained a legal separation and a formal end of his responsibility for his two sons. After much rancorous discussion, she agreed to offer him an annual allowance of £150 a year on condition that he did not get in touch with her or the children without her permission. The other condition, as Nicholas Frankel writes in his detailed and finely judged account of Wilde’s life after prison, was “that he not associate in future with any person deemed disreputable in the eyes of his own lawyer”. This was an indirect reference to Lord Alfred Douglas, who had been Wilde’s lover."

Constance Wilde was very generous to her estranged husband both financially and otherwise. Oscar Wilde OTOH was simply one who seemed determined to throw everything he had out the window.

People judging Constance Wilde harshly in modern light need to step back and look at things from Victorian era.

Name "Wilde" become one of execration in UK and some other places. More to point Constance Wilde had her children to consider. For sake of her children Constance Wilde needed to be able to move easily in society. Fortunately now Constance Lloyd had an income of her own which afforded her some protection.

Agree Stephen Fry is the perfect, iconic Wilde who not only looks scarily similar but has the wit, charm and style of Wilde. The 1997 film had the best possible actors for those roles. Perfectly cast. And a generally good film.

I don’t like Stephen Fry casting himself as the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde.

What a stupid fag to sue the Marquess of Queensbury over something that was true.

^Queensberry. I had to look it up. I like my spelling better.

[quote]Soil? He was a scat queen too?

Maybe the sheets were the Victorian equivalent of wiping your ass on the drapes.

[quote]Michael Sheen showed his perky butt in Wilde!

So did Ioan Gruffudd.

[quote] Wilde is overrated. He destroyed himself. He was a prisspot and a tremendous snob, his effeminate flowery language is embarrassing. He thought he was beyond reproach and too clever and witty to be put away. He was pathetic in his downfall and last years, he was also most probably a pedophile or a pederast at best.

You are a very unpleasant, nasty, stupid cunt.

I found TIOBE and TPIDG rather tedious when first reading and watching them in my early teens, though I did enjoy his children’s fairy tales some years earlier.

But I rather agreed with this passage by Barbara Pym in JANE AND PRUDENCE:

[quote] ‘It seems sometimes that we must hurt people we love,’ said Fabian, stroking her hair. ‘Oscar Wilde said, didn’t he …?’ [italic]‘Let’s not bother about him,’ said Jessie. ‘I always think he must have been such a bore, saying those witty things all the time. Just imagine seeing him open his mouth to speak and then waiting for it to come out. I couldn’t have endured it.’ [/italic] Fabian smiled. He hadn’t been quite sure what it was that Oscar Wilde had said, anyway.

I too considered him as cold and perfect and bloodless and chiseled marble.

Until, anyway, I read De Profundis. Sensitive, heartbreaking, and full of soul. He is extraordinary.

About 5 years ago I went to an art exhibit in the Reading Prison that honored Oscar, as well as others who were executed unfairly (Irish partisans). I was able to enter his cell and it was presented exactly as how it was when he was there. He could see men being hanged from his cell. It is sad and disturbing.

My main curiousity is why he was so unable to handle prison. His complete mental breakdown in prion was a sign of someone who needed the social swirl and privilege that he had grown up with. It strikes me as a sign of how spoiled he was. I don’t think I would be the same after it- but I do think I would have come out of there and lived a more meaningful life rather than effectively committing suicide. The same genius and fantastical view of life that allowed his artistic creation was probably also his weakness when faced with the hard realities of life.

R158 He watched men getting executed from his cell. It was an awful place. Early on he was not allowed books other than the bible.

R158 Well, life does come before a fall. Most people can’t handle prison. He certainly didn’t handle it physically. He was raised a man of privilege. And the prisons were a sty. Wilde fell, punctured an eardrum and was ill for the rest of his life with infections and gastric issues. It was only until he got to Reading gaol that the second warden on in charge took pity and offered Wilde a book from his collection to read. Wilde was so touched that he wept.

But intellectually, psychologically? I would argue that he did cope with prison on that score. He very quickly became nothing if not self-aware. And his artistic understanding of life only deepened. These are the words someone who knows life.

From De Profundis:

[quote] When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

[quote]I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.

[quote]I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books … It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.

[quote]It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul.

Good quote R160 - he could write beautifully.