Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde believed that there was only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that was not being talked about. He was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of a celebrated surgeon and a poet mother who gave him, he would say, his genius, and left the rest to the gods. He studied at Oxford, where he was brilliant, and he made sure that everyone knew it. He arrived in London not simply to succeed but to dazzle, and London, for a time, obliged him.

He wrote poems, fairy tales, essays, a novel, and plays — above all, plays. His comedies — The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere’s Fan — filled London theatres with lords and ladies who said the cleverest things and kept the most terrible secrets, and audiences loved them because, somewhere between the laughter, they recognised the truth. He wrote fairy tales that were beautiful and sad at the same time — The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant among them — and a dark, disturbing novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that shocked polite society almost as much as its author did. He believed that art was not meant to teach a lesson but simply to be beautiful, and he was willing to argue this with anyone who disagreed — which, in Victorian England, was almost everyone.

His life ended badly, as dramatic lives sometimes do. He was imprisoned for two years, and when he came out he was ruined: his money gone, his reputation destroyed, his friends mostly vanished. He left England and never returned, dying in Paris in 1900 at the age of forty-six. But his words survived him. They have been quoted, argued over, printed on cards and buildings and the sides of coffee cups. He would have found this amusing. He once said that he had put his genius into his life, and only his talent into his work: which is, of course, exactly the kind of thing a genius would say.