Wilson Collection: Oscar Wilde

(Albumen photograph of Oscar Wilde, 1882, and front-page caricature of him from New York’s The Daily Graphic newspaper, January 19, 1882)

Under construction.

Oscar Wilde

In 1882, in Colorado, during his American tour, miners cheered Oscar Wilde as "a bully boy with no glass eye" and named a mineshaft after him.[1]

But, in London, in 1895, the Irish playwright was hauled to court to face English injustice. For acting on his same-sex desires he was put on trial. Amid what his attorney called a “torrent of prejudice,” the court sentenced Wilde to prison with two years hard labor for so-called “gross indecency.”[2][3] Friends urged Wilde to flee. But, later, he wrote, to “have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian [homosexual] love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms.”[4]

References 1. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 204. 2. Ibid., 476. 3. Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 389, 397. 4. Ibid., 396.