Oscar Wilde walked out of Reading Gaol on May 19, 1897, having served two years with hard labour for the crime of being who he was. He was forty-two years old. He had been the most celebrated playwright in the English-speaking world. He would live three more years, in poverty and exile in Europe, dying in a Paris hotel room in November 1900 at forty-six.
He was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of a celebrated surgeon and a poet who wrote under the name Speranza and believed, apparently sincerely, that the Irish were the last of the ancient civilizations. Wilde absorbed her extravagance and her nationalism and added to them a brilliance of his own that Oxford could not contain and London could not quite believe.
He wrote the plays, the novel, the fairy tales, the essays. He was famous in a way that the nineteenth century had not quite invented the vocabulary to describe — famous not just for the work but for the performance of existing, for the wit that was a defence mechanism and a philosophy at the same time.
His trial was a catastrophe that he had multiple opportunities to avoid. He did not avoid it. It is possible that some part of him understood that the only way to be fully himself was to refuse the exit.
He died broke and broken, baptised into the Catholic Church in his final hours, buried in Paris. In 1900, his name could not be spoken in polite English society. A hundred and twenty years later, he is one of the most quoted writers in the English language, and the institution that imprisoned him has been converted into a luxury hotel.
He was, in the end, untameable. History got that part wrong.
