The Importance of Being Oscar

Dublin, 1854

I can resist everything except temptation.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde is born. He will take a while to grow into the name.

Oxford, 1870s

I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

At Magdalen College he takes a double first in Classics, and makes taste a way of life.

New York, 1882

Anything to declare?

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

A lecture tour of America — and, so the story goes, a word with customs on the way in.

London, 14 February 1895

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

The Importance of Being Earnest opens. London is at his feet.

Reading Gaol, 1895–97

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.— De Profundis, written in his cell

That spring, it all falls apart. Convicted of “gross indecency” — the law’s name for loving men — he is sentenced to two years’ hard labour, much of it served in Reading Gaol.

Paris, 1900

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has got to go.

Broke, in exile, in a small room at the Hôtel d’Alsace. The wit holds to the end.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.— Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892

He died in Paris on 30 November 1900, aged 46. In 2017, Britain pardoned him. His tomb in Père Lachaise was kissed so often it had to be put behind glass.