His father died, the latest in a line of family tragedies (his younger sister had died when he was a boy, which had a lasting impact on him, and his two half-sisters burned to death when he was a young man of his sister Isola’s grave, he later wrote “All my life’s buried here, / Heap earth upon it.” his half brother was to die at 39 the following year), and it was discovered that the man had been virtually bankrupt.
He was unable to secure any academic teaching position. Perhaps inspired by his father’s hobby of archaeology, Wilde became a prize-winning scholar of Greek and the Greeks (he reportedly picked up his conversational style and taste for epigrams from his tutor), first at Trinity in Dublin and later in Oxford, where he also won a prestigious poetry prize.īut early academic promise came to nothing. Wilde grew up in a house filled with distinguished literary and academic guests, and became a brilliant academic himself. She was a feminist, and a radical nationalist, who published pseudonymous poems not only supporting the cause of Irish nationalism but explicitly calling for armed revolt against the English oppressors (she failed to attract the martyrdom she desired, however – when the editor of The Nation refused to reveal her identity in court (the famous paper was closed down as punishment for having printed her works, and its editor sued), she stood up to publically declare her authorship, but when the authorities realised her identity they refused to prosecute her, and the whole matter was quietly hushed up, in much the same way that Countess Markiewicz would later be spared execution on account of her rank and gender). Sir William’s wife, Lady Jane, was even more notorious.
Sir William (youngest child of a local doctor from a small town in the west of Ireland) had at least three children out of wedlock, and had his reputation badly shaken in a legal dispute arising from a patient’s claim of rape against him – he invited notoriety by refusing to testify under oath on the matter. His father was a respectable man, Sir William Wilde, editor of the Dublin Journal of Medicine and a noted surgeon, as well as a famous philanthropist. Oscar Wilde: famous, succesful, wealthy, popular, well-fed, the darling of London society, the quintessential Englishman, dazzling his admirers with sparkling, if superficial, wit, tossing off ingenious epigrams, scribbling down ‘hilarious’ plays about the charming foibles of the aristocracy, not a care in the world.Ī different Oscar Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, was born just down the street from Dublin’s largest railway station.
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