Sharon D Clarke as Lady Bracknell
The National Theatre, December 2024
Photo by Marc Brenner

Two trivial notes
To start with, a couple of footnotes in that are in the best tradition of small but fascinating facts, at least for a theatre nerd such as myself.

First, Wilde may have come up with the name for Lady Bracknell from the fact that Lord Alfred Douglas’s mother lived in Bracknell, although the characterization of her may have owed more to his own mother. Apparently Mrs Wilde claimed somewhat fancifully to have come from aristocratic Italian ancestry, which she said linked her to the poet Dante Alighieri.

My second piece of trivia is about the all-important railway line in whose waiting room Jack Worthing was found in the handbag. At the time of the writing of the play, Victoria Station consisted of two separate but adjacent terminal stations sharing the same name. To the east was the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, which serviced Kent, and on the west the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway – the Brighton Line, which went to Worthing, the fashionable town to which the gentleman who found baby Jack was travelling at the time, and after which Jack was named.  Apparently, there was a perceived difference in class between these two railway lines, the Brighton line being deemed more upmarket, which would underline why the line where Jack was found was important, at least as a further point of Wilde’s satire on such things.

Early draft manuscript of The Importance of Being Earnest, 1894
New York Public Library

The Trials of Oscar Wilde
Wilde’s life was anything but pain free as the play premiered in the first months of 1895. Just as he was at the very height of his fame, Wilde paradoxically found himself embroiled in the criminal court cases that would destroy his reputation and his life.

Since 1891 Wilde had been involved in a toxic on-again, off-again relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas , whom he had met when Douglas was an undergraduate at Oxford. Douglas was only 21 at the time, Wilde, 16 years his senior. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was very unhappy with his son’s relationship with Wilde, and threatened to disown his son.  Wilde got caught up in this bitter battle between father and son, with the Marquess publicly insulting him by delivering a calling card to Wilde labelling him a “posing somdomite” (sic).

With Douglas’s encouragement and against the advice of his friends, Wilde charged the Marquess with libel. The Marquess could avoid conviction only by demonstrating that his accusation was in fact true.  During the trial in April 1895, the defence presented incriminating details of Wilde’s private life, including letters to Douglas, references to multiple liaisons with named young boys, and finally claiming that they had several male prostitutes who would testify that they had had sex with Wilde.

Throughout this first trial, Wilde’s performance on the stand was incorrigibly defiant. Although he was the prosecutor in the case, he found himself on the defensive much of the time, batting away attacks on the morality of his writing and his relationships with Douglas and other young men with ill-advised insouciance. A few extracts from the transcript of the trial give an idea of the tone of Wilde’s performance, because it certainly comes across like a performance.

For example, when he was asked about the style of his correspondence with Douglas, he replied, “I am ready.  I am never ashamed of the style of my writings.”
The defence counsel continued, “In letter number one you use the expression ‘Your slim gilt soul,’ and you refer to Lord Alfred’s ‘red rose-leaf lips’. The second letter contains the words, ‘You are the divine thing I want,’ and describes Lord Alfred’s letter as being ‘delightful, red and yellow wine to me.’ Do you think that an ordinarily constituted being would address such expressions to a younger man?”
To which Wilde responds, “I am not happily, I think, an ordinarily constituted being.”

And on another occasion, when asked if he had “ever adored a young man madly”, he counters, “I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.”

His witty responses earned laughs from the courtroom audience, but ultimately did not enable him to evade the truths that were being brought out against him.

Seeing that he could not win the libel case, Wilde dropped the charges, and although friends urged him to flee to France, he refused, and he was arrested the very next day and charged with “gross indecency”.  The law under which Wilde was charged dated from ten years earlier, and it provided for a sentence of “not exceeding two years”, with or without hard labour, for any man found guilty of “gross indecency” with another male, whether “in public or in private”.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, 1893
British Library

Prison and after
Wilde spent the full two years incarcerated in Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading prisons respectively, subjected to mean conditions and hard labour that degraded his health. When he was moved from Wandsworth prison to Reading, he was jeered and spat at on the platform at Clapham Junction railway station. Poignantly, there is now a plaque on the platform there that reads:

Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900
Celebrated playwright and poet, was the victim of homophobic abuse at this station whilst being transferred from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol.
2.00 to 2.30 20 November 1895.

During his last year in prison in Reading, Wilde wrote De Profundis, which translates as “From the depths”, and takes the form of a long letter to Lord Douglas in which he describes his journey from his extravagant life before his arrest, to his time of spiritual reflection in prison. It was published in abridged form posthumously in 1905, and not fully until 1962.

At the end of the first trial, Wilde remained naively steadfast in his feelings for Douglas, writing to him as “My dearest boy” and my “immortal, eternal love.” However, by the end of his terrible time in prison, he wrote to a friend asking him to reclaim from Douglas all letters and possessions that he had given him, saying, “the idea that he is wearing or in possession of anything that I gave him is peculiarly repugnant to me. I cannot of course get rid of the revolting memories of the two years I was unlucky enough to have him with me, or the mode by which he thrust me in to the abyss of ruin and disgrace to gratify his hatred of his father and other ignoble passions. Even if I get out of this loathsome place…I will have nothing to do with him…He has ruined my life – that should content him. “

On the day of his release from prison in May 1897, Wilde left immediately for France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. While in exile in Paris, he arranged the publication of The Importance of Being Earnest, and he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem commemorating the harsh reality of prison life.

His imprisonment destroyed not only his reputation, but also his spirit and his health. He wrote no more comic or dramatic works, saying, “I can write, but have lost the joy of writing”. He died in Paris only three years after leaving prison at the age of 46.

I cannot end on that sad note, preferring to think of the joy and beauty of this his last play, that stands as a beacon for free expression in art and life.