Oscar Wilde, a Victorian era Irish playwright, poet and novelist, is well known for the art he bequeathed to posterity and, to a lesser extent, the scandal that sent him to prison and subsequent exile in France. At the height of his career, Wilde made the mistake of entering into an affair with Alfred Douglas, the young, flamboyant son of a brutal Scottish noble, the Marquess of Queensberry, who was distinguished by his godlessness and passion for physical combat. When the affair was brought to light, the enraged Scotsman threatened to “thrash” Wilde, and embarked upon a vendetta, dedicating himself to the artist’s destruction.
After a sustained barrage of threats and denunciations from the Marquess, Wilde finally lost his composure and pursued a libel suit against Queensberry, who had publicly called him a “somdomite” [sic]. The suit was particularly ill-advised, as private detectives were able to uncover considerable evidence of Wilde’s homosexual dalliances with a variety of male prostitutes, some of whom were hauled into court to testify against him. Confronted with more than he could deny, Wilde lost the suit. Vindicated, the Marquess received substantial compensation from Wilde, leaving the author bankrupt. Even worse, he now faced prosecution for gross indecency, which had been made a crime some ten years earlier in 1885 (as odd as it may sound to modern ears, sexuality was not generally regulated by criminal law before the 19th century). Ironically, the law that prosecuted Wilde was described as “An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls….”
Soon, Wilde was arrested, and due to great public interest and the usual, hysterical outrage of crowds, he was prosecuted vigorously. Although the first jury deadlocked, another trial was held, the writer was duly convicted, and he was sentenced to the maximum – two years hard labor – by a properly indignant judge.
The famous author was now just another Irish convict in a London jail. As a convicted homosexual and an aesthete, he must have faced a great deal of abuse from the other inmates, and he was not well suited to the rigors of prison labor. But of all the discomforts and disappointments of confinement, none could have weighed as heavily on him as his separation from his two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, to whom he was devoted.
For all the contemporary discussion of Wilde – Wilde the author, Wilde the unjustly persecuted homosexual, the aesthete, the dilettante – there is precious little concerning Wilde the father. If his fatherhood had little relevance to his work, this would be understandable, but in fact it suffused his art. Many of his stories were written for children, and some for parents as well. The aesthetic elements of his work do not so much suggest the fancies of a pure hedonist as they do fantasy and fairy tales written to stimulate the imagination of little minds.
In some passages, it is clear that he saw children as a source of redemption, the key to greater joys than any that exist in this mortal world:
‘Who art thou?’ said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, ‘You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.’
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.
–From The Selfish Giant
Such sentiments spring from the love inspired by fatherhood, which was apparently a great source of inspiration for Wilde. Were it not for this part of his life, this experience that gave him a connection to the greater part of humanity that dwells in a more conventional world, he may never have made a lasting impact in literature. Without that crucial component of his character – Wilde the father – he may have remained nothing but a queer dilettante, a minor man of letters, an obscure sybarite flitting from one party to the next, today little more than a flickering ghost haunting odd libraries kept by eccentric old men.
Although Wilde may have had fatherhood in common with a great many men, he was clearly of a different type from most of us, and not only for his talents. But his experience as a father, and especially the tragedy that came of it, binds him to us, today perhaps even more than ever.
After he was convicted, Oscar Wilde never saw his sons again. It was a terrible price to pay for his indiscretions, but his wife held firm and, even after she died, her family barred the fallen man from his children.
His sons remembered him fondly, but they were still schoolboys when he died in 1900 at age 46, and they never had the chance to see him of their own accord.
Some years after Wilde’s death, his younger son Vyvyan received a letter from a Frenchman who, as a child, had known Wilde when he was in exile in France, following his release from prison and shortly before his death. In his book Time Remembered, Vyvyan published the contents of the letter:
One Autumn evening, while putting on my overcoat after finishing my meal, I clumsily upset something, perhaps a salt-cellar, on Monsieur Sébastien’s [Wilde went by "Sebastien Melmouth" while in France] table. He said nothing, but my mother scolded me and told me to apologize, which I did, distressed by my clumsiness. But Monsieur Sébastien turned to my mother and said: ‘Be patient with your little boy. One must always be patient with them. If, one day, you should find yourself separated from him…’ I did not give him time to finish his sentence, but asked him: ‘Have you got a little boy?’ ‘I’ve got two’, he said. ‘Why don’t you bring them here with you?’ My mother interrupted … ‘It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter at all,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘They don’t come here with me because they are too far away…’ Then he took my hand, drew me to him and kissed me on both cheeks. I bade him farewell, and then I saw that he was crying. And we left.
While kissing me he had said a few words which I didn’t understand. But on the following day we arrived before him and a bank employee who used to sit at a table on the other side of us asked us: ‘Did you understand what Monsieur Sébastien said last evening?’ ‘No,’ we replied. ‘He said, in English: “Oh, my poor dear boys!”‘
As we look back across more than a hundred years of “progress” that have elapsed since Oscar Wilde wept over the loss of his children, it is remarkable to see how little some things have changed.
