Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And in our Lily Langtry episode, we considered following up with a podcast on Oscar Wilde, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of this, And it's probably because wild is a really inspired dramatist, and he's a talented poet and essayist. He's one of the best loved Irish writers, which is pretty tough company, i'd say. But he's also a really amazing man, and I think that's the main reason people are so interested in hearing about him. He's this bizarre dresser, he's a public wit. He's a famously brilliant conversationalist, which is something that's a little bit harder to talk about, of course than his works. But one indicator of that is that Churchill chose him as the person he would most like to talk with in the afterlife. He's also famous, of course for his tragic downfall. A libel suit that turned against him cost him two years in prison and ruined his name and reputation for decades after his death, and Since June is Pride month in the United States, it seemed like the perfect time to discuss a man who was so famously persecuted because of his sexuality. So we will start at the beginning, as we always do. Oscar fingal Oh Flaherty Will's Wilde was born in Dublin. I don't have overtames, I know clearly neither of us do. He was born in eighteen fifty four and his family was of Dutch origin, and they were descended from an artist, appropriately enough, but the family had been in Ireland since the late seventeenth century, and since then they had mostly either worked in land management or worked as doctors. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a renowned ear and eye doctor and even invented a surgery for cataracts. He operated on the King of Sweden, and his mother was Lady wild Jane Francesca l g who was an Irish nationalist and wrote poems and articles under the name Speranza. I think I want that to be my nom de plume if I ever take one on. Oscar is the second son, and his birth is followed by that of a sister named Zola, and she dies as a young girl, and it's a pretty tragic event in his early years, switching to a happier aspect of his childhood. Wild is a dedicated scholar from the very start. He may have later kept a library that mingled philosophers with the silly books and French pornographic writings that we might think of, but to forget his classical scholarly training was a mistake. And a fact that Sarah and I liked a lot was that he would tear off the top corner of pages in his books and eat it while he was reading. So a different kind of consumer. And how much paper did this man eat? I mean, he was a very avid reader. One of Sarah's friends lent her an Oscar wild book and told her to be very careful with it, and she retorted that Oscar Wilde ate his own books, so he didn't really know what to say back to them. So Wild earns a scholarship to Trinity College, Devlin, which we've talked about before because it's where the books kept, and from there he goes to Magdalen College, Oxford, and he wins prizes in English and classics, and also really comes to love the philosophies of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and I was thinking, what English class doesn't start with some essay on Peter. It seems they all do requisite reading, for sure, but he takes Peter's teaching to love art for art's sake a step further, and as his son Vivian later describes, that, he set out to idealize beauty for beauty's sake. So I think that's what we can think of as Wild's philosophy in his writing. His dorm room was also a little different from mine. He decorated it with blue China and Prince by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne Jones, which again big change from all the mc shure I remember seeing in My friends. And he was also an estete, believing that beauty is the ideal that we should all strive for. Yeah, tying back into that motto that we mentioned a second ago, But we're going to skip ahead now to London in eighteen seventy nine. Wild has just arrived in the city and he's going to be a writer and an editor, and he's going to do it in style because he dresses really flamboyantly, which is something that might be lost on modern people. You might just think it's old fashioned, funny clothes, but people did not dress in black silk stockings. That was not your typical attire in this period. And people weren't wearing fur lined coats and knee breeches. That was an Oscar Wild exclusive. And this and his work and his larger than life personality got him satirized in the periodical Punch, and Gilbert and Sullivan added him to the routine, basing their character Bunthorne on him. And he didn't mind being linked to the ascetic movement. He published poems in eighteen eighty one with his own money to help enhance this connection. Yeah, he didn't even mind if it was a mocking connection. In some cases. He has a pretty good sense of humor himself. He writes a play Vera shortly after this, which essentially uh is just putting it in a nice way. It's no importance of being earnest and it only runs in New York City for one week, not at all in London. But by eighteen eighty two he's on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada. And this is really how he builds up his fame. When he arrives in New York, he famously declares that he has nothing to declare but his genius, which is going to go down in history books for sure. Um and then he makes a name for himself touring, giving lectures, having conversations with people, and becoming famous from when coming back from It a star. He got to work in Paris on his next play, The Duchess of Padua, and he's writing it. It's a commissioned work for the actress Mary Anderson, but she turns it down and doesn't like it, which of course isn't good for business. So he picks up the lecture tour circuit again, this time in England, but it doesn't last long. By eight four, he's settled down in London to marry Constance Lloyd, and despite his later trial and Constance is distancing of her family from her husband, she changes her and her son's last names. We shouldn't see their marriage as a sham, Vivian wrote about it. Oscar was romantically in love with his beautiful young wife, and for some years he was ideally happy, and they have two sons together, Vivian, as we mentioned in eighty six and a year before that, Cyril and Oscar works a day job of sorts and versus, a reviewer for the Paul Malgazette and then as an editor for Women's World until eighteen eighty nine. But another important point to make here is that marriage marks a pretty big shift in his working style, and he had mostly written poetry before it, and after he turns almost exclusively to prose. And we have a quote from biographer Boris Brazil noting that he began his literary career as a composer of sonorous and pleasing verses, in which, however, as he himself admitted, there was more rhyme than reason. Yet as he grew older he seemed to have lost all taste for poetry. And I also think it's important to note that his only major major poem written after his marriage is The Ballad of Reading Jail, written after his imprisonment, and his major literary years where he's known so much for his literary brilliance, is a pretty short span. It's from eighteen eighty eight to eighteen ninety four. His first major piece is The Happy Prince in eighteen eighty eight. That's a collection of fairy tales, but very poetical despite being prose there for kids and adults, and Sarah and I would like a copy. And there are more stories in Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and other Stories, and later A House of Pomegranates and the Sphinx. But also in one he has his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which first appeared in Lippincott's magazine and was condemned by reviewers, and the idea for the novel was actually based in fact, he had gotten it a few years before when he visited the studio of the painter Basil Ward, and Ward was painting this really lovely young man, and after the sitter left, the two agreed that it was too bad that this man's beauty would eventually fade and die, and they wish that the painting itself could age and the man could remain forever young. And Wild obviously thinks that sounds like the makings of a great story. And he also collects some of his philosophical essays eventually into Intentions. So this is a really really productive span of a few years here for Wild. Of course, he's also writing drama like Lady Windermere's Fan, which he described as one of those modern drawing room plays with pink lampshades. It's the epitome of a well built play, although Katie admitted she was not as it's not one of my favorites. But he was called for after its debut performance and gave a bit too smug of a speech. Speaking to the actors, he said, I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do, so not terribly modest there. He then heads off to Paris to write Salome in French and Sarah Bernhardt, one of the greatest actresses of her day, wants to star in it, and she sends it into rehearsals, but the play is stopped by the censor because no Biblical characters are allowed on the English stage, and Wild is really upset by this, really annoyed, and even considers renouncing his citizenship and moving to France, which he probably should have. Yeah, it's it's unfortunate that he doesn't, but he continues writing these funny plays that are great hits in England. In eighteen ninety two, he puts out a Woman of No importance, and this time when the audience cries for author on the stage, he's a little a little cooler with his speech. By January eight, he hits the big time when an ideal Husband debuts and is attended by the Prince of Wales and Royalty does not come to a play on opening night, so it's a big deal. I guess they're waiting to find out if it's good before they bother. His last play was the best of All, The Importance of Being Earnest, which debuted February fourteen to eight. But that's also when his troubles come to Adad and the root of all this trouble dates back to the start of this big literary success actually in when he met the twenty two year old poet Lord Alfred Douglas, who was known as Bozy, which was originally derived from his mother's nickname Boise. And they meet at a tea party and they become really good friends. They dined together, they stay at each other's houses, they traveled together, and the first issue with this relationship comes up when Douglas gives one of his friends an old suit and the friend discovers letters in the pocket and their letters always check your pocket, Yeah, don't leave your incriminating letters behind. So Wild is blackmailed because these are rather incriminating letters, and this still isn't too big of a problem though. The big issue comes later when Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who absolutely hates the friendship between these two men and may have been a little mentally unhinged himself, goes after Wild, and aside from his involvement in this whole affair, he's best known for the Queensbury Rules of amateur boxing, so perhaps not a great man to get and a tangle with guy to have trouble with for sure. So as we mentioned, he didn't like this friendship, but he feels a little bit better about it after he meets Wild, who managed to woo him over a long lunch. But in right, when Wild's fame is reaching its heights, he's angry again with the whole thing and demands his son stop seeing him. He says, your intimacy with this man Wild must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try to analyze this intimacy, and I make no charge. But to my mind, to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it, and Douglas replies, rather witheringly, what a funny little man you are in a telegram too. You can just imagine how is Boluste father must have taken that. So Queensbury starts to get pretty menace thing after this, and he threatens hotel managers and restaurant managers who may be entertaining the man harboring the men. And he shows up at the house of Oscar Wilde with a prize fighter, and Oscar tells him, I do not know what the Queensbury rules are, but the Oscar wild rule is to shoot on site, which is a very menacing warning from this poet who his motto is beauty for Beauty's sake. And then, in at the opening night of the Importance of Being Earnest, Queensbury attempts to disrupt the show, so wild orders additional protection around the theater and Queensbury's left outside for the course of the performance. But the final blow is when he leaves a card at the club that wild and his wife belonged to that says to Oscar Wilde, posing as a psalmbed might and I'm not saying that incorrectly. He spelled it incorrectly, and Wild was grossly offended. He wrote, I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man. I don't know what to do. Yeah, he's worried that his reputation is going to be affected. He's at the pinnacle of his fame right now, and Douglas, who really hates his father, urges Wild to sue Forliabel, and a lot of his friends think this is a terrible idea. They tell him that he'll have no hope winning it, and that he should just get out of the country, move to France, where it's more tolerant, and continue his writing career. But he decides to go ahead with the suit and engages Edward Clark to prosecute, and swears to him that there's no basis to this libel. So that brings us to our trial. April third. Wild is incredibly confident with his suit. He testifies that I said to him, how dare you say such things as you do about your son and me? And he also faces off Queensbury's key piece of evidence, a letter from Wild to Douglas. Clark urges the people to remember that Wild as a poet, and that they should take this letter as the expression of true poetic feeling and nothing more than that. So while this letter may seem really out there to you regular people, this is a normal stuff for a poet exactly. And Wild is really confident, as he said a second ago, he's sure that his fame and his popularity are going to carry this. And this even extends to his cross examination by Edward Carson, who's representing Queensbury, and Wild's responses make for really really good reading. They're witty, they're sharp. Sometimes they contradict each other, so maybe it's not the best best stuff to be saying on the stand, but it does make for an inner tran read. The first part of the questioning focused on his literary works, which Wild defended against charges of immorality. He said, there's no such thing as an immoral word. Books are well written or badly written. That his cocky responses started to die down when Carson asks about his relationships his presence to young men. They're low intellectual capacity and perhaps unsuitability of some of his friends. But while tried to play up his love of youth, which was something he valued in his friends above education or social standing. Yeah, so he tries to make like he's an equal opportunity friend here and he just loves youth. And things get really serious when Carson announces that he'll be introducing a witness who had a sexual relationship with Wild, and this is very dangerous territory and Clark knows it. And that's because in eighteen nine, the Criminal Law Amendment Act had passed which made it illegal to commit gross indecency, which was essentially criminalizing homosexuality. So it meant that this libel suit could become a criminal one with Oscar Wild going to jail. So wild counsel advised him to drop the suit and no jury will convict Queensbury. It's just time to let all of this go. But by the next afternoon, Queensbury's representation has pushed the case ahead into criminal territory and the inspector delivers the arrest warrant to Magistrate John Bridges, who adjourns the court for a short period, which may have been his way of trying to let Wild escape, you know, heading out on the train to Europe, but he doesn't. And his name comes off of the importance of being earnest. Yeah, off of the playbills off the marquee, uh, and he just feels like his life is absolutely crumbling, that this the suit that he felt so confident about, has completely backfired on him. And on April, his first criminal trial begins and Wild is accused of gross indecencies and conspira see to commit gross indecencies. Um, he's not prosecuted for sodomy, but mail witnesses come to court and testify against him. And when he himself appears, he's very different from how he was in the earlier trial. He's quiet and respectful, yeah, respectfully denying everything. And in Clark's closing statement, he echoes most modern thoughts and says, clear from this fearful imputation one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters of today. And in clearing him, clear society from a stain which we interpreted as meaning that this shouldn't even be a crime. It shouldn't even be in court, and they shouldn't even be having to respond to it. Well, and how embarrassing to to put one of your biggest, most famous citizens on trial for something like this. So the jury can't reach a verdict, although they quit him on one charge and he's released on bail before the second trial begins, and you would think people would let it be at this point that that would be the end of it, and even Carson is urging people to lighten up, but the Liberal government of England wants a conviction. One theory is that there were political motives for pursuing wild with this great intensity, and it's likely that the Prime Minister, Archibald Primrose, who was the Earl of Roseberry, had had an affair with the brother of Douglas, a man named Francis, and Francis is likely to have killed himself, and it's not long after he did so that his father, Queensberry started going after Oscar Wilde so intensely starts this manic attack on him, hoping to quote save his other son. And it's possible that if Rosebery didn't go after wild and didn't try to to see his prosecution through to a conviction, that his own case, in his own crime, may have been at supposed by Queensberry. According to Douglas Linder, Roseberry had insomnia and depression during the trial, but it disappeared afterward, which perhaps gives a little more credence to that theory, but this time the prosecution is led by Solicitor General Frank Lockwood, and While describes Lockwood's treatment of him as an appalling denunciation of me, like something out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola's indictments of the popes of Realm, which we all know what that's like. So the jury finds Wild guilty on all counts but one, and he sentenced to two years of hard labor. Most of this is served at reading jail and his sons. This is a really sad aspect of the story. His sons are sent to Switzerland and they never see their father again. Their last name is changed them. The wife of Oscar Wild is really doing all she can to help shore up their reputation for the future, but they're still actual discriminated against as adults because of who their father was. And while he's in jail, Wild right stuprofundus a letter to Douglas, and when Douglas receives it, he destroys it after the first few pages. And Sarah, you read some of that. It's pretty brutal, and I think Douglas thought that it was the only copy and he could just get this really detailed account of their relationship and of all of the things that went wrong, just erased from history. And it's not just a regretful letter because the friendship resulted in while being in jail. After all, he's writing this from prison, But it's regretful because he feels like Douglas cost him his art, and he's ashamed of how much money they spent, and he accuses Douglas of loving his life, loving his uh, all the glamorous sides of celebrity writer. Yeah, the play premiers and the parties and the fame, but not having any respect for the quiet labor that actually went into all his writing, the daily drudgery of sitting down and actually getting it on paper. Wild had also sent this manuscript to his publisher, Robert Ross, intending to revise it later, and parts of it were published in nineteen oh five. Wild and Douglas reunited for a time after prison, but after Wild's death, Douglas tried to get the manuscript from Ross, but he instead presented it to the British Museum and embargoed its contents for sixty years. So imagine when this came out in nineteen sixty it was made quite a big deal. Um So wild is bankrupt when he comes out of jail and he goes to France to try to kick start his writing career again. But the only thing he really produces is the ballot of writing jail, and he writes letters to editors in concern about prison conditions though, so he's he's still out there, he's just not producing it anywhere near the same frequency he was before his trial. Oscar Wilde died of acute meningitis from the ear infection November thirtie in Paris, and on his deathbed he was received into the Catholic Church, which he had long been interested in along with mysticism, and he's buried at Parla Chaise in Paris. And interestingly, on the same trip, I saw the memorial to him at Reading and his tomb in Paris, and it's a pretty crazy contrast. The Paris memorial is this huge winged figure and it is covered with lipstick kisses. There's a little sign discouraging people to go kiss Oscar Wilde's tomb, but clearly most people are not following that. It's surrounded by flowers. He's definitely got a lot of very devoted fans still, and at least don't wear that indelible lipstick if you feel like you have to pick a nice shade too. Eventually it turns into a grief something that Wild would like. He was very concerned with beauty um And we'd like to end on a note that's a little less sad. Sarah found a pretty cool article in the New York Times. But though about Wild and copyright law. Yeah, weirdly enough, you know the famous photo of him where he's wearing that fur lined coat in the knee breeches and the silk stockings. It was taken by a celebrity photographer named Napoleon Seroni, and it did play a very important role in copyright law in the United States. And that's because the photo had been reproduced as part of this New York Department stores advertising campaign after he got so famous on his American tour, and Seroni sued and eventually the Supreme Court ruled that his photo should fall under constitutional copyright protection, and the ruling is still cited today and disputes over copyright laws right the Borough Giles Lithographic Company for since Sereni, there's a little known Oscar wild fact for you and speaking of things of beauty that brings us to listen our mail. Our beautiful objects for today are two bookmarks that we received from listener Mary and Austin, who is five days shy of turning thirteen, so I guess she's thirteen by now. Happy birthday, Mary, and she wrote suggesting we do a little bit of history on Texas, specifically the Battle of the Alamo and a few other things. You've been suggested Texas might be right for a series, so let us know what you think. Yeah, I really like the part in the back where she wrote Texas loves you. So I'm just gonna go around today saying that we're big in Texas. If you would like to send us email, you can at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also follow us on Twitter and see what we're up to on a day to day basis at missed in History. You can also join our Facebook fan page and give us your ideas on what you think we should cover, and as always, feel free to check out our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And in our Lily Langtry episode, we considered following up with a podcast on Oscar Wilde, and the response was overwhelmingly in favor of this, And it's probably because wild is a really inspired dramatist, and he's a talented poet and essayist. He's one of the best loved Irish writers, which is pretty tough company, i'd say. But he's also a really amazing man, and I think that's the main reason people are so interested in hearing about him. He's this bizarre dresser, he's a public wit. He's a famously brilliant conversationalist, which is something that's a little bit harder to talk about, of course than his works. But one indicator of that is that Churchill chose him as the person he would most like to talk with in the afterlife. He's also famous, of course for his tragic downfall. A libel suit that turned against him cost him two years in prison and ruined his name and reputation for decades after his death, and Since June is Pride month in the United States, it seemed like the perfect time to discuss a man who was so famously persecuted because of his sexuality. So we will start at the beginning, as we always do. Oscar fingal Oh Flaherty Will's Wilde was born in Dublin. I don't have overtames, I know clearly neither of us do. He was born in eighteen fifty four and his family was of Dutch origin, and they were descended from an artist, appropriately enough, but the family had been in Ireland since the late seventeenth century, and since then they had mostly either worked in land management or worked as doctors. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a renowned ear and eye doctor and even invented a surgery for cataracts. He operated on the King of Sweden, and his mother was Lady wild Jane Francesca l g who was an Irish nationalist and wrote poems and articles under the name Speranza. I think I want that to be my nom de plume if I ever take one on. Oscar is the second son, and his birth is followed by that of a sister named Zola, and she dies as a young girl, and it's a pretty tragic event in his early years, switching to a happier aspect of his childhood. Wild is a dedicated scholar from the very start. He may have later kept a library that mingled philosophers with the silly books and French pornographic writings that we might think of, but to forget his classical scholarly training was a mistake. And a fact that Sarah and I liked a lot was that he would tear off the top corner of pages in his books and eat it while he was reading. So a different kind of consumer. And how much paper did this man eat? I mean, he was a very avid reader. One of Sarah's friends lent her an Oscar wild book and told her to be very careful with it, and she retorted that Oscar Wilde ate his own books, so he didn't really know what to say back to them. So Wild earns a scholarship to Trinity College, Devlin, which we've talked about before because it's where the books kept, and from there he goes to Magdalen College, Oxford, and he wins prizes in English and classics, and also really comes to love the philosophies of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and I was thinking, what English class doesn't start with some essay on Peter. It seems they all do requisite reading, for sure, but he takes Peter's teaching to love art for art's sake a step further, and as his son Vivian later describes, that, he set out to idealize beauty for beauty's sake. So I think that's what we can think of as Wild's philosophy in his writing. His dorm room was also a little different from mine. He decorated it with blue China and Prince by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne Jones, which again big change from all the mc shure I remember seeing in My friends. And he was also an estete, believing that beauty is the ideal that we should all strive for. Yeah, tying back into that motto that we mentioned a second ago, But we're going to skip ahead now to London in eighteen seventy nine. Wild has just arrived in the city and he's going to be a writer and an editor, and he's going to do it in style because he dresses really flamboyantly, which is something that might be lost on modern people. You might just think it's old fashioned, funny clothes, but people did not dress in black silk stockings. That was not your typical attire in this period. And people weren't wearing fur lined coats and knee breeches. That was an Oscar Wild exclusive. And this and his work and his larger than life personality got him satirized in the periodical Punch, and Gilbert and Sullivan added him to the routine, basing their character Bunthorne on him. And he didn't mind being linked to the ascetic movement. He published poems in eighteen eighty one with his own money to help enhance this connection. Yeah, he didn't even mind if it was a mocking connection. In some cases. He has a pretty good sense of humor himself. He writes a play Vera shortly after this, which essentially uh is just putting it in a nice way. It's no importance of being earnest and it only runs in New York City for one week, not at all in London. But by eighteen eighty two he's on a lecture tour in the United States and Canada. And this is really how he builds up his fame. When he arrives in New York, he famously declares that he has nothing to declare but his genius, which is going to go down in history books for sure. Um and then he makes a name for himself touring, giving lectures, having conversations with people, and becoming famous from when coming back from It a star. He got to work in Paris on his next play, The Duchess of Padua, and he's writing it. It's a commissioned work for the actress Mary Anderson, but she turns it down and doesn't like it, which of course isn't good for business. So he picks up the lecture tour circuit again, this time in England, but it doesn't last long. By eight four, he's settled down in London to marry Constance Lloyd, and despite his later trial and Constance is distancing of her family from her husband, she changes her and her son's last names. We shouldn't see their marriage as a sham, Vivian wrote about it. Oscar was romantically in love with his beautiful young wife, and for some years he was ideally happy, and they have two sons together, Vivian, as we mentioned in eighty six and a year before that, Cyril and Oscar works a day job of sorts and versus, a reviewer for the Paul Malgazette and then as an editor for Women's World until eighteen eighty nine. But another important point to make here is that marriage marks a pretty big shift in his working style, and he had mostly written poetry before it, and after he turns almost exclusively to prose. And we have a quote from biographer Boris Brazil noting that he began his literary career as a composer of sonorous and pleasing verses, in which, however, as he himself admitted, there was more rhyme than reason. Yet as he grew older he seemed to have lost all taste for poetry. And I also think it's important to note that his only major major poem written after his marriage is The Ballad of Reading Jail, written after his imprisonment, and his major literary years where he's known so much for his literary brilliance, is a pretty short span. It's from eighteen eighty eight to eighteen ninety four. His first major piece is The Happy Prince in eighteen eighty eight. That's a collection of fairy tales, but very poetical despite being prose there for kids and adults, and Sarah and I would like a copy. And there are more stories in Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and other Stories, and later A House of Pomegranates and the Sphinx. But also in one he has his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which first appeared in Lippincott's magazine and was condemned by reviewers, and the idea for the novel was actually based in fact, he had gotten it a few years before when he visited the studio of the painter Basil Ward, and Ward was painting this really lovely young man, and after the sitter left, the two agreed that it was too bad that this man's beauty would eventually fade and die, and they wish that the painting itself could age and the man could remain forever young. And Wild obviously thinks that sounds like the makings of a great story. And he also collects some of his philosophical essays eventually into Intentions. So this is a really really productive span of a few years here for Wild. Of course, he's also writing drama like Lady Windermere's Fan, which he described as one of those modern drawing room plays with pink lampshades. It's the epitome of a well built play, although Katie admitted she was not as it's not one of my favorites. But he was called for after its debut performance and gave a bit too smug of a speech. Speaking to the actors, he said, I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do, so not terribly modest there. He then heads off to Paris to write Salome in French and Sarah Bernhardt, one of the greatest actresses of her day, wants to star in it, and she sends it into rehearsals, but the play is stopped by the censor because no Biblical characters are allowed on the English stage, and Wild is really upset by this, really annoyed, and even considers renouncing his citizenship and moving to France, which he probably should have. Yeah, it's it's unfortunate that he doesn't, but he continues writing these funny plays that are great hits in England. In eighteen ninety two, he puts out a Woman of No importance, and this time when the audience cries for author on the stage, he's a little a little cooler with his speech. By January eight, he hits the big time when an ideal Husband debuts and is attended by the Prince of Wales and Royalty does not come to a play on opening night, so it's a big deal. I guess they're waiting to find out if it's good before they bother. His last play was the best of All, The Importance of Being Earnest, which debuted February fourteen to eight. But that's also when his troubles come to Adad and the root of all this trouble dates back to the start of this big literary success actually in when he met the twenty two year old poet Lord Alfred Douglas, who was known as Bozy, which was originally derived from his mother's nickname Boise. And they meet at a tea party and they become really good friends. They dined together, they stay at each other's houses, they traveled together, and the first issue with this relationship comes up when Douglas gives one of his friends an old suit and the friend discovers letters in the pocket and their letters always check your pocket, Yeah, don't leave your incriminating letters behind. So Wild is blackmailed because these are rather incriminating letters, and this still isn't too big of a problem though. The big issue comes later when Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who absolutely hates the friendship between these two men and may have been a little mentally unhinged himself, goes after Wild, and aside from his involvement in this whole affair, he's best known for the Queensbury Rules of amateur boxing, so perhaps not a great man to get and a tangle with guy to have trouble with for sure. So as we mentioned, he didn't like this friendship, but he feels a little bit better about it after he meets Wild, who managed to woo him over a long lunch. But in right, when Wild's fame is reaching its heights, he's angry again with the whole thing and demands his son stop seeing him. He says, your intimacy with this man Wild must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try to analyze this intimacy, and I make no charge. But to my mind, to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it, and Douglas replies, rather witheringly, what a funny little man you are in a telegram too. You can just imagine how is Boluste father must have taken that. So Queensbury starts to get pretty menace thing after this, and he threatens hotel managers and restaurant managers who may be entertaining the man harboring the men. And he shows up at the house of Oscar Wilde with a prize fighter, and Oscar tells him, I do not know what the Queensbury rules are, but the Oscar wild rule is to shoot on site, which is a very menacing warning from this poet who his motto is beauty for Beauty's sake. And then, in at the opening night of the Importance of Being Earnest, Queensbury attempts to disrupt the show, so wild orders additional protection around the theater and Queensbury's left outside for the course of the performance. But the final blow is when he leaves a card at the club that wild and his wife belonged to that says to Oscar Wilde, posing as a psalmbed might and I'm not saying that incorrectly. He spelled it incorrectly, and Wild was grossly offended. He wrote, I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man. I don't know what to do. Yeah, he's worried that his reputation is going to be affected. He's at the pinnacle of his fame right now, and Douglas, who really hates his father, urges Wild to sue Forliabel, and a lot of his friends think this is a terrible idea. They tell him that he'll have no hope winning it, and that he should just get out of the country, move to France, where it's more tolerant, and continue his writing career. But he decides to go ahead with the suit and engages Edward Clark to prosecute, and swears to him that there's no basis to this libel. So that brings us to our trial. April third. Wild is incredibly confident with his suit. He testifies that I said to him, how dare you say such things as you do about your son and me? And he also faces off Queensbury's key piece of evidence, a letter from Wild to Douglas. Clark urges the people to remember that Wild as a poet, and that they should take this letter as the expression of true poetic feeling and nothing more than that. So while this letter may seem really out there to you regular people, this is a normal stuff for a poet exactly. And Wild is really confident, as he said a second ago, he's sure that his fame and his popularity are going to carry this. And this even extends to his cross examination by Edward Carson, who's representing Queensbury, and Wild's responses make for really really good reading. They're witty, they're sharp. Sometimes they contradict each other, so maybe it's not the best best stuff to be saying on the stand, but it does make for an inner tran read. The first part of the questioning focused on his literary works, which Wild defended against charges of immorality. He said, there's no such thing as an immoral word. Books are well written or badly written. That his cocky responses started to die down when Carson asks about his relationships his presence to young men. They're low intellectual capacity and perhaps unsuitability of some of his friends. But while tried to play up his love of youth, which was something he valued in his friends above education or social standing. Yeah, so he tries to make like he's an equal opportunity friend here and he just loves youth. And things get really serious when Carson announces that he'll be introducing a witness who had a sexual relationship with Wild, and this is very dangerous territory and Clark knows it. And that's because in eighteen nine, the Criminal Law Amendment Act had passed which made it illegal to commit gross indecency, which was essentially criminalizing homosexuality. So it meant that this libel suit could become a criminal one with Oscar Wild going to jail. So wild counsel advised him to drop the suit and no jury will convict Queensbury. It's just time to let all of this go. But by the next afternoon, Queensbury's representation has pushed the case ahead into criminal territory and the inspector delivers the arrest warrant to Magistrate John Bridges, who adjourns the court for a short period, which may have been his way of trying to let Wild escape, you know, heading out on the train to Europe, but he doesn't. And his name comes off of the importance of being earnest. Yeah, off of the playbills off the marquee, uh, and he just feels like his life is absolutely crumbling, that this the suit that he felt so confident about, has completely backfired on him. And on April, his first criminal trial begins and Wild is accused of gross indecencies and conspira see to commit gross indecencies. Um, he's not prosecuted for sodomy, but mail witnesses come to court and testify against him. And when he himself appears, he's very different from how he was in the earlier trial. He's quiet and respectful, yeah, respectfully denying everything. And in Clark's closing statement, he echoes most modern thoughts and says, clear from this fearful imputation one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters of today. And in clearing him, clear society from a stain which we interpreted as meaning that this shouldn't even be a crime. It shouldn't even be in court, and they shouldn't even be having to respond to it. Well, and how embarrassing to to put one of your biggest, most famous citizens on trial for something like this. So the jury can't reach a verdict, although they quit him on one charge and he's released on bail before the second trial begins, and you would think people would let it be at this point that that would be the end of it, and even Carson is urging people to lighten up, but the Liberal government of England wants a conviction. One theory is that there were political motives for pursuing wild with this great intensity, and it's likely that the Prime Minister, Archibald Primrose, who was the Earl of Roseberry, had had an affair with the brother of Douglas, a man named Francis, and Francis is likely to have killed himself, and it's not long after he did so that his father, Queensberry started going after Oscar Wilde so intensely starts this manic attack on him, hoping to quote save his other son. And it's possible that if Rosebery didn't go after wild and didn't try to to see his prosecution through to a conviction, that his own case, in his own crime, may have been at supposed by Queensberry. According to Douglas Linder, Roseberry had insomnia and depression during the trial, but it disappeared afterward, which perhaps gives a little more credence to that theory, but this time the prosecution is led by Solicitor General Frank Lockwood, and While describes Lockwood's treatment of him as an appalling denunciation of me, like something out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola's indictments of the popes of Realm, which we all know what that's like. So the jury finds Wild guilty on all counts but one, and he sentenced to two years of hard labor. Most of this is served at reading jail and his sons. This is a really sad aspect of the story. His sons are sent to Switzerland and they never see their father again. Their last name is changed them. The wife of Oscar Wild is really doing all she can to help shore up their reputation for the future, but they're still actual discriminated against as adults because of who their father was. And while he's in jail, Wild right stuprofundus a letter to Douglas, and when Douglas receives it, he destroys it after the first few pages. And Sarah, you read some of that. It's pretty brutal, and I think Douglas thought that it was the only copy and he could just get this really detailed account of their relationship and of all of the things that went wrong, just erased from history. And it's not just a regretful letter because the friendship resulted in while being in jail. After all, he's writing this from prison, But it's regretful because he feels like Douglas cost him his art, and he's ashamed of how much money they spent, and he accuses Douglas of loving his life, loving his uh, all the glamorous sides of celebrity writer. Yeah, the play premiers and the parties and the fame, but not having any respect for the quiet labor that actually went into all his writing, the daily drudgery of sitting down and actually getting it on paper. Wild had also sent this manuscript to his publisher, Robert Ross, intending to revise it later, and parts of it were published in nineteen oh five. Wild and Douglas reunited for a time after prison, but after Wild's death, Douglas tried to get the manuscript from Ross, but he instead presented it to the British Museum and embargoed its contents for sixty years. So imagine when this came out in nineteen sixty it was made quite a big deal. Um So wild is bankrupt when he comes out of jail and he goes to France to try to kick start his writing career again. But the only thing he really produces is the ballot of writing jail, and he writes letters to editors in concern about prison conditions though, so he's he's still out there, he's just not producing it anywhere near the same frequency he was before his trial. Oscar Wilde died of acute meningitis from the ear infection November thirtie in Paris, and on his deathbed he was received into the Catholic Church, which he had long been interested in along with mysticism, and he's buried at Parla Chaise in Paris. And interestingly, on the same trip, I saw the memorial to him at Reading and his tomb in Paris, and it's a pretty crazy contrast. The Paris memorial is this huge winged figure and it is covered with lipstick kisses. There's a little sign discouraging people to go kiss Oscar Wilde's tomb, but clearly most people are not following that. It's surrounded by flowers. He's definitely got a lot of very devoted fans still, and at least don't wear that indelible lipstick if you feel like you have to pick a nice shade too. Eventually it turns into a grief something that Wild would like. He was very concerned with beauty um And we'd like to end on a note that's a little less sad. Sarah found a pretty cool article in the New York Times. But though about Wild and copyright law. Yeah, weirdly enough, you know the famous photo of him where he's wearing that fur lined coat in the knee breeches and the silk stockings. It was taken by a celebrity photographer named Napoleon Seroni, and it did play a very important role in copyright law in the United States. And that's because the photo had been reproduced as part of this New York Department stores advertising campaign after he got so famous on his American tour, and Seroni sued and eventually the Supreme Court ruled that his photo should fall under constitutional copyright protection, and the ruling is still cited today and disputes over copyright laws right the Borough Giles Lithographic Company for since Sereni, there's a little known Oscar wild fact for you and speaking of things of beauty that brings us to listen our mail. Our beautiful objects for today are two bookmarks that we received from listener Mary and Austin, who is five days shy of turning thirteen, so I guess she's thirteen by now. Happy birthday, Mary, and she wrote suggesting we do a little bit of history on Texas, specifically the Battle of the Alamo and a few other things. You've been suggested Texas might be right for a series, so let us know what you think. Yeah, I really like the part in the back where she wrote Texas loves you. So I'm just gonna go around today saying that we're big in Texas. If you would like to send us email, you can at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can also follow us on Twitter and see what we're up to on a day to day basis at missed in History. You can also join our Facebook fan page and give us your ideas on what you think we should cover, and as always, feel free to check out our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. 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