05 Sep Oscar Wilde

Although Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, he was as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1874 to 1878 and then moved to London. So a literary tour of England should take in the controversial sculpture “A Conversation with Oscar Wilde” on a pedestrian street near London’s Trafalgar Square. Also there’s a memorial window in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. A frequent visitor to France, Wilde died in Paris in 1900 aged 46 and was buried there.

Has there ever been a writer since Shakespeare with such a sharp wit? You have only to listen to the delicious dialogue in his plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The dark novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is another masterpiece. (All have been adapted for television or film at least once). As Wilde himself once said: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”