16 October 1854: Oscar Wilde is born

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 16 October 1854.

Wilde’s parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a well-known surgeon who authored several books and was knighted for his services. His mother, Jane Francesca, wrote popular poetry under the pen name “Speranza.” Oscar was the second of the couple’s three children and had three half-siblings fathered by Sir William before his marriage. Because of his mother’s literary successes, young Oscar enjoyed a cultured and privileged childhood.

Until the age of nine, Oscar was educated at home under a German governess and French nurse, learning both German and French. In 1864, he was enrolled at Portora Royal School, a boarding school in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. Here, he became especially interested in Greek and Roman studies, receiving prizes as the best Classics student in his last two years there.

At sixteen, he enrolled at Trinity College in Dublin where he was an outstanding student. With an interest in the classics, he was awarded the Berkeley Gold Medal, the highest honour available to classics students. He competed for a scholarship to Magdalen College and won it, so in 1874, twenty-year-old Oscar Wilde headed over to England to study at Oxford.

After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, Wilde became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in “one of the first celebrity trials”, imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.