30 November 1900: Oscar Wilde dies

In April 1895, London was fascinated and shocked by the trial when Oscar Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. But there was so much evidence against Wilde that he had to drop the prosecution and pay the costs, leaving him bankrupt. As he left the court, a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of sodomy and gross indecency, and after another trial, he was sentenced to two years in prison.

He spent most of his incarceration at hard labour camps in three different prisons. His health was destroyed, and apart from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which was published under his prison number C.3.3., he never wrote another word. After his release from England’s Reading Gaol in May 1897, he emerged diminished in health yet still capable of flashes of his trademark wit that startled those who met him.

Calling himself “Sebastian Melmoth,” Wilde drifted through France and Italy, unable to return to the success and sociability that had once been his natural habitat. He wandered the boulevards alone and spent what little money he had on alcohol. Money slipped through his fingers, and the burden of notoriety trailed him like a long, unavoidable shadow.

Wilde spent his last years living in small hotels in Paris, which were paid for by his estranged wife (who refused to reunite with him), as he was completely penniless. The estrangement from Constance grieved him, though he cherished the rare news of his sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. His days were marked by both longing and lethargy; he still loved good talk and companionship, but his health had weakened, and his spirits never fully recovered. Wilde’s final months were spent at the Hôtel d’Alsace in the rue des Beaux-Arts, a place of modest comfort. Chronic ear infections, poverty, and the effects of years of stress culminated in meningitis. Friends such as Robbie Ross remained loyal, ensuring small kindnesses in an otherwise threadbare existence.

He was received into the Roman Catholic Church shortly before his death, a gesture long considered yet only embraced at the end. On 30 November 1900, at the age of 46, Oscar Wilde died quietly in his shabby Parisian room. Those who loved him mourned a man whose brilliance had been both his making and his undoing. Today, visitors to Père Lachaise Cemetery pause at his striking tomb, reflecting on a life cut short yet still radiant—proof that wit and imagination have their own forms of immortality.