OSCAR FINGAL O’FLAHERTIE WILLS WILDE was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of an eminent eye-surgeon and a nationalist poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Speranza’. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or ‘Art for Art’s Sake’) Movement. Despite gaining a first and winning the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. He published a largely unsuccessful volume of poems in 1881 and in the next year undertook a lecture tour of the United States in order to promote the D’Oyly Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, Patience. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies – Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self- imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
ROBERT MIGHALL completed a Ph.D. on Gothic fiction and Victorian medico-legal science at the University of Wales, and then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. In 1997 he became the editor of Penguin Classics; he now works as a consultant and occasional writer. His publications include an edition of Oscar Wilde’s poems for Everyman Paperbacks, a study of Victorian Gothic fiction for Oxford University Press (1999) and the Penguin Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He lives in London.
