![]() Wilde's play Lady Windemere's Fan, first performed on 20 February 1892 at the St. His play Salomé was published in Paris and London, but was forbidden performance by the lord chamberlain because of legislation banning religious plays. Photograph from the 1895 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, via Wikimedia commons Critics decried the Faustian tale as homosexual, poisonous, and deserving of being burnt, and so of course it was a tremendous popular success. In July 1880 The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Books are either well written or badly written. "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. ![]() He continued to write and print aesthetic dialogues, social satires, and even one political essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. In 1888 Wilde published his first collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and in 1891 he published Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories and A House of the Pomegranates. He quickly re-named the publication The Woman's World and raised its tone. In 1885 a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette led to a regular job as a reviewer and journalist, and in 1887 he became the editor of The Lady's World magazine. Money was tight, especially since Wilde's work was mostly freelance and he was helping to support his mother. ![]() They had two sons: Cyril, born in 1885, and Vivian, born in 1886. On, Wilde married fellow Dubliner Constance Mary Lloyd. In 1883 he moved to Paris, where he met Robert Sherard, his friend and later biographer. Wilde delivered nearly 150 lectures in North America over the next year. Richard D'Oyly Carte, producer of Patience, hired Wilde to lecture across the United States in advance of the production's US premier, so that Americans would understand the aesthetic movement the operetta mocked. Photograph of Constance Mary Lloyd, via Wikimedia Commons His first play was Vera, but the 1881 London premier was cancelled due to fears that his depiction of a tsar might reflect poorly on the recent assassination of Tsar Alexander II. He befriended famous actresses such as Lillie Langtry, Ellen Terry, and Sarah Bernhardt, and in 1881 the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience satirised Wilde and his aesthetic movement as the character 'Bunthorne'. Wilde quickly became a staple of London society with his clever sayings and aesthetic flair. "The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read" In 1881 he self-published a book, Poems, which sold out of its first print run within the year. In 1879 Wilde moved to London, followed by his mother and brother. Once he did graduate, Wilde returned to Dublin and tried to romance his childhood sweetheart, Florence Balcombe, who instead married Bram Stoker. For some time he was unable to graduate because of his deliberately and repeatedly failing Oxford’s mandatory divinity test. Two years later, in 1878, Wilde won Oxford's Newdigate prize for his poem 'Ravenna'. He famously said of the blue china with which he entertained, "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china". He wore his hair long and decorated his room with flowers and feathers. There Walter Horatio Pater and John Ruskin inducted Wilde into the culture of aesthetes, of which Wilde became a life-long proponent. Wilde studied at Oxford from 1874 to 1879 (and received a double first). In his final year Wilde won Trinity College's highest academic award in Greek, the Berkeley Gold Medal, and received a demyship to study Greats and Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Mahaffy, whom Wilde called his "first and best teacher", would later inspire Wilde's character Prince Paul Maraloffski in Vera. By the time he finished school in 1871, Wilde had won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied classics with John Pentland Mahaffy and Robert Yelverton Turrell. In February 1867 Oscar's little sister Isola died, and he carried a lock of her hair thereafter. ![]() His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde, was an Irish nationalist, a poet who published under the pseudonym 'Speranza', and the centre of a literary salon. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's best oto-optamologic, knighted for medical services, and collector and publisher of Irish folklore. Oscar Fingal O'Flahterie Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October, 1854, the second of three children. "I am not young enough to know everything" Oscar Wilde By Napoleon Sarony (Library of Congress), via Wikimedia Commons Early Life and Education
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