After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Oscar Wilde's Very Victorian Scandal

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

In 1895, the world witnessed its first true celebrity trial when Oscar Wilde was charged with “Gross Indecency". To tell the powerful story of Wilde's life in its fullness, Anthony and Maddy are joined by Merlin Holland, grandson of Oscar Wilde. Anthony and Merlin met while Anthony was filming his new History Hit documentary A Very Victorian Scandal: The Trials of Oscar Wilde.Sign up to History Hit to watch this and hundreds of other original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitYou can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's 1895, and we're at the old Bailey in London. The courtroom falls silent as the judge prepares to speak. Hundreds of eyes fixed on the defendant. Once the brightest star in London, Oscar Wilde has appeared to wilt under the weight of the accusations presented. Not long ago, he stood defiant, but as the jury files back in, even his poise begins to fracture. reporters lean forward, ready to carve his fate into tomorrow's headlines.

Wild closes his eyes, knowing that whatever comes next will change everything. His name, his freedom, his legacy. The judge clears his throat, and he proceeds to issue the verdict. Oscar Wilde was a national treasure, a prince. of Victorian society, but beneath it all, a storm was gathering. And when the moment came, Wilde's world didn't just crack, it collapsed. Who was Oscar Wilde? How did a man once loved for his work so quickly become vilified by the public? And what sort of legacy was forged in the wreckage of his fall? To answer these questions, we are joined today by Oscar Wilde biographer

and his only grandson, Merlin Holland. Welcome to After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. Now, the downfall of Oscar Wilde in 1895 shattered the life of one of Britain's brightest literary stars, reducing a celebrated playwright. Reducing a celebrated what is happening today? Oh dear. I don't think he likes it.

I don't think he does. He's come back to a... And it is a he as well. Yeah. Oh, dear. Reducing a celebrated playwright to a prisoner. Today we'll piece together the final tragic years of a man whose famous wit could not protect him from Victorian society. On today's show, we welcome on the pod Merlin Holland.

He's a biographer and editor of numerous works on Oscar Wilde, including his new work after Oscar. And he has been researching him for more than 30 years, not only this, but he also happens to be Oscar's grandson. Merlin, welcome to After Dark. Hello. We're thrilled to have you here. It's so good to have you, Merlin. is a special episode in many ways because Merlin and I have met before when we were filming for a very Victorian scandal, which you'll be able to go and watch on History Had TV right now.

And as I explained to Merlin on the day, Oscar has a very special place in my heart and in my intellectual pursuit and in so many ways since I was a teenager. So it's great to be able to sit with Merlin and talk about this particular history. And one of the things that, you know, I know as an Irishman and you're very well. of, but maybe some people aren't quite so aware, is that Oscar's origins are very Irish. And let's rewind to 1854 and talk about the family that Oscar arrives into in Dublin. Very good idea, because I think many people today seem to assume that Oscar sprung fully formed about the 1890s and produced all these wonderful plays. And the whole build-up to that is his youth and going through Trinity

College, Dublin and Oxford, and a brilliant, brilliant scholar in classics at Oxford and so on. And I think that all this is quite often forgotten. The biographers, of course, know about it, but the general public doesn't. So, yes, why not? It's a strange thing, really, isn't it? Because by forgetting that, we forget his Irishness. And, you know, he has said himself, he's often quoted and often misquoted, but, you know, he has said himself that, you know, I am Irish, which is altogether a different thing when he was talking about his ideas. identity. So I do think it's really foundational. And especially when, and we'll come to this, the trials start happening. His Irishness is to the fore in many ways, even if it's not mentioned explicitly. Let's talk about his mother and father, Merlin. What is their background and what position are they occupying in the 1850s? Well, his father was one of the founding fathers of Irish medicine. And Wilde's incision, I believe, on good authority, is still used today for diseases of the air.

And he's celebrated, and indeed, I think Sir William has a bust in the Victorian iran eye. He was an orthelmic surgeon in ordinary, I think was the official title to Queen Victoria. So if ever the Queen went to Ireland and needed attention, Sir William would dare have been there on hand. But he wasn't just a medic. He was also an antiquarian. And he led the British Association for the Advancement of Science expedition to the Aran Islands. And I can't remember exactly what year it was, I think it was early 1860s, because he knew all about the sort of early Irish history of the area.

And they presented him with two magnificent claret jugs afterwards, one inscribed in Irish and one in English. And I think Oscar's real love of history. comes from his father, but then his mother, now that's a different thing. This is the force, a life force. She's not an ordinary woman, is she? Very much not. And she was Jane Elgy.

She claimed that the Elgy family name was descended from Dante Alighieri, which I think was probably just her imagination. But she was a poet and contributed largely to the young island movement of, remind me, 1848, the uprising? Yes, and then all the way into the 50s as well, but yes, yeah, yeah. And together with James Gavin Duffy, and at one point she was very nearly arrested for sedition for her anti-British poetry in the newspaper that he ran.

And when he was being tried, she went to court apparently and stood up and said, if anybody is to blame, it is I. And when she was told this story in later life and asked whether it was true, she said, well, no, it wasn't really, but let it stand. It will read well in a hundred years' time. She has a sense of the dramatic, which I adore. It's that nationalist, revolutionary mother

and the historian father, the scientist father, a combination of those two produces Oscar. It's a particularly extraordinary upbringing, I suppose. And one of the things that, I guess, most people listening to this will know about Oscar is his incredible wit, and just how quotable and misquotable he is today. was this version of him that we have now that is I suppose part mythic and part based on reality

was this version of him on display in his earliest years was he the Oscar that we know and love from an early age or did he have to grow into this person he grew into it I think the the turning point I mean he went to Trinity College Dublin and from there didn't get a degree there not that he failed but he just didn't stay to get the degree and as his tutor at Trinity said to him, run up to Oxford, you'll be better off up there than you are here. And I think that he got to Oxford,

studied classics, and in those days, as today, even a classics degree was four rather than three years, get a first part and a second part, the only degree at Oxford where you can get the famous so-called double first, which, of course, he got, and very few people did then.

And when he left Oxford, I think one of the great turning points was being asked to go and lecture in America. And until the latest biographers, Richard Elman and Matthew Sturges, I think that time of Oscars, a whole year, 145 lectures are roughly speaking during the course of the year going around, not on airplanes, but on trains in those days, it's a hell of a journey. And he realized when he got there, he did a lecture called the English Renaissance. And it was bits of William Morris, Walter Pater, one of his tutors at Oxford, a bit of Rossetti, a bit of James Whistler,

and a little bit of Oscar thrown at the end. It was far too long, far too theoretical. The audiences didn't take it very well. And he then, as he did, and many times later in his life, change. He knew what the public wanted. And he then produced two lectures. One called the house beautiful, and the other was the decorative arts. And basically what he was doing was telling the Americans how to decorate their houses. And it reads rather like a Habitat catalog of the 1960s. If you can't afford beautiful Persian rugs, put rush matting on the floor. And this was before he'd published anything at all.

He produced a play, which was a flop all about Russian revolutionaries called Vera. He became famous for being famous. And I think it gave him a lifelong selection of gentle jibes at the American way of life as well. But it was, I think, pretty much for trial by fire because he'd gone as the living image of one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, patients. He'd been caricatured,

or an ethete had been caricatured in the operetta, and he'd been asked to go as the real-life thing so that people could see. So let's talk a little bit about this eshetism then. You talked about him essentially helping to decorate people's houses, and he has this, he does have this greater vision of an idea of beauty and creating beauty. Tell us a little bit about the estates and where Oscar fits into this. It's very difficult.

I've always said, much to the horror of many academic friends, that the whole idea of this aesthetic movement is almost something which is intangible. I mean, it has roots in the pre-Raphylites. But the whole idea of living life for beauty, I think some of the aphorisms which Oscar comes out with, particularly at the beginning of the picture of Dorian Gray when it comes out in book form, much to the horror of the critics, he believed that the secret of life, he says the secret of life is in art. And I suppose if you take that apart and analyze it, there's a lot of truth in it.

Yeah. Whether it's the secret, what one interprets by the secret, whether it's one should live life in this way, or whether it's the idea that art is the only form of perfect existence, as imperfect as we are as human beings. I wish he was here to answer the question. Listen, I think I struggle with this as well. I think, Maddie, you have a background in art history, so actually you're probably very well place to talk about this as well. But it was this idea of kind of art for art's sake,

wasn't it, where it was like it didn't have to have anything other than beauty to be valuable or to have given you that creative urge. Yeah, I mean, this is, I'm so fascinated in Merlin by something that you said about the aesthetic movement being intangible. Oscar strikes me as someone who is partly intangible and yet we hold him up as this literary great and rightly so that he had so much substance to him. But you mentioned him being famous for being famous. And there's a very thin veil, I think, in his world between art and life. And they combine in all these interesting ways. You talk about him being sort of satirized on the stage, but then also turning up as that character. And there's a

boundary that's always being crossed. It seems very, very playful. Is that something that he cultivated as he went along? Or did he always have that sense of playfulness, and art as being the only thing worth doing. That is how you should live your life. I think at this point, I should quote to you, a sentence out of a letter that he wrote to James Whistler. James Whistler was quite upset because Oscar pinched a number of his aesthetic art theories.

But he writes this letter, James Whistler, and at the end of it he says, remain James, as I do, incomprehensible, to be great is to be misunderstood. So that's exactly what I mean. I think that more or less sums it up. It's this desire to remain the slightly incomprehensible figure. So long as you remain in comprehensible, people will continue to try and discover you.

I'm going to take that forward in life, I think. Add mystery to my wheelhouse. So one of the aspects, and we're going to come towards the final days and we're going to come towards Oscar is what's known as Oscar's downfall, possibly what a lot of people remember him for in many ways, despite all the great literary works. But before we get there, I want to talk about your grandmother and your father and your uncle and that side of his life, because you already hinted at scandal with the picture of Dorian Gray. We know that the scandal coming down the line in terms of the trials. But what we also have is a family life, is

domesticity, is a Victorian ideal of domesticity in many ways, at least on the surface of it. Tell us a little bit about their home, the wild family home life. Well, I think all we'd really know about it is what my father recorded in the memoir that he wrote in 1954. But you have to remember that this was written 60 years after the events. And I found it slightly difficult with pangs of conscience looking at my father's memoir and then looking at his diaries that he was keeping at the time. And I think that the idea of this smiling gentle giant of a father going up to the nursery and playing with the children and so on, I don't think it was a regular thing. But because the idea of the sort of Victorian paterfamilias, the sort of rigid Victorian father who asks the nursemaid to bring the children down into the drawing room before dinner to be presented to the guest and all that, and otherwise hardly sees them, I think that definitely wasn't Oscar's style. And if I'm sure Oscar did go up to the nursery and play with the children, but it wasn't that frequent, but it was exceptional.

And I think the exception in my father's mind then became the norm. And I think I had, as I say, a pang of conscience revealing what he says in his diary, which was I had to write about this. And, you know, I'm wondering whether the father really did come up to the nursery. But his brother in a letter shortly after Oscar dies, his brother writes a letter to one of the family friends and says, I remember how Oscar used to come up to the nursery and play with us. So there's a certain ambivalence there. I think he was exceptional as a Victorian father.

I think there's no doubt. He didn't write the so-called fairy stories for the children because they were published when Vivian, my father and Cyril, were only three and two and a half, two, two. But as Vivian says in his memoir, he gave us suitably shortened versions of the stories for our young minds. And I think that it made the separation in the end when Oscar went to prison, when the children and Constance had to go in exile off to the continent, right out the scandal. I think it made it all the worse, because if your father hadn't been a hands-on father, a relatively hands-on father, you wouldn't have missed him as much as they did.

Yeah, it's a real full stop on that family unit, isn't it? And on the imaginative culture of that family as well to a certain extent. Melan, tell us a little bit about your grandmother, Constance, because people might be surprised to know that Oscar Wilde was married. They may not know that much about him, and we know about his relationships with men. But how did he and Constance come to be married, and what do you know about their relationship? It's interesting you say a lot of people didn't know that Oscar Wilde was married. I mean, obviously they knew at the time.

Yes, yes. That's very true. Many years, when my father's book came out in 1954, I've got a whole, I've got two huge files of letters written to my father, thanking him for, you know, telling the story. And I should think probably between a third and, you know, about a third of them, say we never knew Oscar Weil was married. Yes. I think, you know, the scandal had put the lid so firmly on the whole family story that people assumed, And because most of what they knew was that he was the writer of some amusing comedies and went to prison for being gay. But Constance, Oscar, when he was at Oxford, had a girlfriend, Florence Balcom.

And he and Florey were obviously very fond of each other. Flurry then went off rather sensibly and married Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, who became Henry Irving, the famous actor's manager at the Lyceum Theatre. So I think Flory Valcom escaped with her skin. Breathing aside relief somewhere. That's an extraordinary life. But although they did correspond a bit after she got married. But there's never been any doubt in my mind that Oscar married.

He could have done much better if he'd wanted to marry somebody for money. She wasn't poor She had a legacy from her father And from her grandfather And she was English And she was English Yes Although she had Irish roots as well

But you know Relatively slim so to speak But I don't think there's any man Any question in my mind That they married They're married for love I agree Yeah

People are constantly asking me Oh did he Was it a so-called lavender marriage Was he Well, all right, if it was, then, okay, so he has one child, but he didn't need to have two, probably. It's very difficult to conjecture about it, but my feeling always has been that they married for love. And in 1891, I think I'm right in saying, the second volume of stories, so-called, well, they weren't by that stage.

They'd all taken on a much darker hue. It was no longer the happy prince and the selfish giant. It was the fisherman and his soul, somebody selling his soul to be allowed to love a mermaid and so on. Each one of those stories was dedicated to a famous society hostess, but the whole book is dedicated to his wife. And he writes a letter to her at the time saying he likens the book to a church. He says the side chapels, each individual story, are dedicated to these famous women. but the whole is dedicated to you. The great lamp of the shrine, which burns beautifully, is yours.

You know, it's a wonderfully sort of purple prose, Oscar Romantic letter. But, you know, even by 1891, she was the mother of his children. You can't take that away. As somebody once said, you know, Oscar Wilde is not either or. You have to look at him as always both and. Yes, absolutely. So the fact that he finally became confirmedly gay doesn't, in my mind, alter the fact that he married his wife at the time for love. He may already have had homosexual tendencies. It's difficult to tell. I think, what would you say?

I agree. Yeah, no, I think it's actually a very modern way of understanding these types of relationships, rather than it being it has to be this or it has to be that, which, you know, I think we've come out of that era. But I think Oscar and Constance, even after the arrest, Oscar talks about going back to Constance. There's a conversation around whether or not that would be possible. So it's, you know, and he has that conversation regarding going back to Constance. And he, well, as we will get to, also talks about going back to Boise, who I'll introduce in just a moment. So these two people are coexisting on a similar plane, I think, when I encounter them. And the remarkable thing about Constance is this, she is so perfectly named in many ways. She becomes this pillar, this familial pillar, I think, where she tries to manage all of these

relationships. She's forced to manage all of these relationships. And she gets to a point ultimately where it will become too difficult for the children, for the boys, if she stays in that wild circuit, I think. But certainly, even after he's released from prison, there's a world in which they considered coming back together. Okay, I'm not sure what that marriage would have looked like then. I'm not sure they would have cared really.

But certainly there was an idea that there would have been a marital or a familial unit, even post-prison. So I think you're right. I agree with you. I don't think it's black and white. And I think it's all the more interesting because it's not. It's interesting as well that you say that the relationships that he had and the arrangements that he had seem to us fairly modern. We can maybe understand them a little bit more from our perspective. And I think it speaks to the ambiguity millen that you were talking about and the other aspects of his life,

that he isn't someone who exists in these categories or conforms to certain ideals, that actually he lives his life as a piece of art. And that includes all the passion and all the love and all the creativity that comes with that. And beyond that, the boundaries aren't really set and they don't really matter in this circumstance. Well, I think there's been a tendency no longer, as you say, I think the either or view. of Oscar, I think, has now been properly shelved where it belongs. But I think there was so much in the way of ambiguity, ambivalence. He was baptized a Protestant, although there is possible evidence that he may have had a Catholic baptism as well. And he was always fascinated by the Catholic

Church. He was an Irishman who needed the oxygen of British society to produce these extraordinary comedies that he did. There's so much, which balances itself out. It's two halves are the same thing, really. And I think this applies very much to his relationship with Constance as well. Incidentally, while we're on the subject of women, there's one thing which I think a lot of your listeners may not be aware of, which is that in 1897, Oscar was asked to edit, to revamp a woman's magazine, which was called the lady's world. And he said, I'll do it. But on one condition, and that is you change the title, it's going to be called the woman's world. And that was in deference to the new woman, as she was called then. And it is something which is not,

now it's been, a lot has been made of it in the latest biographies. But he agreed to do this. And what he actually said at the time, he said was that he wanted, it was not too feminine and not sufficiently womanly, what we want to do is we want to deal not just with what women wear, but what they think and what they feel. Wow, that's so radical. Yeah. For the end of the 19th century. You can see the influence of his mother behind this, can't you?

And at one point, he talks about a girl at, I think it was the Queen's University in Belfast, who has won a scholarship. And he says of her, it's marvellous to Chronicle an item of news, Irish news. and he talks about winning her scholarship that shows how worthy women are of that higher culture and education which has been so tardily and in some instances so grudgingly granted to them.

Go on, Oscar. Absolutely. Wow. And there's a petition to Trinity College Dublin in 1892 with 10,000 signatures on it. The first signature is his mother and the second signature is his wife. How about that? So we have these amazing things.

amazing pillars of women that are holding him up in many ways and that he's very happy to be held up by. those final days. So as people may know, what happens then in a very, you know, life-changing way is that Oscar meets Bozzie or Alfred Lord Douglas. He is the son of the Marcus of Queensbury. And he is, what, 20, 21, I think when they meet a young, beautiful man and Oscar. And he certainly fall in love. Whatever that looks like, whatever that means, we can talk about forever. They, Oscar, I think it's fair to say, is entirely enthrall. He is, he is consumed by Bozzy. And Bozzy is, what is Bozzy?

Bozzy is difficult, I suppose. Bozzy is tricky and he's capricious and he's all of those things. And he's quite demanding. He can be demanding of Oscar's money. They take a pair of rooms side by side in the Savoy. And there is a visitation from lots of different sex workers, male sex workers, that come into the room. And later those sheets come up in the trials.

but it all starts to unravel, this intense intimate relationship starts to unravel, not between Oscar and Bozzy, but when Queensbury inserts himself in it. So there's a calling card, which turns into a real turning point. You give us a little bit about what happens that day when Queensbury heads to a particular club in London. Well, just as a little preface to that, there was an incident which took place in the Café Royal. Yes. Which is when Bozzi and Oscar are having lunch, and they invite the Marquis, who has appeared, to join them. And he's, I think, a little bit doubtful about whether this is going to be a good idea.

But apparently, the story goes, that Bozzi leaves, and the Marquis and Oscar finished their lunch together. And the Marquis, I can't remember it. He actually says it or he writes it to Bozzi. He says, you know, I can understand why you're fond. to this man. He's extraordinary. But of course, it doesn't take long. It's a matter of weeks before he's then saying, you've got to break up this relationship. London is talking about. It's disgraceful and so on. And then in the end, it's at the first night of the importance of being honest in February, 1895, he appears with a bouquet of rotting vegetables that he's

intending to either throw on the stage. His ticket is cancelled at Oscar's request by the management. and he goes stomping off, as Oscar says, DeBosey, chattering like a monstrous ape. But he goes and he leaves his calling card at Oscar's club, the Albemal Club, on which he's written Oscar Wilde posing somdomite. Sondomte, yes. He was in a rush. And it's never quite clear whether it was posing as or whether it was posing. So if he was posing as, he's not accusing him of being a Sotomite, but posing

Sodomite means that you are a Sodomite and you're posing. Yes. So this is why when Oscar then sues him for libel at Boise's insistence, the indictment

which is drawn up takes account of both interpretations of the card. And when he receives the card, he writes a note to his, we think, I'm pretty certain, his first male

homosexual lover, Robert Ross. and says, Robbie, come and see me. The most terrible thing has happened. The ivory tower is assailed by the foul thing. That very purple game. I've asked Bozzi to come in the morning. But when Robbie gets there, Bozzy's already there.

Bozies not going to waste the opportunity of trying to see his father behind bars. We should say Bozzie hates his father. Both sons, both of Queensbury's sons have a very, well, the one that's left alive now, have a very difficult relationship with his father. Queensbury is known to be a man of sport. He's, you know, the Queensbury boxing rules. This is how he's known. So this is a very, you know, tactile.

He's not an isthee, put it that way. But as you say, Merlin Bozzi is keen to get this through in the course. And I just want to pause there for a second because it occurred to me recently. Posing as Sodomai posing somdomite, definitely Sodomitical intent is in there. But the interesting thing about this is that about, I think it was three or four months prior, the Laboucher Amendment Act had come into place, which when you were trying to prove same-sex sexual activity between men prior to that, you had to prove penetration. So it's a very difficult thing to prove. But with this amendment, it was all kinds of kissing, fondling. It could be

so many different things. So it suddenly widens out, and it's more easy to go after somebody for same-sex attraction because of this amendment. But it's interesting that Queensbury puts Sodomite or Somdomite specifically on the card, because that is the thing that everybody would have been watching out for previously. That is the worst thing. Again, I think people misunderstand this. It's Oscar who goes after Queensbury first. There are three trials, and the first one is Oscar taking Queensbury. Interestingly, the Laboucher Amendment refers to it, as you say, it's far more broad. It's referred to rather quaintly as gross indecency. Yes, yes.

Which can be interpreted more or less as anything, a kiss in public. It doesn't have to be sodomy. You know, it's not specified. It's just very broad. And I make the mistake constantly. In the first trial, which is the trial which Oscar brings for libel

against the Marcos of Queensbury, he is cross-examined by Edward Carson, the very famous barrister. And the cross-examination, is so penetrating and brutal that I make the mistake constantly of seeing Oscar as being in the dock rather than Queensbury.

Yeah, he's interrogated like he's on trial. It's quite brutal. It is. And it does about fire for him, doesn't it? But before we talk about the outcome of this trial, I have a question about Bozzy here. And Anthony, you talked about him being difficult and potentially demanding on Oscar.

And I just wonder how much is, Oscar swayed by Bozy in going after Bozy's father? Is this something that Oscar feels he wants to do for himself to write this wrong and stand up for himself? Or is this a case that within the relationship between Oscar and Bozzy, Oscar feels he needs to do this. He wants to please this young man that he's in love with. I mean, I think by that stage, this is 1895, and he's known Bozies since 1890, 1891, I think the desire to please him is still there. They've had bitter quarrels over as his evidence by that long, long letter from prison. He writes to Bosi, de profundis.

But he still wants to please him. And he says rather movingly in that letter he writes from prison, You dominated me and your father frightened me. I was no longer the captain of my soul and did not know it. Gosh. And in that, I think, sums up the relationship he has not only with Queensbury, but also with Bozi I staggered as an ox into the shambles

he says events overtook me completely I made all the wrong decisions and I think it's wanting to please Boz Robbie Ross who he asks to come the night

the card he discovers the card would have he been there first would simply said to him tear the damn thing up put it in the waist you're on a hiding to nothing other people said to him

shortly before the trial no jury is going to Victor father of trying to save his son from what is seen, of course, as depravity and sexual deviance. So I think that, yeah, gosh, people have often said to me, is the one question you'd like to ask your grandfather? And I've always said, yes, why did you do it? And I say, I think I know, but I want to hear it from his lips. If only, yeah. So tell us what the outcome of the trial is. it's not going to end well, and this is the beginning of the end on a larger scale, isn't it for Oscar?

But this trial specifically, what happens? Well, he treats it as a piece of theatre. He's playing to the gallery. There are too many jokes. He's trying to score off Edward Carson. His own counsel, Sir Edward Clark, who incidentally, and almost incomprehensibly, because he was very much of an establishment figure, represents him pro bono in the two criminal trials which follow.

So he doesn't even pay for his barrister then. But Sir Edward Clark admits a lot of the correspondence, which has been found by Queensbury's solicitors. Not exactly normal, if one would one could put it like that, letters passing between two men. And as Oscar says, this is not commercial correspondence. This is a correspondence between two men who are very fond of each other. But it's admitted.

But it's when Edward Carson comes to cross-examine him on all this, that it all starts to unravel. And the famous point at which there's a servant at Boise's lodgings in Oxford called Walter Granger, and Edward Carson says, did you sit down and dine with him? And Oscar says, of course not. He was a servant. The sort of thing wouldn't have happened. And then Edward Carson says, did you kiss him?

And Oscar says, oh, dear me, no, he was such an ugly boy. I pitied him for it. He was what? And you, it's, oh, it's the train at the end of the tunnel. It's coming towards you and you, please, no, it's one witticism, one joke too many. And he talks himself into prison. And it is funny, and I am laughing, you know, however many hundred years later. But you're right, Merlin, it's that thing that go, well, hold on, because the question, the

follow-on question is, so had he not been ugly, would you have kissed him? And then it's like, ah. that the reason you say that you did not kiss him? You're absolutely right, yes, that comes in. I think Carson couldn't believe what I don't think he was expecting the answer at all. I think it fell into his lap and he then made the most of it. So then we have this instance where Oscars, counsel, both councils together, decide that we're going to drop this case, that this will not turn out well, so let's drop it. So that's case one finished, but this is the end of the trials. Now what happens? Once this trial essentially collapses, what we have

is Queensbury saying, no, we're actually not going to leave it there. And he decides to send all the evidence that they had. And this evidence then gets filtered, actually, for what's coming next to the director for public prosecutions, as it was known. And we're kicking off again straight away with the second trial. Merlin, tell us a little bit more about this. And this is more dangerous because now this is a trial that's been brought against Oscar. Exactly. Both parties agree to withdraw, as you say. Oscar goes off and has lunch or whatever it was and in the afternoon he goes to the Cadogan Hotel where Bozzi is staying and he spends the afternoon there, I'm afraid to say drinking hock and seltzer and he is very undecided, I think

what he should do. And people have always said, The police left it until after the last train for the continent had gone to arrest him. And with a bit of research, I discovered that was complete nonsense, because there were several more trains afterwards. They were going to make, I think, and I believe this, there was too much of this going on. There was been the Cleveland Street scandal. Telegraphed boys from the post office were so-called offering their services at the aristocracy at a sort of male brothel. It was known about. The police raided it.

I think the public feeling about this unmentionable vice was running pretty high. And I think to find that Oscar had dropped himself in it, basically, by suing Queensbury and the evidence coming out, it was too good an opportunity to miss. And there is, though, his mother comes into this as well. About fleeing or staying. Yes. Yes. You know, whether he should go or whether he should stay. and apparently it's reported

that Oscar's mother said to him if you go I will never speak to you again but if you stay you'll always be my son Isn't that amazing? That's incredible isn't it? There's so much of who she was. I think and it has such a ring of truth about it that I believe that it really is.

Same, I want to believe it whether it's true or not I'm choosing to believe that it is. This trial, trial two, is interesting because we don't get a verdict. There is essentially a hung jury. I think it's 10 in favor, two against, as far as I remember. Yes, in those days it had to be a total verdict rather than a majority. Yes.

So we don't get a verdict in this trial. And you might be thinking to yourself, amazing. We're off the hook here and we can go. But no, this is when the director of public prosecutions comes back again. And this is where the case gets streamlined. They get rid of things that they're not 100% sure of. That doesn't stand up in court. Let's get rid of that.

They're really picky with their witnesses. And so now we go for trial three. And this is where the real downfall occurs. Interestingly, though, is that in all three trials, the picture of Dorian Gray comes up as evidence that Oscar must be homosexual because he is writing there is at the homosexual subtext in the picture of Dorian Gray between the artist Basil and Dorian. And it comes up in the Crown Prosecutions trial against him as well.

It's not made as much of as in the libel trial, but it's still there. I think the idea that you've got rid of this monster of depravity, who is corrupting English literary morals, if you like, by writing this rather sort of dubious story, which is now on, I think, the O-level syllabus in England. I did it in school. I loved it. What's the great quote that Oscar says about, you know, there's no such thing as morality or immorality in a book. There's just a book that's well written, a book that's poorly written, you know, and that you can sort of imagine him saying that trial, I'm not sure that he did. But, you know, the sort of defence of this, keeping everything ambiguous in terms of that art and life boundary and because of the people are now bringing his art into the trial and his real life. You can imagine him sort of pushing back against that and being playful with it. It's too clever by half. It's playing to the gallery.

I mean, I've always said he goes into this as if it is a play to which he has written the prologue. Yes. But he doesn't know the outcome. And he's not even sure of how many characters are going to appear. So it's a pretty dangerous thing to do. But, you know, he lived by, as he said again, in De Profundis, you know, the danger was half the excitement. Yeah. And that sort of sums up that period of his life.

before he sues de Marcus of Queensbury. So just to give you an idea then of some of the proof that's presented in the trial, we have staff from the Savoy Hotel talking about who's coming and going from the two rooms. We have apparently stained bed sheets. So there's this inference of sexual activity. We have rent boys, as they're called at the time, who are coming in, however believably, to say that, yes, we had kissed, or yes, he had given me money or whatever it might be.

And this stacks up, stacks up, stacks up. And by the third trial, it won't surprise anybody to hear. Oscar is certainly not the man he was even in the first trial. He is more defeated. He is tired. He is, you know, and the amazing thing about this is, they have the dock at Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice. It's called now.

The very dock that he stood in is there and they're refurbishing it and everything. So you can literally hold on to that dock, which is just incredible. No spoilers, because we're getting to it now. But he is found guilty, Merlin, in this case. Tell us what happens once that verdict is delivered. Well, once the verdict's delivered, the judge says, whatever he does say, take him away. And Oscar, in the reports of the trial, says, and I, my lord, may I say nothing? And the judge just waves him down into the cells.

So he's arrested that night. I think he spends the weekend in Newgate. He then goes to Pentonville. and he finishes up for three or four months in Wandsworth, Wonsworth prison. And he's been given a sentence of two years hard labor. And the judge says, in my view, it's not a severe enough sentence for what he has done. And we think about that today. And when I was doing some research into the subject, I found that a, I think I'm right

and saying it was a boy of 12 had been given two weeks in prison for stealing a tin of condensed milk. And if that was the sort of thing, that sort of sentence that was handed down, you can understand why the judge is saying, well, this is nothing like a severe enough sentence for gross indecency. And I think that he starts performing hard labor in the prison. And it was a pretty harsh regime. It was intended to break prisoners. The treadmill, I believe it was prisoners in a long line, literally treading on the slats of this huge roller, which in turn was connected by gearing and pulleys and whatever, either to the prison laundry or I think it was also that it was used for grinding corn. Yes. But at least that was something which was, say, creative.

It had a purpose. have a purpose is what they had in the cell itself, which was what was called the crank. And it was simply a handle in the wall. The friction of this handle could be increased or decreased according to the, presumably, the strength and size of the prisoner. And a prisoner had to make so many revolutions of this crank. It was totally unproductive. And you think somebody was spending an hour, two hours, whatever it was, turning this damn handle

for no obvious purpose, whatever. You can imagine how it was punishment, I mean, beyond anything which we can really conceive today in a prison. Thinking about his family in this moment when he's in prison and the experience beyond those prison walls, what happens to Constance and the children in this moment? How does she react to Oscar being in prison? Well, as soon as he's arrested,

she brings the children out of school, The libel trial takes place at the beginning of April. His first trial against the Crown is around April 22, 3, 4. And the final trial is at the end of May. And I think Constance brings her children out of school, wondering, you know, really what's going to happen next. She sends them off to the continent with a governess in the middle of May, but she stays behind. And what she was saying about Constance, and they, you know, her name is very apt, she's very aptly named for her constancy. She stays behind, and I've proof of the fact, that she stays behind until the middle of June.

Now, why on earth would she stay behind? The answer is she stayed behind, in my view, to the end of the second trial when he's convicted, in order that if he gets off, she's there to greet. That stands to reason to me. I've always assumed that, yeah. She doesn't just sort of pick up her skirts and rush off to the continent with the children. The children are sent off, obviously, to protect them from the fallout. Yes. But she then goes and joins them in June in Switzerland.

They spend two or three months just above the Lake of Geneva and then starts this peripatetic existence between Switzerland and Italy and Germany, Constance finding a new place to settle with children and school them, initially hoping that she can get back into England sort of by the back door maybe six months after the whole thing has blown over. But of course, the scandal is far too big and there's no way that she can go back to England. And eventually she dies before Oscar on the continent. I'm going to fast forward a little bit to 1897. So we've had two years of hard labour.

We've had De Profundus. We've had that beautiful letter that, as you've quoted from earlier, Merlin, that has, you know, sort of part confession, part art, part musing. really, really, really beautiful work. But Oscar emerges into a world that doesn't really know where to place him, particularly in terms of England. And so he must, again, thanks to good old Robbie Ross, the help of Robbie Ross, he must get himself out of there. So tell us what happens in that exile period once he leaves prison in 18. There's one little thing I'd like to tell you that when he come within a few days, coming out of

prison. Friends have gathered a certain sum of money for him to try and set him up on his feet. Constance has agreed to give him an allowance of 150 pounds a year. This is her deviant, delinquent husband who she is giving an allowance out of her private income. And of the money that the friends have gathered together, Oscar sends the equivalent in today's money of about 2,000 pounds to 10 of his fellow prisoners to set them up when they come at two pounds here, two pounds there, one pound 50 here. And he sends it to solicitors to be given to these men that he's known his fellow convicts when they come out of prison to set them up.

And there's one thing I'd just like to say to you that in de profundis, he's in prison, he's never been in prison before, and he writes this, society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual but it also has a supreme vice of shallowness and fails to realize what it's done when the man's punishment is over it leaves him to himself

that is to say it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins and this is written in prison to Alfred Douglas and when we talk today about the rehabilitation of offenders. Here is Oscar. Again, he's so much, I know it's a cliche, but he's so much ahead of his time, realizing that society has to help rehabilitate the criminals. Extraordinary. Anyway, Constance writes to him. He writes to Constance. Apparently, her brother says

it was one of the most beautiful letters he'd ever seen, sadly now disappeared, destroyed by her family after her death. She kept all his letters. And it's quite clear that she wanted to go up to Northern France to Diep, Belnaval, where he was living, and see him. He desperately wanted to see her, partly obviously, to have access to his children. And my interpretation of the whole, people have said that she hesitated. Yeah, she did hesitate, but why? And the answer, I think, is quite simple. They weren't divorced. She didn't want to divorce him. If they got back together, it wouldn't have lasted, but if they got back together, how on earth would that continental society have coped with Mr. and Mrs. Wilde? He was a convict, a homosexual, and a bankrupt. Any one of those

would have put you beyond the pale. So, you know, we can't ostracize her, but can we really accept him back in, look, the easiest thing, my dear, is just let him find his feet. Give him a period of probation, six months maybe. And of course, she listens to this, at which point Alfred Douglas starts working his money. He's back, he's back. And he goes to Oscar, doesn't he? They reunite relatively briefly, but he goes out to him. Alfred Douglas is living in France at the time. And he keeps writing to Oscar. And Oscar writes to Robbie Ross, who is being his loyal friend at this stage, saying, I've had the most revolting letter from Bozzi. I hope I never see him again. But, oh God, the autumn comes. He's living on the north coast of France. The only

way to look, basically, at Bernouval, is over the channel. Back towards England, cold, grey, autumn days coming in. And Boise says to him, come on, let's go off to Naples for the winter. I mean, in his position, I'm afraid to say, I think I probably would have done the same. Oh, listen, we could We could sit here and be like, no, you shouldn't do it, don't go back, but, you know. It's just like the trial. And so he goes off to Naples with Alfred Douglas, and all hell breaks loose. Constance stops his allowance. The marchioness of Queensbury, who is the one who's funding Bozzi's lifestyle at that stage,

stops her allowance. So they're starved apart. And I think Oscar finally realizes that he's made a terrible mistake. There's a very interesting letter. that Constance writes to a friend of hers a month or two after they've broken up, Oscar and Bozzie in Naples. And she says, for the sake of the children, I feel I have to keep a part. But if I saw him now, I know I should forgive everything. And it's almost incomprehensible that she can have been so loyal.

But she was the mother of his children. She believed in him. You get such a sense of her perception of him as a charismatic and lovable person. And he's obviously a huge, huge portion of her life and so important to her. As you say, he's the father of her children. But even beyond that, that there's obviously there's a connection there, whatever that connection looks like, that is not breakable for either of them. And she doesn't want to break it.

She doesn't need to. There's a line in, I think it's a woman of no importance and exchange. between, I think, Mrs. Allenby and Lord Ellingworth. And she says to him, you men, you love with your eyes, if you love at all, we women, we love with our ears. And to me, that sums up Constance. She doesn't just love with her eyes. She has a life behind her with Oscar and her children.

And I think if what would have happened if they'd got back to it? As I say, I don't think it would have lasted. No. But it might have kick-started him again into writing. It wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been comedies. It would have been things like Salome. Wow, can you imagine, yeah. The new surrealist theatre, the symbolist theatre.

We would have had other things. And then, of course, Constance dies. Barely a year after Oscar comes out of prison from a botched operation. He never sees her again. He does go and visit her grave. and he writes very movingly about it. I was going to say, what is his reaction to her death? He's distraught.

Robert Ross wrote to Oscar's publisher and said, Mrs. Wilde has died, and of course Oscar didn't feel it at all. And people have often quoted this in evidence of the fact that Oscar was now confirmedly gay, couldn't care less about his wife, didn't feel her death at all. In my book, I've conjectured something which is much more complicated, and I think it's probably more correct. But he is distraught by, not only by her death,

is he says to one of his friends, if only we'd kissed one more time. That was to another very close friend of his. And he goes and sees her grave in Genoa, where she would be living and died. And he says it was very tragic, seeing her name carved on the tomb, of my name, no mention.

And it gave me a sense of, the uselessness of all regrets. Life is a very terrible thing. Oh gosh. Yeah. It's heartbreaking. It gives me the shivers every time I read it. In those last years, he never abandons his sense of humour. It's difficult to conceive how in those circumstances he could still be amusing. But there's an old friend of his invited him to go and just got married, Francis Forbes Robertson, and she's living in Wales and she says, come and see me and my new husband. And this is how he replies to her.

Miles of sea, miles of land, the purple of mountains and the silver of rivers dividers. You don't know how poor I am. I have no money at all. I live, or I'm supposed to live, on a few francs a day, a bare remnant, saved from shipwreck. Like dear St. Francis of Assisi, I am wedded to poverty. But in my case, the marriage is not a success. I mean, you can come out with that. It has humour, it has beauty, it has sadness. And he finishes the letter saying, also sometimes, send me a line to tell me of the beauty you've found in life. I live now on echoes and have little music of my own, your old friend, Oscar. We have had, then, in this history, we have had an Irishman who has, you know, set Trinity alight, not literally, and then moved over to England and become a star in his own right, even before he published anything.

and, you know, made waves in America, had these hit plays published a very, you know, immoral or headline-grabbing novel. We've had the trials. We've had this idea of same-sex attraction. We've had, again, more headlines around Oscar, the witicism, and then the downfall. We've had the imprisonment.

We've had the release. And now we come to the final day, the death of Oscar Wild. This is a French affair. but the life that he leaves is certainly not the life he experienced even five, ten years prior. He is a broken man. He is a lost man. I would imagine if he had seen this somehow ten years before, he could never have imagined that this was how it was going to end, maybe.

I think you're absolutely right. And I think that if he had been prescient and he'd known what was going to happen, he would never have taken legal action against Marcus of Queensbury. And so he says to Bozzi in that famous letter, the De Profundis, he says, you never understood my art. My art to me was everything. It was all other passions to me were as marsh water to red wine, the light of the glowworm against the magic mirror of the moon.

My art meant everything to me. And I think people have often talked about Oscar being a martyr, as he says somewhere that the uselessness, the terrible uselessness and waste of martyrdom. If you're a martyr, you go willingly to your death for a principle, for a cause, whatever it may be. And he certainly didn't go willingly to his death. And I think that those last terrible years alone, there were friends, but he wasn't totally destitute. He writes begging letters to people for money. He sells the scenario of an unwritten play to three different people.

And I feel terrible every time I read it. You know, very, very naughty. But, you know, when you need money, there's not much you stop at. And of course, in the end, it's been conjectured that he died of tertiary syphilis, which has now been more or less firmly stamped on by the medical profession and exposed as a silly bit of gossip.

But, you know, the literary man who dies young and dies of syphilis, showing a life of sort of depravity, sexual depravity and everything else, it was all part of the Oscar Wild myth, if you like. But it's basically he had a terrible ear problem. And it got into, as his father said at one stage, when the ear is infected unless it's treated, there is no knowing where the infection may go. and into the brain, cerebral meningitis, terrible pain, opium in his last days, and finally, he just, he just dies.

One of the things that when we spoke before Merlin, I know, and a lot of listeners will probably be really aware, and I think this is a good place to see this conversation out on, is that, of course, in Perlaches, there is the iconic grave that is there and that is visited again and again and again. and I was telling Merlin just before we began this. I'm heading that way myself this weekend. But you had some work that you as kind of the guardian of this legacy had to do recently to, because if you think about that gravestone, one of the first things that comes to mind is all the lipsticks. And yes, it feels like this is a, you know, a fitting tribute and whatever else. But actually, maybe you should tell listeners what happens with all those lipsticks over time

and how that can impact the monument. Well, I think it started shortly after the film in which Stephen Frye played Oscar very well. I mean, he has the physique as well as the intellectual capability to carry it off. But I think it made people aware that there was, those who didn't know, that there was a tomb in Palaciers. And somebody, one person, put a lipstick kiss on it. And it became the thing to do on the Paris circuit for all those. visitors. And it was partly due to the generosity of the Irish that we were able to clean the tomb and put up a glass barrier around it. And interestingly, when the sun shines early

in the morning on the glass in the autumn and it's low in the sky, and a kiss on the glass will be projected onto the tomb. Same effect, no damage. And I found this out from a journalist who was writing about the protection and cleaning of the tomb shortly afterwards. And she said, a couple of girls came running down the alley, where's the tomb with all the kisses on? And she said, who's tomb? Well, you know, the tomb of the kisses. No idea who it was. And they were distraught to find that they couldn't kiss the stone.

But she said, kiss the glass and see what happens. And they did. And she said, now, you've done what you wanted to do. You've given Oscar a kiss, but it's just been projected by the sun onto. the stone. I didn't realize you could do that now. And the whole point being that the chemicals in the lipsticks were starting to corrode the monument, which is, you know. People do that a little bit at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St. Pancro's Church as well. We went there and saw it. I did not kiss it. We didn't kiss it, no. And I'd never have kissed us, even though I don't wear a lipstick,

but I've never kissed that grave either. So I'm not going around kissing graves if anybody wants to know. And Maddie, would you like to wrap up for us? I would. So before we end, I want to asked Merlin about the British Library card that he's been given for his grandfather, because he showed us this before we started recording. And we can talk a lot about, you know, the different legacies that Oscar Wardley is behind. And, you know, he is one of 50,000 men who are posthumously pardoned for homosexual acts in, I think 2017. It's called the, is it the Alan Turing Law? Yes, that's right. You know, and there are some very serious ramifications and lots of different legacies that we can discuss. But tell me about the British Library card because it was quite

remarkable to see this when you came into the studio. Well, somebody found that Oscar's reader's card from what was then the British Museum Reading Room, which was the National Library back in those days, had been taken away from when he was convicted. And they, oh, you know, they were homophobic, they took it. And the British Library is the successor to the British Museum reading room, said this is nonsense. Anyone who had a conviction had his readers past taken away. And they got in touch with me and they said, wouldn't it be a nice gesture if we made one in his name and gave it back to you? And I said, that's a lovely idea. Could we perhaps combine it with an evening when my book comes out? Perfect timing. And they did that. And people

have asked me about the Alan Turing law. I'm not sure, I'm still not sure whether I as a descendant have to request a pardon, I think it's called a, it has a proper legal name, whether I have to ask for a pardon or whether it's done automatically. And I've said to people, if I have to ask for it, I don't think I would. Because a pardon implies that you've done something wrong. And although it was against the law, he didn't believe that same-sex relations between men was wrong. And the fact that an institute of learning has given him back to a man of letters, a reader's card symbolically to me is much more significant and worthwhile than to have a pardon under the Alan Turing law. And yes, I have a reader's card. If I don't, I suppose I'd have to get

dressed up in knee breaches and grow my hair in order to get in on the car. I think there's a family resemblance. I think you get in on it. No, I was deeply touched by that. that. It's a lovely gesture. Yeah. And it is a really fantastic object. You know, anyone who's got a British Library reader's card, it's, you know, the little plastic sort of credit card-shaped card, and it's got Oscar's photograph on it. It's really remarkable. expiry, 30th of November, 1900.

Oh, is it? So you won't be able to check any books out with it necessarily. Okay. Merlin, if anyone wants to read your work, including your latest book, where can they do that? What's the title of it? Where is it available? It's after Oscar, the legacy of a scandal. and in it I think I first of all tried to bust

a lot of the myths which were created around him after his death and secondly to show that Oscar in fact caused more trouble after his death in 1900 right up until the present day than he did in his lifetime so it's I think it's quite a rocky read

if I can put it like that wonderful I will be getting my copy straight after we've recorded this if you've enjoyed this show then leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment below, share, like, subscribe, everything that we ask you to do, please do it. And we will see you next time. Thank you very much.