1854–1900
→ Died in exile
Irish writer sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour for “gross indecency”
Having sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel in 1895, he was himself prosecuted under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.
A writer and playwright born to Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin, who read classics at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford. A central figure of Aestheticism, he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and became London’s leading dramatist with society comedies such as The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). After his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, collapsed, he was sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour for “gross indecency”. On release he left Britain, lived impoverished in France as “Sebastian Melmoth” and died of meningitis in Paris in 1900. He was posthumously pardoned in 2017.
Also known as: Sebastian Melmoth
Activities and affiliations
-
1878–1900
Literature and arts
Related historical events
- 1885–1941.11.06Sexual Reform Movements in Europe and the Reaction of the 1930s (1885–1941)WriterWas sentenced to two years’ hard labour under the Labouchère Amendment in 1895.
- 1885.08.07–1938.07.19Sexual Reform in Britain: From the Wilde Trials to The Well of Loneliness (1885–1938)Playwright and poetProsecuted Queensberry for libel and was himself prosecuted for “gross indecency” under the Labouchere amendment, receiving two years’ hard labour in 1895.
The trials of 1895 and exile
In mid-1891 he met Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”), then an Oxford undergraduate, and began a tempestuous affair; through Douglas he entered the Victorian underground of working-class male prostitution. On 18 February 1895 Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, left a card at Wilde’s club addressed “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]”, and Wilde, encouraged by Douglas and against his friends’ advice, prosecuted him for libel. When Queensberry’s counsel Edward Carson announced that he would call male prostitutes who had had sex with Wilde, Wilde dropped the case; Queensberry was acquitted, and the costs bankrupted Wilde.
On 6 April 1895 he was arrested for “gross indecency” under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. Asked at his trial what “the love that dare not speak its name” was, he described the deep spiritual affection of an elder for a younger man found in David and Jonathan, Plato, Michelangelo and Shakespeare’s sonnets; the speech drew applause but strengthened the charges. The first jury could not agree, and at the second trial on 25 May he received the maximum sentence of two years’ hard labour, which the judge called “totally inadequate”. Records also show that some of the youths he met were as young as sixteen.
He served his sentence at Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading Gaol, where he was known only as “C.3.3” and wrote the long letter to Douglas later published as De Profundis. Released on 19 May 1897, he sailed that evening for France and never returned to Britain. Living as “Sebastian Melmoth”, he wrote letters denouncing the brutality of English prisons and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and died of meningitis in Paris, impoverished, on 30 November 1900. In 2017 he was pardoned posthumously, with some 50,000 men convicted of homosexual acts, under the so-called Alan Turing law.