Trials of Oscar Wilde
오스카 와일드 재판 (1895)
The three trials around Oscar Wilde in London in April–May 1895. After Wilde’s libel prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry over his “posing somdomite” card collapsed, Wilde was charged with “gross indecency” under the Labouchère Amendment and on 25 May 1895 sentenced to the maximum of two years’ hard labour. It became the emblematic case of Britain’s laws against homosexuality.
In depth
The trials of Oscar Wilde began on 18 February 1895, when the Marquess of Queensberry left at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, a card inscribed “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite”. Encouraged by Queensberry’s son Lord Alfred Douglas and against the advice of his friends, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess for criminal libel. Under the Libel Act 1843 Queensberry had to prove his accusation true and in the public interest, so his lawyers hired private detectives who uncovered Wilde’s world of male prostitutes, blackmailers and cross-dressers.
At the libel trial, which opened at the Old Bailey on 3 April, Queensberry’s counsel Edward Carson quoted The Picture of Dorian Gray and pressed Wilde on his friendships with lower-class young men. When Carson announced that male prostitutes would testify, Wilde dropped the prosecution; Queensberry was acquitted and Wilde was bankrupted by the costs. On 6 April Wilde was arrested for “gross indecency” under the Labouchère Amendment.
At the first criminal trial, which opened on 26 April, Wilde’s description of “the love that dare not speak its name” as the deep spiritual affection of an elder for a younger man, as between David and Jonathan, in Plato and in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare, “the noblest form of affection”, drew applause from the gallery, but the jury could not agree. At the second, on 25 May 1895, Wilde and Alfred Taylor were convicted and sentenced to the maximum of two years’ hard labour, which the judge called “totally inadequate for a case such as this”.
Wilde served his sentence until May 1897 in Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading prisons, walking the treadmill and picking oakum; in Reading he wrote De Profundis, a long letter to Douglas, and after his release he published The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He predicted that the fight against the Criminal Law Amendment Act would be a “road... long and red with monstrous martyrdoms”. A book including the transcript of the libel trial, which came to light in 2000, has also been read as suggesting that he took advantage of teenagers.