Oscar Wilde

Born in October 1854, Dublin. As a university student, he read ‘Greats’ at Trinity College in Dublin, then Magdalen College, in Oxford. Whilst studying he became associated with the philosophy of aestheticism and worked as a journalist in London.

In the 1880s he wrote essays on his ideas around the ‘supremacy of art’ and wrote his only novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’. He went on to write and produce four comedies in the early 1890s including ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, which became one of the most successful plays of late-Victorian London.

The Marquess of Queensberry accused Wilde of committing sodomy. He attempted to prosecute her for criminal libel but this ultimately backfired leading to his own arrest when evidence of Wilde partaking in ‘indecent acts’ with men was discovered. After serving his sentence in several prisons in London and Reading, he sailed to France and was exiled in 1897. In 1900, he developed meningitis which caused his death at the end of November of that year.

Homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 and so, along with 50,000 other men, he was posthumously pardoned for homosexual acts, under the act which is known as the ‘Alan Turing Law’.