Edmond Perrier's Victorian Museum

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin and died in 1900 in Paris. He was an Irish writer, novelist, playwright and poet.

Son of Sir William-Robert-Wills Wilde and Jane-Francisca Elgen, he began his studies in Ireland and succeeded in Magdalen College of Oxford university in 1878. Wilde's four years at Oxford were amazing and his personnality changed. He wore unusual clothing and he had the look of a dandy. London in the 1870s permitted Wilde to build a public persona and to test the limits of what that society would tolerate. He dressed in strange clothes with flowers such as lilies and sunflowers.

That's why, he was different from all the other personalities of the Victorian era. Wilde's direction in life changed because of the influence of three professors : Ruskin, Pater, and Mahaffy.

He published poems in newspapers and magazines and some of these were gathered in 1881 in Poems by Oscar Wilde. At that time Oscar Wilde enjoyed an international fame but his life changed for the worse when he was sued by the father of his lover for libel about his homosexuality. He spent 2 years in a penal colony. After his release in May 1897, he definitively left Great Britain for France. It's in this host country that he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), which is a long poem commemorating the testing experience of living in prison.

But his exile weakened him and his health declined. He died in November, 1900 and in December, one of his play was performed again in London.