Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical fiction and gothic horror novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The novel-length version was published in April 1891.
John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, was a British nobleman of the Victorian era, remembered for his atheism, his outspoken views, his brutish manner, for lending his name to the "Queensberry Rules" that form the basis of modern boxing, and for his role in the downfall of the Irish author and playwright Oscar Wilde.
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford University he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married a poet, Olive Custance, in 1902 and had a son, Raymond.
Robert Baldwin Ross was a British journalist, art critic and art dealer, best known for his relationship with Oscar Wilde, to whom he was a devoted friend and literary executor. A grandson of the Canadian reform leader Robert Baldwin, and son of John Ross and Augusta Elizabeth Baldwin, Ross was a pivotal figure on the London literary and artistic scene from the mid-1890s to his early death, and mentored several literary figures, including Siegfried Sassoon. His open homosexuality, in a period when male homosexual acts were illegal, brought him many hardships.
The Uranians were a late-19th-century and early-20th-century clandestine group of up to several dozen male homosexual poets and prose writers who principally wrote on the subject of the love of adolescent boys. In a strict definition they were an English literary and cultural movement; in a broader definition there were also American Uranians. The movement reached its peak between the late 1880s and mid 1890s, but has been regarded as stretching between 1858, when William Johnson Cory's poetry collection Ionica appeared, and 1930, the year of publication of Samuel Elsworth Cottam's Cameos of Boyhood and Other Poems and of E. E. Bradford's last collection, Boyhood.
John Gambril (Francis) Nicholson (1866–1931) was an English school teacher, poet, and amateur photographer. He was one of the Uranians, a clandestine group of British men who wrote poetry idealizing the beauty and love of adolescent boys. As a school master at various boarding schools in England and Wales, Nicholson formed "passionate friendships" with some of his students, and dedicated much of his poetry to favoured students.
Wilde is a 1997 British biographical romantic drama film directed by Brian Gilbert. The screenplay, written by Julian Mitchell, is based on Richard Ellmann's 1987 biography of Oscar Wilde. It stars Stephen Fry in the title role, with Jude Law, Vanessa Redgrave, Jennifer Ehle, Gemma Jones, Judy Parfitt, Michael Sheen, Zoë Wanamaker, and Tom Wilkinson in supporting roles.
Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.
The Trials of Oscar Wilde, also known as The Man with the Green Carnation and The Green Carnation, is a 1960 British drama film based on the libel and subsequent criminal cases involving Oscar Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry. It was written by Allen and Ken Hughes, directed by Hughes, and co-produced by Irving Allen, Albert R. Broccoli and Harold Huth. The screenplay was by Ken Hughes and Montgomery Hyde, based on an unperformed play The Stringed Lute by John Furnell. The film was made by Warwick Films and released by Eros Films.
Oscar Wilde is a 1960 biographical film about Oscar Wilde, made by Vantage Films and released by 20th Century Fox. The film was directed by Gregory Ratoff and produced by William Kirby, from a screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on the play Oscar Wilde by Leslie Stokes and Sewell Stokes. The film starred Robert Morley, Ralph Richardson, Phyllis Calvert and Alexander Knox.
Christopher Merlin Vyvyan Holland is a British biographer and editor. He is the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde, whose life he has researched and written about extensively.
The love that dare not speak its name is a phrase from the last line of the poem "Two Loves" by Lord Alfred Douglas, written in September 1892 and published in the Oxford magazine The Chameleon in December 1894. It was mentioned at Oscar Wilde's gross indecency trial and is usually interpreted as a euphemism for homosexuality.
The Order of Chaeronea was a secret society for the cultivation of a homosexual moral, ethical, cultural, and spiritual ethos. Founded by George Cecil Ives in 1897, based on his belief that homosexuals would not be accepted openly in society, the Order offered a network for underground communication.
Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, commonly known as the Labouchere Amendment, made "gross indecency" a crime in the United Kingdom. In practice, the law was used broadly to prosecute male homosexuals where actual sodomy could not be proven. The penalty of life imprisonment for sodomy was also so harsh that successful prosecutions were rare. The new law was much more enforceable. Section 11 was repealed and re-enacted by section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, which in turn was repealed by the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partially decriminalised male homosexual behaviour.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
John Francis Bloxam (1873–1928) was an English Uranian author and churchman. Bloxam was an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford when his story, "The Priest and the Acolyte", appeared in the sole issue of The Chameleon: a Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances, a periodical which he also served as editor. The story details the love affair of a young Anglican priest and his lover, a 14-year-old boy. The affair, when discovered, triggers a suicide pact of both priest and boy. A poem, A Summer Hour, also with pederastic themes, appeared in The Artist. The contents of The Chameleon, which also included Lord Alfred Douglas's notorious poem Two Loves, would be used against Oscar Wilde in his trial. Bloxam was a convert to Anglo-Catholicism, and became a priest.
De Profundis is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to his friend and lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.
Oscar Wilde's life and death have generated numerous biographies.
Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was a British author, poet and journalist.
