In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
OW–1854–2026  ·  The Press Room

Oscar
Wilde

1854  —  1900
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Dublin, 1854  ·  Paris, 1900

The Dublin wit who conquered London with epigrams, wrote the perfect comedy, and was destroyed in the same season by a libel suit he brought himself.

He took a double first at Oxford, told the New York customs he had nothing to declare but his genius, and made aestheticism a public performance in a fur coat. He wrote Dorian Gray, the fairy tales, the critical dialogues, and four comedies, two of which were running in the West End in February 1895 when Queensberry left his card at the club. He sued, lost, was tried twice, and served two years' hard labour. He wrote De Profundis in Reading and the Ballad on the way out, and died in a Paris hotel at forty-six.

He wronged his wife and lost his sons' name. The wit does not cover it.

Consultation

Give a man a mask
and he will tell you the truth.

Wilde speaks from 2,379 chunks across twenty-one works — The Picture of Dorian Gray, the four comedies ending in The Importance of Being Earnest, Salomé, the two early plays, Intentions, The Soul of Man under Socialism, De Profundis, the Poems and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the fairy tales, the stories, and his essays, lectures, reviews, American impressions and prison letters.

His discourse holds the four people who wrote him down: Frank Harris's unreliable Life and Confessions, Lord Alfred Douglas's hostile Oscar Wilde and Myself, and André Gide's short, exact Study of the man he met in Algiers. Mencken and Chesterton, who both had opinions, keep rooms in this hall.

Ask him whether he wanted to be caught. Ask him what the mask tells that the face conceals. Ask him about Bosie, about Constance, about the children in prison he wrote to the Chronicle about — and whether anyone in 2026 is still too clever for their own good.

The Critic as ArtistAestheticismThe Truth of MasksThe ComediesDe ProfundisReading GaolDublin
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Intentions  ·  The Critic as Artist, Part II  ·  1891

Drawn From the Corpus