Foreword: Why Wilde?

Abstract

At the peak of Oscar Wilde’s fame and infamy—the trials for what would be declared his “gross indecency”—the editorial above projected the effects of the poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, wit, and international celebrity upon the public. His “brilliant paradoxes” and “corrosive epigrams,” the Telegraph claimed, threatened to bring the British Empire to “wreck and decay.”¹ While almost comically hyperbolic, these accusations are representative of the mass panic that surrounded Wilde, as artist and as figure, in his day.

We have had more than enough, of MR. OSCAR WILDE, who has been the means of inflicting upon public patience … as much moral damage of the most offensive and repulsive kind as any single individual could well cause. If the general concern were only with the man himself—his spurious brilliancy, inflated egotism, diseased vanity, cultivated affectation, and shameless disavowal of morality—the best thing would be to dismiss him and his deeds without another word to the penalty of universal condemnation. But there is more than the individual himself to be considered in this matter. [That is] the tendency of his peculiar career, the meaning and influence of his teaching, and all those shallow and spurious arts by which he and his like have attempted to establish a cult in our midst, and even to set up schools in literature, the drama, and social thought.

—The London Telegraph, 1895