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He was probably also a paedophile, as Lord Robathan (as he now is) pointed out in the House of Commons in 1999:
'We should be careful about romanticising Oscar Wilde, as the placing of a statue of him in the Strand last year did. Clearly, he was persecuted by the father of his male friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, the Earl of Rosebery [he meant Marquess of Queensbury, of course]. He wrote some fine plays and was quite a good poet. However, those who are concerned about paedophilia and sex tourism should know that Oscar Wilde was a paedophile and a sex tourist--[Interruption.] Labour Members shake their heads. Let them read the biography--[Hon. Members: "We have."] I can quote from memory that Alfred and Oscar competed for Neapolitan boys in 1897. What is that if not paedophilia and sex tourism? Let us hear no more nonsense about Oscar Wilde being a martyr to homosexual equality.'
An article in the Catholic Herald tells more.
'In "Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer: the 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath" by Antony Edmonds, the details are laid bare: A common canard among those who know little about Wilde is that he was a martyr to Victorian injustice and hypocrisy. However, as we have indicated, the trials were conducted fairly; and Wilde was fortunate that the maximum sentence available to the judge was two years, which Mr Justice Wills described as ‘wholly inadequate for such a case’. Today, men who have sexual relations with boys under sixteen can be sentenced to up to fourteen years in prison, and paying for sex with a boy of sixteenor seventeen carries a sentence of up to seven years. Wilde probably committed the first of these offences, and he was certainly guilty of the second.'
I blogged about this here, in one of my posts that got most clicks, and here and here.
Yes, I was aware of this, but I don't care much about the sins of the dead. If Wilde were still alive and using the proceeds of his writing to finance his lifestyle or escape from justice, it would be a different story. I don't believe he would have received a harsher sentence either. It was fairly well-known in the late nineteenth century that upper-class prisoners who were given even a year or two of hard labour would die within a few years. It was a death sentence, essentially.
ReplyDeleteAnd heterosexual men still married girls under 15 at that time. The standards were different in that area. And as every woman can tell you, even today a lot of adult men sexually harass girls in their early teens.
ReplyDeleteThe age of consent for girls had risen from 12 to 16 not long before the Wilde case, while adolescents then reached puberty later than nowadays in England.
DeleteSo no long before then? And where did you get the information that teenagers reached puberty later in those tines?
DeleteI forget. I think it's well known.
DeleteHmm, a death penalty for what he did? Seems reasonable.
ReplyDelete