Friday, March 13, 2009

Oscar Wilde was the second son born into an Anglo-Irish family, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee) (her pseudonym being Speranza). Jane was a successful writer, being a poet for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and a life-long Irish nationalist.[1] Sir William was Ireland's leading Oto-Ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services to medicine.[1] William also wrote books on archaeology and folklore. He was a renowned philanthropist, and his dispensary for the care of the city's poor, in Lincoln Place at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road.

In June 1855, the family moved to 1 Merrion Square in a fashionable residential area, where Wilde's sister, Isola, was born in 1856. Here, Lady Wilde held a regular Saturday afternoon salon with guests including Sheridan le Fanu, Charles Lever, George Petrie, Isaac Butt and Samuel Ferguson. Wilde was educated at home up to the age of nine. He attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Fermanagh from the ages of nine to sixteen,[2] spending the summer months with his family in rural Waterford, Wexford and at Sir William's family home in Mayo. Here the Wilde brothers played with the older George Moore.

After leaving Portora, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874, sharing rooms with his older brother Willie Wilde for two years. His tutor, John Pentland Mahaffy the leading Greek scholar at Trinity awakened his interest in greek literature. He was an outstanding student, and won the Berkeley Gold Medal, the highest award available to classics students at Trinity. He was awarded a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued his studies from 1874 to 1878 and where he became a part of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life.

Wilde had a less than happy relationship with the prestigious Oxford Union. On matriculating in the autumn of 1874, Wilde applied to join the Union, but failed to be elected.[3] When the Union's librarian requested a presentation copy of Poems (1881), Wilde complied. After a debate called by Oliver Elton, the gift was condemned for supposed plagiarism and returned.[4][5]

While at Magdalen, he won the 1878 Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna, which he read out at Encaenia; he failed, though, to win the Chancellor's English Essay Prize for an essay that would be published posthumously as The Rise of Historical Criticism (1909). In November 1878, he graduated with a double first in classical moderations and Literae Humaniores, or 'Greats'.