Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? You used to be a friend of Lord Cawdor. I met him at dinner last week. Your name happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the Dudley. Cawdor curled his lip, and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fateful to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son, and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentlemen would associate with him? Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous…
Cross-examination continued—Does not this passage suggest a charge of unnatural vice? —It describes Dorian Gray as a man of very corrupt influence, though there is no statement as to the nature of the influence. But as a matter of fact I do not think that one person influences another, nor do I think there is any bad influence in the world.
A man never corrupts a youth? —I think not.
Nothing could corrupt him? —If you are talking of separate ages.
No, sir, I am talking common sense? —I do not think one person influences another.
Oscar Wilde prevaricatedhe made no social distinctions or had influence (unless literary) but indeed exercised such along with wit and wile that did him well socially and in his writing and then also did him in. A man of letters put on trial and convicted in 1895 for ‘gross indecency’ by a society that criminalised ALL sexual acts between males of ANY age and under ANY circumstances, while at the same time also a man to quote his own words ‘utterly reckless of young lives’.
Further many of his (‘disreputable’) associations of choice lend to also assessing Wilde by the look of it now and then. Even a literary friendship from 1891 on he had with the likes of André Gide, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature, was marked. Gide became a vocal self-described paederast. Something Wilde recognized and abetted early in 1895, engaging in sex tourism for boys while the two happened across each other in Algiers, along with Lord Alfred Douglas whose exploits books have been filled about too. (Algeria after a brutal conquest was then under French colonial rule and further became popular as a travel destination for Europeans.Algiers is also mentioned In The Picture of Dorian Gray , Dorian had a “little white walled-in house at Algiers’ where he would winter [in the later edition too with Lord Henry].) Douglas’ hateful father the Marquess of Queensbury though had been increasingly goading for a fight.
Scant months after that trip a forty-year-old Wilde back in England was in court, fibbing about his age and tables turned facing many questions not just about literature like Dorian Gray but, many boys and young men through three trials. I won’t go into all of these but, several names in the ways they frequently have or haven’t been presented bear giving space.
In 1893 in Goring and Oxford was the teenage Walter Grainger, an under-butler, (the position apparently insisted by Douglas) who was the subject during the libel trial of Wilde’s most memorable and damaging denials. (‘I never dined with him. If it is one’s duty to serve, it is one’s duty to serve; and if it is one’s pleasure to dine, it is one’s pleasure to dine.’ “Did you ever kiss him?” ’—Oh, dear no. He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly.’) According to Grainger he was also paid ten shillings after one encounter and warned to keep the sexual nature of the relationship secret lest he be in ‘very serious trouble’. Nonetheless apparently there was gossip.
Then at the Savoy Hotel in London thirteen-to fourteen-year-old pageboy Herbert Tankard was included in the Plea of Justification about Wilde ‘always kissing me’ and tipping generously (apparently a habit of Wilde’s regarding the pageboys).
Another notable name was Alphonse Conway. In 1894 Wilde was writing what would become one of his most popular plays The Importance of Being Earnest. He would meet Conway, who had newly turned sixteen, beachside in Worthing and spend the better part of that summer with him including a trip to Brighton. Details assembling yet another in a line of witness depositions describing the wining and dining, money, gifts lavished and various sexual acts.
Standing out as well was Edward Shelley, an eighteen-year-old clerk in 1892 for John Lane with his business partner Elkins Mathews who were a publisher of Wilde’s. Shelley recounted, shortly before the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, after accepting a dinner invitation where pressed to drink he felt insulted and degraded by Wilde’s sexual advances which induced a stupor. He continued seeing Wilde and despite repetitions because he ‘was weak’ and ‘wanted to think some good of the man’ further ‘thought Mr. Wilde was really sorry for what he had done.’ Shelley also said she received an inscribed set of WIlde’s work including The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘” To one I like well”, or something to that effect’ which he ended up tearing out such pages. After counsel arguments lobbying hits on mental state and whether he was an accomplice (which in practice of the law would require corroboration of his account) the Judge ended up directing withdrawal of Shelley’s part from consideration of the jury. But Shelley’s words ‘At first I thought that Mr. Wilde was a kind of philanthropist, fond of youth and eager to be of assistance to young men, of any promise. But certain speeches and actions on the part of Mr. Wilde caused me to alter this opinion.’ summed up perhaps the crux of what not only the court but public opinion were set to decide.
Ultimately the indictments Wilde were convicted on involved in 1893-84 Charles Parker, a former valet who was around eighteen-to-nineteen when meeting Wilde, Alfred Wood, a former clerk of seventeen when he met Douglas and Wilde, and last in the case of unidentified male guests at the Savoy Hotel, there instead with Douglas (this correction not made in court, Wilde would lament ‘the sins of another being placed on my account’). Wood previously had ended up (through mishap and/or theft) with compromising letters which Wilde gave him money for ‘to get away from a class of persons’ that one could understand as blackmailers, including one named Cilbborn who was unsuccessful over a letter with Wilde. But as Wood explained in court it was possibly dually an opportunity too away from the likes of Wilde and Alfred Taylor. Taylor a once well-to-do cocoa heir and friend of Wilde’s since 1892 was also put on trial and convicted due to the proceedings around Wilde. It was Taylor through whom Parker and Wood were greatly involved in sex work. As the judge put it, he ‘kept a kind of male brothel’ and procured boys and young men for his friends. Wilde addressed this in his long prison letter ‘People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approached them, were delightfully suggestive and stimulating.’ and taking from Balzac ‘It was like feasting with panthers.’
In Wilde ‘allowing myself to be forced into appealing to Society for help and protection’ by pursuing the libel case against Queensbury, the law, formed from both the advocates of protection and those of control, current science, religion, and social debates, as an instrument of order was also ‘exercised to the full’ bringing charges against him. And in the now 121 years since Wilde’s death, while homophobia has been beaten back in several respects, the criminalisation and dehumanisation around sex work(ers) also changing, society still would pass its judgements. Then as now the question raised of the corruption of youth remains. Along with the same underlying The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Nor did Wilde curb his fondness for youth, he just took it with him abroad. In a February 1898 letter to Robert Ross (who was involved with Wilde prior to Dorian Gray, a relationship that would remain important becoming Wilde’s first literary executor after his death) Wilde wrote ‘a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble— more than other forms.’Uranian stemming from 1844 too is a word very often given the stand in of homosexual (the latter term newer at the time taking on use as an adjective in 1891 and noun by 1894). Yet the term represents a continuum that, not without irony, such approaches obfuscate. Particularly artistic output of this nature was of a boy-lover manner. As Michael M. Kaylor writes in Secreted Desires:The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde‘scholarship engages in absolute avoidance of this form of love, intimacy, and/or eroticism; claims its anachronism; heightens its ‘homosocial’ aspects; or disguises it as 'homosexual’.’ Wilde’s much quoted speech when asked in court to explain a poem by Douglas with the line ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ paints a particular age-stratified picture also. Wilde and Douglas may have shared a long and intensely faceted bond; for Douglas, he claimed Wilde was the only such companion who was older than him (a sixteen year gap). But Wilde too with a string of young companions, most brief involvements, in his wake comes off below ‘deep, spiritual affection’ or ‘Higher Philosophy’. Douglas commented many years later of Wilde’s behaviour in Paris where Wilde lived after his release from prison ‘Oscar believed, as many other eminent people do, that he had a perfect right to indulge his own tastes.’ Those tastes easily indulged as he wrote Ross in May 1898 ‘Boys can be had anywhere’. The broad more visible gay Paris’ subculture that congregated in the city’s public spaces was youthful and one in search of youth.
As well during an Italian trip in April of 1900, just months before Wilde would die at age 46, Wilde also writing to Ross remarked about visiting the Cathedral of Palermo where he met a young seminarist named Giuseppe Loverde who ‘was fifteen, and most sweet.‘Further‘I also gave him many lire, and prophesied for him a Cardinal’s hat, if he remained very good, and never forgot me. He said he never would: and indeed I don’t think he will, for every day I kissed him behind the high altar.’ Alas it is difficult ever with the passage of time to know if that remained true. Or in truly what respect many of those less (in)famous who were involved with Wilde held him or, the time they spent.
We can however more easily consider controversial works like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and by consequence the man behind it, as neither are hardly forgotten. Wilde even in 1897 wrote ‘Dorian Gray is a classic, and deservedly.’ That I do have to agree, while bearing in mind there was far less classical about Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde himself.
