“The best way to make children good is to make them happy.”
Oscar Wilde
I followed his advise. I got my daughter an ebook: ‘The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Stories.’ It worked like a charm, like it has for generations. Witty, inspiring and charismatic. Oscar Wilde is one of the greatest of English Literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world.But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him.
A Bit of History
Wilde was one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890’s. Wilde is still as popular as ever today amongst academics and students alike. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of an eminent eye~surgeon and a nationalist poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Speranza’. He went to Trinity College , Dublin and despite winning a first prize for poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford fellowship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success.
However, his three volume of short fiction, The Happy Prince, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and A House of Pomegranates, together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies ~ Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and the Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
And now quoting Mr. Wilde
“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”
“Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
“When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”
“Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.”
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.”
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.”
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
“One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”
“The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.”
“The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
“Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.”
“It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”
“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”
“The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”
“No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.”
“One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”
“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
THE END
Success, however, was shot lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, with his success as a dramatist was at its hight, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas’s father, and lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two year imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballard of Reading Goal. he was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self ~ imposed exile. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.