In May of 1895, Oscar Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency by the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales. Wilde’s conviction and sentencing was the culmination of a four-year public fight with John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, inventor of “Queensbury rules” of boxing, and the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man of whom Wilde became intimately acquainted. In 1891, Queensbury famously left Wilde a calling card at the author’s club with the written inscription, “For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic].”  This occasion prompted Wilde to engage in public prosecution against Queensbury for criminal libel, leading the Marquess and his lawyers to actively prove that Wilde was, in fact, homosexual. The ensuing indecency trial, along with the hysteria of its media coverage, resulted in Wilde having to not only defend himself as an artist, but to actively promote specific interpretations of his writing and correspondence. For example, in one instance the trial’s prosecutor, Charles Gill, asked Wilde about select passages he had written, both published and private, as well as letters written by Lord Alfred Douglas. Concerning a passage from one of Douglas’ letters, Gill said in court, “There is another sonnet. What construction can be put on the line, ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’?” (The Trials of Oscar Wilde). Wilde responded to Gill by saying, “I think the writer’s meaning is quite ambiguous. The love he alluded to was that between an elder and younger man, as between David and Jonathan; such love as Plato made the basis of his philosophy; such as was sung in the sonnets of Shakespeare and Michael Angelo.”

These instances of answering questions of meaning with the trial’s prosecutor was not the first time Wilde engaged in exercises of literary interpretation. Wilde previously entered exegetical conversations of his work shortly after the 1890 publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In one instance, Wilde stated, “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.” The public reading audience and their reaction to the homoerotic content of Dorian Gray prompted the author to revise and update its subsequent 1891 edition, adding a Preface that boldly stated Wilde’s station as an artist, his conviction that an artist’s aim is to “reveal art” and “conceal the artist,” and the timely position that “[t]here is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.” Wilde’s book, his trial, and its media coverage resulted in an unprecedented public conversation regarding non-heteronormative sexualities in the late 19th century. Greg Robinson observes how newspaper and magazine coverage was among the only public discussions of homosexuality. Robinson notes how the “sensational” and “often moralistic” newspaper and magazine reports “provide some evidence of contemporary attitudes toward homosexuality, and thereby offer insight into the ways in which of dominant social conceptions of minority sexuality were formed and transmitted” (Robinson 1). The role of media coverage during the indecency trial acted as both a promotion of heteronormative values as well as advancing awareness and conversation around homosexuality that was not already present in the public consciousness of 1895.

 Additional Reading

--Beasley, Brett. “The Triptych of Dorian Gray (1890–91): Reading Wilde’s Novel as Three Print Objects.” Cahiers Victoriens & Édouardiens, vol. 84, no. 84 Automne, 2017, pp. 18–18, https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2978.

--Grolleau, Charles. The Trial of Oscar Wilde, from the Shorthand Reports. Project Gutenberg.

--McGann, Maddison. “Reading Reception in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 54, no. 4, 2021, pp. 604–24, https://doi.org/10.1353/VPR.2021.0046.

--Robinson, Greg. “Whispers of the Unspeakable: New York and Montreal Newspaper Coverage of the Oscar Wilde Trials in 1895.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, https://doi.org/10.5070/T861025870.