The Irish Famine of 1879, while at a smaller scale than the Great Famine’s of 1740 and 1845, had dire effects on tenant farmers, especially in western districts. Heavy rains, low crop yields, and few opportunities for outside income made rent unaffordable and eviction a looming threat. The Irish Land League, a land agitation and tenants rights movement, was thus founded and led by Charles Steward Parnell, Michael Davitt, Andrew Kettle and Thomas Brennan. The movement sought to achieve for tenant farmers the security of tenure, fair rents, freedom to sell property, and ultimately, for peasants to have sole ownership of the land. Oscar Wilde would have already settled into London by Autumn of 1879, taking a room with painter and Oxford friend Frank Miles.
The Wilde’s origins in western Ireland are rooted in the late 1740s, when Ralph Wilde, Oscar’s great-grandfather, landed in Castlerea, which is a small town in the County Roscommon (Hanberry, 1). Following the death in 1876 of Oscar’s father, Sir William Wilde, the family was virtually bankrupt; what few properties were left (one being their holiday home in Illaunroe) would be made unprofitable amidst the early developments of the Land League. In a letter to Oscar, Lady Wilde wrote, ‘How are we all to live? It is all a muddle. My opinion is that all that is coming to us will be swallowed up in our borrowings before we are paid.’ Despite spending the majority of his adult life outside of Ireland, he and his family remained strong proponents of both the Land League and the greater cause of Irish Nationalism. In an interview with The Pall Mall Budget, at the time when his play Salomé, was being reviewed by the London theatre censor, Wilde stated, “I am not English; I’m Irish — which is quite another thing.”
Sources:
HANBERRY, GERARD. “Discovering Oscar Wilde in the Heart of Galway.” The Wildean, no. 44, Oscar Wilde Society, 2014, pp. 96–103, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48569044.
Tóibín, Colm. “‘The Road to Reading Gaol." London Review of Books, London Review of Books, 27 Nov. 2019, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading….
“Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854–1900).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/….
“The Censure and Salomé: An Interview with Mr Oscar Wilde,” Pall Mall Budget, 30 June 1892, p. 947.