Joseph Bristow. Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment

Abstract

The story of Oscar Wilde’s three trials has been told many times—excitedly, day by day as the trials occurred, in the national and world press from The Times to the Illustrated Police News; then subsequently in Charles Carrington’s The Trial of Oscar Wilde from the Shorthand Reports (1906), Christopher Millard’s Oscar Wilde Three Times Tried (1912), and H. Montgomery Hyde’s compression of the latter for Penguin’s Famous Trials series; and regularly on stage and in two films both released, pre-Wolfenden Report, in 1960 starring Robert Morley and Peter Finch, respectively. The story compels as the tragic double to the exquisite mastery of Wilde’s theatrical comedies, Wilde’s fall from one who stood, as he expressed it in his prison letter De Profundis ‘in symbolic relation to his age’ to the most outcast of men evoking the most irreproachably Aristotelian pity and terror. More than one newspaper reporter reached at the time for theatrical metaphors when reporting on the performance in the court of Wilde and his interlocutors. In spite of Wilde’s averring in the first trial, when pressed by the Marquess of Queensberry’s counsel Edward Carson on the meanings of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that ‘novels and life are different things’ (p. 12), the intertwining of art and life in both the trials and the critical history of Wilde’s work have consistently challenged Wilde’s claim, in Dorian Gray’s Preface, that art’s aim is ‘to reveal the artist and conceal the artist’. Rather, Wilde’s life has then and now been read as an aesthetic artefact: ‘Your books,’ Edward Shelley, the most artistic of Wilde’s partners to be dragged into the legal proceedings, wrote to Wilde ‘are part of yourself’ (p. 342).