The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde

The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde

by Merlin Holland
review by E.A. Lombardi

Guide Rating -

"The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde" offers a look at some of the most dramatic moments in Oscar Wilde's life, but the records for those trials have remained unpublished since 1895, deemed "unfit for publication." Now, HarperCollins introduces the first published transcripts of Wilde's trial, complete with an introduction and commentary by Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson.

Ironically enough, Wilde brought the trouble upon himself, when he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel in writing this note: "Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite [sic]." In vivid details, this book depicts the life and words of Wilde as he has rarely been seen before.

Witticisms at its Finest

In the transcripts, Wilde pulls off characteristically witty lines, without regard to how his words will affect the outcome of his case. When he testifies about a conversation with Queensberry, he quotes Queensberry as saying: "If I catch you and my son together again in any public restaurant, I will thrash you."

Wilde repeats his reply with relish: "I don't know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight." His story was greeted by laughter from the courtroom. He was enjoying himself, and seemed unable to acknowledge the true severity of the situation in which he found himself.

Wilde's closest friends urged him to drop the case, but Wilde's lover urged him to continue with the trial; so he pushed on... Caught up in the whirlwind of the trial and witnesses, Wilde seemed to see himself as a character on a stage, living out the inevitably tragic role.

Literature on Trial

Wilde once said, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all." Still, his books were used to prosecute Wilde for "gross indecency," with charges that he showed "immorality and sodomitical tendencies in his published work." Holland says, "Wilde was in his element defending his views on art and morality."

With this trial, Oscar Wilde joined the ranks of such writers as Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, French writers who were scrutinized for obscenity and immorality in their works. Unfortunately, the punishment for Wilde's supposed crimes against society was far worse than what other controversial writers had received. Wilde's sentence amounted to a death sentence.

Wilde "cast a rainbow of forbidden colours over that drab age of industrial power and empire building; he pushed his subversive ideas and his subversive behavior to the limits of what they could tolerate--and then just a little bit further, which they could not."

Holland's hope is that, in publishing this accurate account of Wilde's trial, "his fight, although insanely quixotic, was fought with all that style and conviction which we have come to expect from Oscar Wilde." With this newest addition to Wilde scholarship, who could forget the life and works of the ever-notorious Oscar Wilde?!