Wilde Trials

A series of three trials held at the London Old Bailey in 1895 in which Oscar Wilde stood accused of homosexuality. Wilde was found guilty and convicted to a two-year prison sentence and hard labor.

Background

Wilde's eventual conviction was supported by the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act which prohibited sexual relations between men. Prior to the 1885 Amendment, a 1533 statute outlawing “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery” backed the persecution of homosexuals. While in an earlier age the “sodomist” had been regarded as a perpetrator of specific, sinful acts, a development in late Victorian pathology saw homosexuality as a new form of criminal degeneracy. According to Michel Foucault, the homosexual male, a deviant individual, emerged as “a type of life, a life form.” At the time of the trials, Wilde's homosexuality was an open secret among his contemporaries. This was one significant reason for his treatment as a very controversial public figure. Yet, as a writer he was at the height of his success. It was Wilde's affair with Lord Alfred Douglas that triggered the 1895 court trial. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, publically accused Wilde, in distinctly inarticulate terms, of "posing as a Somdomite" (sic). On hearing this, Wilde allegedly wrote to a friend that “my whole life seems ruined by this man.” [please give source] Wilde proceeded to sue Queensberry for libel.

The Trials

The first trial, the libel trial against Queensberry, took place between 3 and 5 April 1895. In this trial Wilde denied any homosexual activities when cross-examined by Queensberry's lawyer but young men called as witnesses were able to cast doubt on Wilde's truthfulness. As a consequence, Queensberry was acquitted, to public celebration. The public was allowed to attend the trial. In the second trial, conducted from 26 April to 1 May 1895, Wilde was accused of “indecency.” Due to Wilde's own rhetorical skill and his lawyer's efforts to cast doubt on the credibility of witnesses, the jury could not reach a definite decision and a third trial became necessary. Wilde was urged by friends to leave the country in the interval between the second and third trials but he refused to do so.

The third and last trial took place from 20 May to 25 May 1895. Under a new prosecutor, it ended with Wilde's conviction for “gross indecency” by the commission of acts of indecency in private with members of his own sex. He was convicted to two years of imprisonment and hard labor in Reading Goal.

In all trials the prosecution's focus lay on Wilde's “suspicious” writings, while specifics of his sexual activities were not so much under scrutiny in spite of the fact that it was for these that he was accused.

Public Response

After Wilde's conviction, a great number of spiteful, self-righteous newspaper editorials were published. The Daily Telegraph expressed that “the grave of contemptuous oblivion may rest on his [Wilde's] foolish ostentation, his empty paradoxes, his insufferable posturing, his incurable vanity,” [please give source for this quote] and further saw his case as a “terrible warning” for young men in danger of falling victim to the same vices. The London Evening News felt compelled to state that “England has tolerated the man Wilde and others of his kind too long.” Wilde and “his kind” being a threat to “the wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life.” [please give source for this quote]

Aftermath

Wilde was released from prison in 1897 as a broken man. He went to France where he called himself Sebastian Melmoth after the doomed title character of Charles Maturin's novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

In 1898, he published “The Ballad of Reading Goal.”

In 1905, five years after Wilde's death, a letter of deep reproach to Lord Alfred Douglas was published under the title “De Profundis.“ This letter was originally written during his imprisonment.

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Sources:

Arata, Stephen. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle. Identity and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Google Books. Web. 25 October 2011.

Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. 1948. New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Google Books. Web. 25 October 2011.

Ousby, Ian, ed. “Oscar Wilde.” The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. Wordsworth Reference. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994.

Wilpers, Birgit. The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Seminar paper. GRIN Verlag, 2008. Google Books. Web. 25 October 2011.