Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
- Owen Dudley Edwards
- 04 October 2012
Boyhood and education, 1854–1874
Wilde's immediate family was more clerical than any of his fellow writers' of the Irish Renaissance: in addition to Maturin, two paternal uncles proper and one by marriage, a maternal uncle, and maternal grandfather were ordained in the (established) Church of Ireland. These and some of their lay relatives and friends participated in the Romantic flowering of Irish evangelicalism (1815–45) which sought to convert the Irish Catholic masses where predecessor protestant episcopalians were content to subordinate them. All the major Irish Renaissance writers of protestant origin showed some evangelical inheritance, substituting cultural for spiritual leadership: Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey. All retained the self-confidence and authoritarianism of Irish protestant evangels. Wilde's Iokanaan in Salomé (1893) and Canon Chasuble in The Importance of being Earnest (1895) reflect that family clerical background, as do Wilde's 'Poems in Prose'.
Wilde was baptized by his father's brother Ralph in St Mark's Church, Dublin, on 26 April 1855. Five or six years later he was baptized into the Roman Catholic church, at his mother's instance, by the Revd L. C. Prideaux Fox (1820–1905), chaplain to the juvenile reformatory at Glencree, co. Wicklow, where the family were on holiday. Wilde violated no Irish protestant taboo as great as that broken by his mother for him in thus perverting him (as her relatives would have termed it). During the great Irish famine (1845–52) William Wilde had directed the census from local medical reports giving him unique mastery of famine mortality and his folklore researches showed its cultural toll, while Jane Elgee as poet and polemicist on the Dublin Nation declared that the million-odd victims owed their fate to her fellow protestant landlords. Wilde's dialogue between Death and Avarice in 'The Young King' (Lady's Pictorial, Christmas 1888) echoes her indictment while his Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) has recollections of her poem 'The Famine Year'. He would have understood the symbolism of her consecration of her sons to the church whose children had died in such horror and such numbers. He reaffirmed her defence of the Irish revolutionaries of 1848 when lecturing in San Francisco in 1882. Filial devotion made him a rebel, with some uncertainty as to his cause.
Wilde's Irish-speaking father took his family on vacations to Galway in quest of folklore, later written up by his widow: Wilde himself retained enough Irish to sing abstruse Gaelic lullabies to his children. Wilde would also draw on his parents' mastery of ghost, curse, and fairy lore to inspire his first prose fiction, 'The Canterville Ghost' and 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' (Court and Society Review, Feb–March and May 1887), and The Happy Prince and other Tales (1888). The wish of human vanity whose fulfilment brings ultimate damnation, characteristic in Gaelic story-telling, dominates Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891). Wilde would duly win his greatest social success as oral narrator. His parents' choice of Gaelic heroic names for him (including what may have been a claim of descent from the ‘wild’ O'Flaherties, memorable threats to English settlers) heightened his alienation. Fenian legend supposedly survived in the bard Ossian, son of the Odysseus-like contriver Fingal, and father of the Achilles-like hero Oscar: Wilde fulfilled all three roles in his life. But Fenian names sounded ominous in Irish protestant ears after 1858, and Wilde may have suffered from it as a boarder at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, co. Fermanagh, a bastion of English imperial culture where Ireland was virtually obliterated from formal educational allusion. Wilde seems to have detested his time there (1864–71), although winning scripture prizes in 1869 and 1870. But it taught him how to conceal the Irish identity he had inherited.
On 23 February 1867 Wilde was told that his little sister Isola Francesca (b. 1857) had just died. He mourned her unconsolably, memorialized her ten years later in the poem 'Requiescat' (later anthologized by Yeats), carried a lock of her hair as best he could until his death, and haunted his literary work with images of girls unknowing of their incipient womanhood, for example in Vera (1880, 1882), 'The Canterville Ghost', 'The Birthday of the Infanta' (Paris Illustré, 30 March 1889), The Picture of Dorian Gray, each of his four great comedies, and Salomé, the keynote always innocence expressed in extreme terms, whether of courage, kindness, or cruelty. His earliest surviving letter (to his mother, 5 September 1868) shows his hunger at Portora for home and its culture, asking for the current number of James Godkin's National Review, then an outlet for her patriotic verse, and seeking news of her poems' possible republication (subsequently realized) by the Glasgow Irish nationalist firm Cameron and Ferguson. From Portora he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1871.
Wilde's mother by now held a literary salon at 1 Merrion Square, Dublin, the Wilde family home from 1855, with visitors such as the poets Aubrey de Vere and Samuel Ferguson, the great peasant story-teller William Carleton, and the Dublin historian John Gilbert. At Trinity, Wilde's chief mentors were the classicists John Pentland Mahaffy and Robert Yelverton Tyrrell. Mahaffy proved a stimulating challenge in his witty contempt for Roman Catholicism, Irish nationalism, democracy, liberalism, socialism, and Gaelicism, on none of which he influenced Wilde: but both men helped make him a great Greek scholar. He won a foundation scholarship in 1873 and the Berkeley gold medal for Greek in 1874. Mahaffy germinated Wilde's first great dramatic character, Prince Paul Maraloffski, the tsar's premier in Vera, cruel, treacherous, and endlessly amusing. Wilde's juvenile cult of Shelley weathered the editorial austerity exuded by Edward Dowden from Trinity's chair of English literature. Wilde was then too shy for much student friendship but activity in college societies threw him together with Edward Carson.
