On this day, the well-known Irish author, poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Wilde’s unsuccessful attempt to prosecute the Marquess of Queensbury for defamatory libel had had a boomerang effect and had led to Wilde himself being prosecuted for homosexual liaisons. The prison sentence was devastating for London’s most popular and influential playwright of the period, and on his release Wilde sailed the same evening for Dieppe in France, never to return to England. While in France he wrote, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol‘, a poem highlighting the brutality of the punishment that all convicts share. Towards the end, sick and dejected, and more or less confined to his hotel, Wilde joked, on one of his final trips outside, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” He died soon after.
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