Here's an interesting, brief article that I found today on the Internet:


It was on this day in 1895 that Oscar Wilde was arrested on the charges of sodomy. For the past two years, he had been the lover of Alfred Douglas, a young poet and student at Oxford. In February of 1895 Douglas's father left a note at Wilde's club that accused Wilde of being a sodomite. Wilde sued Douglas's father for libel, but the judge ruled that he was justified in calling Wilde a sodomite. Wilde knew he would be arrested, and his friends urged him to leave the country, but instead he accepted his fate and went to prison.

At the time, he was at the height of his popularity as a playwright, but once he was arrested audiences turned against him. His plays An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were selling out every night in London, but they soon closed. A tour of A Woman of No Importance (1893) had been planned in the U.S., but it was cancelled. Newspapers wrote editorials denouncing Wilde's homosexuality; even close friends spoke out against him.

The first trial took place in late April. On the night before the final day of the trial, Wilde wrote a letter to Alfred Douglas that said, "Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours. . . . If I have been the butt of a terrible tragedy, it is because the nature of that love has not been understood."

The first trial ended in a hung jury, but Wilde was convicted in the second trial. He was sentenced to two years in jail, and while he was there he wrote his most famous poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and his autobiographical essay De Profundis (1905). He was released in 1897 and died three years later in a hotel in Paris, estranged from his family.

Wilde said, "It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style."