Oscar Wilde

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A FAIR SCHOLAR

Knowledge came to me through pleasure.
Oscar Wilde

At the end of January 1864 Oscar and his brother were sent away to school, leaving the six-year-old Isola at home. It was an escape from the nursery and the rule of governesses. The Portora Royal School at Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, a hundred miles north of Dublin, was an ancient foundation, established in 1608 by James I for the education of the town s recently transplanted Scotch Presbyterian population. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, it had transformed itself into a far more outward-looking institution. And under the enlightened stewardship of Rev. William Steele, beginning in 1857, it emerged as a small but flourishing and academically renowned public school. The position of Enniskillen at the heart of the expanding Irish railway network made it a convenient location. Boarding pupils arrived from across the country, the sons of colonial officials, Irish gentry, established clergy, and professional men.

The Wildes had connections with Portora (the art master, William Bully Wakeman, was a friend of the family s and had provided some illustrations for Sir William s book on the Boyne), but the reputation of the place, both academic and social it was known to some as the Eton of Ireland would have been quite enough to commend it. The school was handsomely housed in a fine Georgian mansion on the top of the hill outside the town, with beautiful views out over Lower Lough Erne. When the Wilde brothers arrived, they were among 175 pupils: 112 boarders and 63 day boys. The boys, ranging in age from ten (according to the prospectus) to seventeen, were divided into distinct lower and upper schools.

The headmaster, Dr. Steele, was a remarkable man: intellectually distinguished, liberal-minded, frank, even noble (he encouraged Catholics toattend the school, though few came). Aged forty-four in 1864, he still had a lithe, vigorous frame, a quick step, and

MATTHEW STURGIS is the author of acclaimed biographies of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert, and has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent on Sunday.

ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Exhaustively researched, enlightening and lively . . . The story of the man in full, with flaws and fine qualities almost equally balanced . . . Sturgis does not pretend to be a critic one of his gripes against Ellmann is that he approached his biography as a literary critic rather than a historian and he does not essay any overarching judgments. Instead he delivers the judgments of Wilde s own day: The Ballad of Reading Gaol turns out to have been by far the most popular of Wilde s works during his own lifetime, a fact I found surprising. The opinions of Wilde s more perceptive contemporaries can make us think. Brooke Allen, Wall Street Journal
 
Give yourself a present: Pick up a copy of Oscar Wilde: A Life . . . Sturgis s biography is now the fullest one-volume account of the iconic fin-de-siècle writer, aesthete, wit and gay martyr. It draws on the most up-to-date manuscript discoveries and scholarship, but deliberately sticks closely to Wilde s life. Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
 
[Sturgis s] clear-eyed understanding of Wilde is acute, his narrative assured. Drawing on new material, including the full transcript of the libel trial that set Wilde on the path to prison, he assembles an indelible portrait of a confounding and complex man. Mary Ann Gwinn, Minneapolis Star Tribune