Wilde's parents, the surgeon and radical journalist William Wilde and Speranza, were collectors of Irish music and folktales, and fluent Irish speakers. Perhaps this is a childhood memory of the people who came to the couple's various homes in Merrion Square (tres classy), Glencree (then recently emptied of its thousands of inhabitants by the Famine) and Connemara.

Apart from their love for Irish culture - regarded by the Empire types of the time as analagous to loving monkeys - the two were artistically and personally radical; William Wilde famously liked to put it about, and was extremely successful in doing so, despite having a reek like a polecat off him due to his dislike of bathing. He was a famous ear surgeon, and I've always wondered if Oscar was so called as a pun on the Latin name for the hearing-engine.

Speranza was kindly disposed towards her husband's other families, and Oscar knew them and loved them; two of his adored sisters burned to death - both were wearing the thin muslin dresses popular at the time, and when one leaned too close to the fire and her dress caught flame, her sister rushed her out into the knee-deep snow and both - both now aflame - rolled in the snow, but they were so badly burned that they died of the injuries.