The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #36203   Message #499810
Posted By: SDShad
06-Jul-01 - 11:08 AM
Thread Name: Another Sectarian Killing
Subject: RE: Another Sectarian Killing
Good though, Maire, but nope. Wilde died in 1900. His sodomy conviction and sojourn in the prison system (including the infamous Reading Gaol) came in 1895 (to 1897).

From the website where I looked up the dates:

During his final fever, he still retained his wit: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go..."

God, I love the man's wit.

But Wilde's persection and downfall are a good bellweather of what Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes towards gays were in British society. Of course that witch-hunt mentality continued well into the twentieth century, bringing down and killing a genuine, if at the time unsung, British hero, Alan Turing, during the 1950s. Among others.

Chris