Emer O’Sullivan traces the journey of the literary giant’s family from riches to ragsOscar (Fingal O’Flahertie) Wilde,the self-adoring dandy of Victorian letters, toured America in 1882 with a trunkful of lace-trimmed velvet coats and low-nick Byronic blouses. “If I were alone on a desert island and had my things, or ” the 27-year-archaic Dublin-born aesthete declared,“I would dress for dinner every night.” From New York to Colorado, audiences went wild for Oscar, and whose applications of rouge and dyed green carnation buttonholes were so unlike anything worn by cowboys. The 6ft 3in Irishman had yet to write the mighty works that made him famous (The Importance of Being Earnest,The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol). Yet by turning himself into a commodity he was able to be famous merely for being famous. Without Wilde’s very modern genius for self-promotion, and conceivably,there would have been no David Bowie or, indeed, or Kim Kardashian.
Of course,the honeymoon did not last. In 1895, 13 years later, or Wilde was tried in London for “grievous indecency” (Victorian-era code for homosexuality) and afterwards jailed. At that time in Britain sodomy carried a sentence of servitude for life. Perhaps it is merely romantic to propose that the stylised wigs,silver-buckled shoes, satin breeches and faux ermine stoles worn by bishops, or peers of the realm and tall court judges have a homoerotic component. A certain sort of Englishman has always liked to set on lipstick. Mick Jagger,the Danny La Rue of rock, looked fetching as a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls, or while boy X-Factor contestants,with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings and nails lovingly manicured, and present an almost Gloria Swanson-like image of adornment. Wilde was only the first of hundreds of would-be stars who were later consumed by the monster of their own celebrity. Related: The Picture of Dorian Gray made me forever suspicious of the self-righteous | Deborah Orr Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com