Interview with Oscar Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland

When, in the 19th century, Oscar Wilde famously wrote He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, he could hardly have imagined that he himself and in spite of himself would have not only mirrored the Victorian era but also the whole time up to today.

In a writing career spanning just a couple of decades from the late 1870s until his death in 1900, the Irish wit, poet, dramatist and literary genius penned legendary theatre plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance, delicate childrens’ stories like The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose and brilliant essays covering a wide range of topics - from the Victorian dress reform to children in prison, from Aestheticism to Socialism and beyond - in addition to his magnificent only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Oscar Wilde’s world suddenly collapsed in 1895, when, as a homosexual man, he was prosecuted for gross indecency in England. The father of his lover Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas, known as the Marquess of Queensberry, had left a calling card at Wilde’s club in which he called him a “sodomite”. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, and lost. He was ultimately convicted and sentenced to hard labour. His wife Constance had to leave the country with their two children and eventually changed their surname to Holland to try and protect them, while her husband ended up in jail from 1895 to 1897 and died in Paris aged 46, in poverty.

The year of Oscar Wilde's death was 1900, when most of the wars, the events and the technologies that forged the 20th century were yet to happen; still, Wilde’s wordings like It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read sound like they were written yesterday in response to some random pieces of news informing you that your favourite books of all time will now be censored in order not to offend you anymore, and that if they never offended you in the first place then you should go and sign up for a government-funded mental health programme that will help you come to terms with this dangerous numbness that you never realised you had because it is inherently generated by patriarchy.

The effort and desire to bring Oscar Wilde and his genius into this century can be appreciated everywhere in the world as people, social media and commercial adverts keep the legacy of his aphorisms, quotes and excerpts alive and well. At the same time, British society seems engaged in an ongoing attempt to obscure, alter and blur the lines of truth by nurturing ignorance and distorting the facts.

Below in this article, you’ll read of researchers paid by UK taxpayers to make a BBC documentary about Oscar Wilde who had no idea he died in 1900 and actually believed he died in 1920 or 1930. Not content with their gaffe, they subsequently polled a whole dining table and found that there was only one person who knew that Oscar Wilde died in 1900. They didn’t say what nationality the knowledgeable individual was, but it's worth noting that this happened in pre-Brexit times when having Europeans over for dinner in UK was still legal.