Oscar Fingal O

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Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde

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Oscars Early years

• He was born Oct. 16, 1854 in Dublin Ireland
• His father was a successful surgeon his
• mother was a writer and literary hostess
• (reputation and status were important).
• He was well educated and was a graduate
• of Oxford College. (Harry Potter was filmed
  there.)
• - The building was
• called
• Christ Church
• (even though
• it is not
• a church.

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College Years

• While in college, Wilde became a part of the
  Aesthetics Movement (Art for the sake of Art,
  devotion to beauty). This was a 19th century
  European movement that emphasized aesthetic
  values over moral or social themes.
• While in college he also found a love for
  literature.
• Even tough Oscar became a writer, he saw writing
  as an outlet for ideas, a place to put his
  thoughts, and not a craft.
• His views contrast with those of a man named
  William Morris. He believed in the artistry of
  making things (furniture, tapestry) everything
  of value had to be crafted with time and care.
  (opposite of the industrial revolution,
  factories)
• Oscar believed things should just look good, he
  didnt care how they were made or who made them
  (opposite of Morris). Art was not supposed to do
  anything except be beautiful!

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College Years
Oscar in his velour suit. (not a normal pose!)
Inside the lunch hall at Oxford. (Used as the
dining hall in HP)
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London

• After college he moved to the city of London to
  pursue a literary career. London was the hub for
  everything!
• Here he wrote novels, plays, poems and worked as
  a literary critic (high status job).

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Writing Career

• In 1891 he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray.
• He was most well known for writing satirized
  plays like, The Importance of Being Earnest.
• In Ernest he is making fun of the overly
  wealthy and their over-the-top behavior and
  luxury. They judged people unfairly and he
  didnt like that so he is making this known. He
  could also be referring to the unfair judgment
  from Bosies (love interest) father.

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The Importance of Being Ernest
Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray!
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Victorian Period - 1847-1901

• Queen Victoria was on the throne of England while
  Wilde lived in London.
• She embodied conservatism (supports minimal and
  gradual change in society seeks to preserve
  things as they are, emphasizing stability and
  continuity) and asked her subjects to do the
  same.
• She made it a law to have
• marriages, births and
• deaths public record.
• Marriages became legal
• not just we say we are married.
• There was a huge chasm
• between rich and poor
• Poverty was at its highest.

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Victorian Period continued

• Industrialization began during this time.
• Factories began to assemble things quicker than
  in the past (assembly lines).
• This boom in industry made England very wealthy.
  They imported these good all over.
• This money made the rich, richer!

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Class Structure in Victorian London

• Upper Royalty (have a title Lord, Duke),
  lived off old money and/or interest of that
  money, did not work it was not gosch (cool) to
  work, overtly well educated (multiple languages,
  useless information), live in the West Side
  (clean, fresh, bright, manicured, carriages,
  space)
• Middle Actors, Lawyers, Doctors, Writers had
  money, but needed to work had luxuries, but not
  to the extent of the wealthy
• Lower had to work to survive laborers
  uneducated illiterate (no public schools)

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Poverty in London

• Nineteenth-century Britain saw a huge population
  increase accompanied by rapid urbanization
  stimulated by the industrial revolution. The
  large numbers of skilled and unskilled people
  looking for work suppressed wages down to barely
  subsistence level (they were barely surviving!).
• Available housing was scarce and expensive,
  resulting in overcrowding. These problems were
  magnified in London, where the population grew at
  record rates. Large houses were turned into flats
  and tenements, and as landlords failed to
  maintain these dwellings, slum housing developed.

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Poverty Continued

• There was no public sewage system.
• The streets had a tidal ditch running through it
  and people would throw their sewage in these
  ditches from their windows (look out below).
• This ditch contained the only water that the
  people in the streets had to drink.
• Children between the ages of 8 15 or the
  elderly, often became mudlarks. Mudlarks would
  search in the muddy shores of the River Thames
  during low tide, scavenging for anything that
  could be resold (bits of coal, scrap iron) and
  sometimes, when occasion offered, pilfering from
  river traffic. People dwelling near the river
  could scrape a subsistence living this way.
• For the mudlarks, work conditions were filthy and
  uncomfortable, as excrement and waste would wash
  onto the shores from the raw sewage.
• Mudlarks would often get cuts from broken glass
  left on the shore. The income generated was
  seldom more than skimpy but mudlarks had a
  degree of independence, since the hours they
  worked were entirely at their own discretion and
  they also kept everything they made as a result
  of their own labor.

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London Through the Haze
                                                                 
London through the hazeAbout this image       
In the nineteenth century the air around London
was heavily polluted by industrial smoke and
factory pollution. The smog made the city (mainly
the East Side) a very dark and unhealthy place to
live. - No pollution regulations, London Fog,
city covered in soot (chimneys burned coal)
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Understanding the Queen

• Victoria was the niece to King George IV.
• The King had no direct heirs to the throne and
  Victoria was named the successor.
• She was groomed from a young age to rule. She had
  nannies, education, learned art, history
• languages.
• She was 18 when she took the throne.

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Victorian Period

• While on the throne, the King implemented the
  Reform Act for the Poor (whosoever will not work
  ought not to live).
• Workhouses were the solution. (place where those
  unable to support themselves were offered
  accommodation and employment)
• The idea was to keep England rich at the expense
  of the poor.
• Because of the reform,
• there was a greater
• separation between
• the poor and the rich.

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Child Labor

• The Victorian era became notorious for employing
  young children in factories and mines and as
  chimney sweeps. Children were expected to help
  towards the family budget, often working long
  hours (12-15 hrs.) in dangerous jobs and low
  wages.
• Agile boys were employed by the chimney sweeps
  small children were employed to scramble under
  machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins and
  children were also employed to work in coal mines
  to crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for
  adults. Children also worked as errand boys,
  crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling
  matches, flowers and other cheap goods.
• Many children got stuck in the chimneys that
  they were sweeping and eventually died. In
  factories it was not uncommon for children to
  lose limbs crawling under machinery to pick
  things up.
• Several Factory Acts were passed to prevent the
  exploitation of children in the workplace.
  Children of poor families would leave school at
  the age of eight and were then forced to go to
  work. School was not free at this time public
  schools were not in existence yet. (This is why
  only the rich were educated. To be well educated
  was a status symbol.)

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Children Continued

• Famous people, like Charles Dickens (A Christmas
  Carol, Oliver Twist), used their writings or
  their ability to be in the public eye, to help
  the children and the poor.
• At the time, there were no hospitals for
  children, so if your child got sick, and you
  could not afford a doctor, they would most likely
  die.
• Orphanages were also horrible places. Children
  were abused and usually starving.

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Continuation

• Dickens founded the first Childrens hospital
  he also
• began the first real orphanage that helped place
  children into good homes.
• Although there were advocates for children and
  the poor, there were those that believed in
  Dandyism.
• Wilde believed in the Dandy ideas. A famous
  dandy, Baudelaire, commented that the dandies had
  "no profession other than elegance...no other
  status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty
  in their own person....The dandy must aspire to
  be sublime without interruption he must live and
  sleep before a mirror." (Seigel, 98-99)
• The Dandy is walking art, pure vanity.

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• Anyone who lives within their means suffers
  from a lack of imagination.
• Oscar Wilde
• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong
  romance.
• Oscar Wilde

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Continuation

• Dandyism was the idea of pursuing happiness.
• That was a mans only true occupation it did
  not matter the cost.
• If drugs, art, homosexuality, murder, and/or
  women were the things that made a man happy, then
  he was to seek them out.
• Wilde and others like him gravitated towards this
  idea, because it seemed to better match the idea
  of Victorian life self servant.
• If crimes happened, it wasnt someone like Wilde
  that would be a suspect he was wealthy.

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Dandyism vs. Victorianism

• True Victorians lived by a high moral standard.
• Queen Victoria believed in morals and the
  institution of marriage.
• It was thought that the poor were morally corrupt
  and must have done something to deserve being
  poor.
• The wealthy were thought to be good people and
  that they did not commit crimes.
• Homosexuality, prostitution, murder, drugs,
  infidelity, were all poor crimes.

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Wildes Private life

• Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884.
• They had two sons - Cyril Vyvyan.
• Although he was married, he began an affair with
  Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie.
• Douglas was the son of the
• Marquise of Queensberry.
• Being a man of Victorian
• standards, the Marquise was
• outraged at his son and
• Wildes affair.

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Continuation

• The Marquise publically announced that Wilde was
  a homosexual, and that Wilde was taking advantage
  of his son.
• Wilde sued the Marquise for slander.
• This began the first public trial of
  homosexuality in Victorian London.
• The trial was made a public record and the
  newspapers made Wilde out to be a demon.

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The Trial

• After being publically humiliated, Wildes wife
  filed for divorce and moved away with their
  children.
• Wilde argued that it was Douglas that pursued him
  and spent all of his money.
• Wilde felt betrayed when the courts ruled that he
  was guilty of gross indecency, and was sentenced
  to 2 years in prison, doing hard labor.

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Prison Life

• While in prison, Wilde spent 12 to 15 hours on
  the Treadmill as punishment.
• Although he was mad that Douglas did not defend
  him in court, Wilde still wrote him the longest
  love letter ever publish. It was titled De
  Profundis and was published publically for all to
  read.

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Life After Prison

• Wilde was released after serving his time.
• He was reunited with Bosie, but the wounds were
  too deep.
• He moved to Paris and tried to rekindle his
  writing career, but he wasnt successful.
• He died alone and penniless on November 30, 1900.