Oscar Wilde is arrested for ‘gross indecency’
The Irish playwright’s libel case ends in disaster
On 18 February 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry left a calling card at London’s Albermarle club intended for the author and playwright Oscar Wilde. The note, scrawled in the nobleman’s own hand, derided the recipient as a “posing somdomite [sic]”, and was borne from a suspicion that Wilde was engaged in a relationship with Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas.
Spurred on by Bosie, but against the advice of his closest friends, Wilde reported Queensberry for criminal libel. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain, and his accusations not only threatened Wilde’s reputation, but his liberty.
Yet when Queensberry’s trial opened at the Old Bailey on 3 April, it soon began to feel as though it was Wilde, rather than the defendant, who was being accused of wrongdoing. Over the next three days, the aristocrat’s defence barrister read out suspect passages from Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as letters he had exchanged with Bosie, in order to prove the author’s “perverse” inclinations. Then, after Queensberry’s legal team threatened to call several young male acquaintances of Wilde as witnesses, the prosecution withdrew its case.
After the trial was over, Wilde was almost immediately arrested on charges of ‘gross indecency’, which ultimately led to him being sentenced to two years’ hard labour in May 1895. Required to pay Queensberry’s legal fees, he was also declared bankrupt.
Wilde’s health never fully recovered from the ordeal. After serving his sentence at Reading Gaol, he died in Paris in November 1900, aged 46.