ABSTRACT
The trials of Oscar Wilde in April and May of 1895 are often perceived as a
watershed in Victorian literary culture. The willingness of the law to elide the
utterances of an author and those of his characters, the severe sentence and the final
denunciation of the dramatist by 77-year-old Mr Justice Wills as ‘dead to all sense of
shame’1 sought both to banish Wilde as a dissident individual and to cleanse English
letters of the subtle moral pollution associated with his influence. The jailing and
exile of Wilde would, conservative opinion seemed to hope, somehow purify the
nation’s sullied flesh, allowing genuine manly sentiment to replace loves that spoke
their names only too freely. The overt hedonism, homoeroticism, and artistic
irresponsibility that had characterised a mode of writing Wilde had knowingly
associated with ‘Tired Hedonists’ who wear ‘faded roses in our buttonholes’ and
proclaim ‘a sort of cult for Domitian’2 would be swept away and normality, with its
neat compartmentalisation of gender roles and stratified class positions, restored.
