Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin (now home of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College), the second of three children born to an Anglo-Irish couple: Jane, née Elgee, and Sir William Wilde.

Biography

Oscar was two years younger than his brother, William (Willie) Wilde. Jane Wilde was a niece (by marriage) of the novelist, playwright, and clergyman Charles Maturin (1780–1824), who may have influenced her own literary career. She mistakenly believed that she was of Italian ancestry, and under the pseudonym “Speranza” (the Italian word for ‘hope’), she wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848; she was a lifelong Irish nationalist.

Jane Wilde read the Young Irelanders’ poetry to Oscar and Willie, inculcating a love of these poets in her sons. Her interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home. Sir William Wilde was Ireland’s leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. A renowned philanthropist, his dispensary for caring for the city’s poor at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road. On his father’s side, Wilde was descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, who went to Ireland with King William of Orange’s invading army in 1690, and numerous Anglo-Irish ancestors. On his mother’s side, Wilde’s ancestors included a bricklayer from County Durham, who emigrated to Ireland sometime in the 1770s.

Wilde was baptized as an infant in St. Mark’s Church, Dublin, the local Church of Ireland (Anglican) church. When the church was closed, the records were moved to the nearby St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street. Davis Coakley mentions a second baptism by a Catholic priest, Father Prideaux Fox, who befriended Oscar’s mother c. 1859. According to Fox’s testimony in Donahoe’s Magazine in 1905, Jane Wilde would visit his chapel in Glencree, County Wicklow, for Mass and would take her sons with her. She asked Father Fox in this period to baptize her sons.