Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas
When the playwright Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas amid the dreaming spires of Oxford, he was immediately smitten. Despite the fact that Wilde was not only 16 years the young undergraduate’s senior but was also married with two sons, the pair soon embarked on a passionate affair. Almost from the start, Douglas served as Wilde’s muse and was famously the inspiration for the acclaimed novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The couple’s relationship was often turbulent, due in no small part to the younger man’s decadent lifestyle. Douglas was a known dandy, a fan of good times and parties, and shunned the sedate, literary life Wilde craved. On several occasions, they even separated only to be reunited shortly afterward. One of their most notable spats came when Wilde gifted Douglas the chance to translate one of his works, only to then criticize the job he did. But even this spat failed to keep them apart for long.
What they couldn’t overcome, however, was the disapproval of Douglas’ family. In Victorian England, homosexuality was a crime and Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, keen to preserve the reputation of his family name, plotted against Wilde. Ultimately, his condemnations led to the writer’s arrest for “gross indecency”. At the height of his fame and popularity, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor and was forced to write behind bars from 1895 to 1897.
Upon his release from prison, Wilde understandably wanted to leave England behind for good and start a new life in Europe. Accompanied by Douglas, he spent some time in Rouen, France, and then the couple moved to Naples to enjoy an Italian summer. This was far from a happy time, however. Wilde’s imprisonment had left him virtually penniless and, despite the support he himself had offered Douglas over the years, the younger man declined to help his lover financially. Indeed, it was money matters that finally brought the whole relationship to a close, with Douglas returning home to England under pain of losing his inheritance if he stayed in Italy.
Wilde chose to live out his years, still penniless and, to a certain element of English society, disgraced, in Paris. He died and was buried in the French capital in 1900. After his death, Douglas would go on to marry a woman and then convert to Catholicism. He would soon express his regret at ever having met his former lover and condemned the homosexual adventures of his youth.