Oscar Wildethe wit with a warning

He arrived in London from Dublin already famous for being famous — a lecture tour of America at twenty-seven, a persona assembled out of velvet, aphorisms and calculated idleness. Asked at New York customs whether he had anything to declare, he is supposed to have said he had nothing but his genius. The line is very likely invented, which is entirely in character and rather the point.

The work came late and came fast. The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, then four comedies in four years. Two of them — An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest — were playing in the West End on the same nights in 1895 when he walked into court to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite.

He lost, and the evidence the defence had gathered went straight to the Crown. Two trials later he was sentenced to two years' hard labour. He went in at the height of his fame and came out bankrupt and unpublishable, wrote one long letter in prison and one poem after it, and died in a Paris hotel room at forty-six.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Oscar Wilde