Oscar Wilde: King of Quotes Trivia Quiz

Answer: Dublin, Ireland

He was born to Anglo-Irish parents living at 21 Westland Row, Dublin on 16 October 1864. The house is now the site of the Oscar Wilde Centre, a research unit of Trinity College Dublin established in 1998.

His father, William Robert Wills Wilde, was a prominent eye and ear surgeon, knighted in 1864. His practice was quite successful, so it came as quite a shock that he died (in 1876) bankrupt. Oscar Wilde's mother Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde (née Elgee) wrote poetry using the pen name Speranza - chosen as a reference to her supposed Italian ancestry. (This ancestry was a figment of her imagination, as her family name came from roots in Durham, and not from an Italian immigrant whose name was altered over the years.)

Just this much information about his family leads one to suspect that this quotation, from 'The Importance of Being Earnest', sprang from heartfelt experience: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Answer: O'Fflahertie

His birth certificate reads Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wilde, but O'Flahertie (and sometimes O'Flaherty) appears at later times on a range of documents. He added the Wills later, as did both his father and older brother.

Both of his parents were keen students of Irish history and legend, which clearly influenced their choice of names. Oscar may have either English or Irish roots; the Irish one related to a character in the Fenian cycle whose grandmother was transformed into a deer - hence the name meaning friend of deer - while the English root would have a meaning something along the lines of god's spear. Irish history was probably what inspired their use of the English version of the Gaelic 'Ó Flaithbheartaigh', a clan name associated with the west coast and resistance to Viking invaders. Its English meaning is "bright prince". Fingal is an area north of Dublin, originally a Viking settlement called 'Fine Gall', meaning territory of foreigners.

With such a weight of names that refer to others, it is no wonder that Wilde developed a sense of the importance of establishing a sense of self. He is often quoted (with no source) as having said, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." In 'De Profundis' (the 50,000-word letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897, reflecting on the path he had taken in his life, and whether he would change it if given the opportunity), he wrote "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." His conclusion, despite all the suffering it had brought, was that he had lived the life he had to live.

Answer: True

Before marrying Oscar's mother, William Wilde had several prior relationships that produced children who he acknowledged and supported. Henry Wilson was born in 1838 to one mother, while another woman was the mother of Emily Wilde (born in 1847) and Mary Wilde (born in 1849).

William and Jane's first child was William Charles Kingsbury Wilde, born in 1852. Like his brother, he was a writer, but primarily a journalist and poet. Then came Oscar in 1854, followed by Isola Francesca Emily Wilde, born in 1857 (and named after Iseult of Ireland, a figure in the Arthurian legends who was the lover of Sir Tristan, her mother and her mother's sister). She was apparently the family's joy until she died at the age of nine. Her death left a lasting impression: when he died, one of his few possessions was an envelope containing a lock of her hair. He wrote the poem 'Requiescat' in her memory.

"Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it."

Answer: Oxford

After studying Classics at Trinity College in Dublin (where he had been exposed to aestheticism during his final year of study), Wilde enrolled at Oxford to study Greats, their title for a course of study including Greek and Roman history and philosophy. While there, he explored a number of different philosophies, including Freemasonry (which he abandoned on leaving Oxford), Catholicism (only his dislike of committing to a particular creed prevented his joining the Roman Catholic church), and Aestheticism. This was an artistic and literary movement that considered art (of all forms) should exist only to be beautiful, and not to teach any kind of lesson. They were often flamboyant in their disdain of practicality and emphasis on appearance.

Wilde embraced aestheticism enthusiastically, and carried much of that energy through the rest of his life. While still a student, he produced one of the earliest of many famous quips: "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china." Despite his stated devotion to appearance over substance, he graduated in 1878 with an excellent result, a double First. This means that he achieved the highest standard (First Class Honours) in two of his disciplines. He also received an award for 'Ravenna', a poem reflecting on his visit to that city.

Answer: True

While this is widely attributed to Wilde, and it certainly sounds like something he might have said, it did not appear in print until 1914, so may well be apocryphal. But it's a great line, and, as Wilde definitely did tell someone who asked him during that tour whether reports of a particular extravagant display of aestheticism were true, "It's not whether I did it or not that's important, but whether people believed I did it".

The tour lasted for a year, and could be described as a piece of performance art, as he demonstrated visibly the concepts of aestheticism about which he was speaking.

Answer: Constance Lloyd

Despite his flamboyance, which might be associated with homosexuality, Wilde had several strong relationships with woman, including three of the four names listed.

Florence Balcombe was a childhood sweetheart, whose marriage to Bram Stoker in 1878 was declared by Wilde to have broken his heart, and confirmed his decision to return to London rather than staying in Dublin. Wilde met Lillie Langtry in 1877; they became close friends as she introduced him to London society, and he tutored her in Latin. Vyvyan Holland was actually Oscar's second son with Constance. The first, Cyril, was born in 1885, and Vyvyan's birth in 1886 is seen by biographers as marking the start of the breakdown of his marriage, as he found her unattractive sexually following the birth. They led increasingly separate lives, but never divorced. Following his conviction in 1895, she changed her name (and that of their sons) to Holland, and moved to Switzerland in an attempt to distance herself from him

In his 1891 short story collection 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories', Wilde wrote, "Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood." I suspect that Constance might well have countered that the same applies to men.

Answer: Robert Ross

Ross met Wilde in 1886, and they soon began an affair, although it was quite a discreet matter, unlike what happened when Lionel Johnson introduced Wilde to his cousin, Lord Alfred Douglas, in 1891. Their intimacy led quickly to a sexual affair, one that was conducted with far less discretion than the laws of the time called for. Douglas initiated him into the world of gay prostitution, and ensnared Wilde in the hostile feud between himself and his father, the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, the boxing rules guy). Beardsley and Whistler were leading lights of aestheticism, along with Wilde.

Perhaps Wilde was considering this period of his life when he had Lord Darlington say, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." This line, from the 1892 play 'Lady Windemere's Fan', follows another character saying, "That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good." Darlington says women find all men to be bad, someone one argues that everyone he knows (except one) is good, and Darlington offers his opinion.

Answer: James McNeill Whistler

During the 1880s, Wilde and Whistler were close friends - or maybe frenemies would be a more appropriate description, as they vied to exceed each other in brilliance, and are reputed to have stolen each other's wittiest words. According to Herbert Vivian, a mutual friend, one evening at dinner Whistler made a clever comment, to which Wilde responded by saying he wished he had said it. Whistler had a chance to vent the animosity he felt in the relationship by replying, "You will, Oscar, you will." When this was published as part of an article alleging that Wilde stole most of his epigrams from others, Wilde ended his friendship with Vivian, and the relationship with Whistler never really recovered.

This incident is referenced in a 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' skit (Season 3, Episode 39) which features Oscar Wilde (Graham Chapman), George Bernard Shaw (Michael Palin) and James McNeill whistler (John Cleese) competing to impress the Prince of Wales (Terry Jones) in a room of sycophants who oooh and aaah appropriately as the wit flies.

Wilde had some pithy comments to make about other writers. Of Rudyard Kipling, he wrote that, "he revealed life by splendid flashes of vulgarity". He clearly did not enjoy reading the work of Henry James, saying that "he wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty".

Answer: his incarceration

In 1895, Oscar Wilde unwisely brought a defamation suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, for publicly calling him a sodomite. He lost the case because the defense successfully used the truth defense against libel. This led to Wilde's arrest and conviction for gross indecency, and his subsequent incarceration for just under two years, between May 1895 and May 1897. His time was spent in several different institutions: Newgate Prison, Pentonville Prison, Wandsworth Prison and finally Reading Gaol. He was there when Charles Thomas Wooldridge was convicted of murdering his wife, and subsequently hanged. This was the spur that led to the writing of 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' after his release.

The poem includes the well-known line, "Yet each man kills the thing he loves", as Wilde compares the convicted killer's suffering to that of all prisoners (and, by extension, his own). It was originally published anonymously, citing the author as C33 (Wilde's cell number). Only after it had gained widespread acclaim and success did the publishers affix Wilde's name to it.

A portion of this poem was used for the epitaph on his tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery:
"And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn."

Answer: Paris, France

He left England for the European continent on the day he was released from Reading Gaol in 1897. Using the name Sebastian Melmoth, he lived in poverty (having lost all his money as a result of the lost defamation trial in 1895), with his estranged wife sending him a small weekly stipend (on the proviso that he was not to come anywhere near her or their sons).

His final residence was a furnished room at the Hotel d'Alsace on rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was visited there by a friend named Claire de Pratz, who was interviewed in 1929 by Léon Guillot de Saix for a newspaper article titled 'Souvenirs Inédits Sur Oscar Wilde' ('Unpublished Memories About Oscar Wilde'). In that interview, she described his room, and how bitterly he complained about ending his days in such squalor, after a life spent pursuing beauty. Since the interview was in French, Wilde's often-quoted 'last words' were her translation of them into French nearly 30 years later, so you will see a lot of variations on the quote. " - 'You see, my dear child,' he said to me, 'there is a duel to the death between me and my wallpaper. One or the other of us has to go. It will be my wallpaper or me.'"