Oscar Wilde an icon of his times

To mark the 100th anniversary of Oscar Wilde's death tomorrow, JOHN WALSH presents the A-Z of the writer and aesthete who defined decadence.

A is for Aestheticism. The belief that there is no higher value than beauty and that the cultivation of beautiful things and experiences is the essence of civilisation. Oscar Wilde took up the idea after moving into elegant rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, and came to embody it. Though no oil painting, he believed that to dress, think, speak and behave with a sense of beauty was morally imperative. Later he decided that beauty had nothing to do with morals.

B is for Aubrey Beardsley. The former insurance clerk whose black-inked, cruel-faced, weirdly-robed and sexually on-for-it figures in the illustrations to Wilde's Salome were the perfect expression of fin-de-siecle decadence.

C is for Cadogan Hotel. At No 75 Sloane St, London SW1, the Gethsemane-like scene of Wilde's downfall. On April 5, 1895, he was forced to abandon his libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury. With the press gleefully reporting the sensational exchanges at the trial, Wilde was urged by friends to leave the country. Instead he went to the Cadogan and sat all day in Room 53 drinking hock-and-seltzers with his pal Robbie Ross.

D is for Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. Whose relationship with Wilde was disastrous but sustained to the end. Pouting, aristocratic, sulky and rude, Bosie would have benefited from a good slap early in life; but Wilde loved him. There was, apparently, little sexual hanky-panky between them. Bosie didn't fancy the fat and increasingly puffy Wilde, patronised him as a bourgeois and wasn't keen on sodomy.

E is for The Importance of Being Earnest. Generally held to be Wilde's finest play. W. H. Auden described it as the perfect example of a "verbal opera."

F is for William Frith whose painting, Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy gave Wilde his iconic status as talker, thinker, explainer and hang-on-his-every-word impresario of art.

G is for Dorian Gray. The gilded youth in Wilde's gothic/aesthetic extravaganza The Picture of Dorian Gray, who never ages, while the picture in his attic takes on all the lineaments of cruelty, selfishness and vice perpetrated by its human subject.

H is for Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson and number one torch-bearer.

I is for Ireland where he spent the first 20 of his 46 years. At Trinity College, Dublin, he was useless at sport but a brilliant classical scholar.

J is for Japanese china. Wilde acquired it at Oxford. It was blue and white, and not terribly exciting but, in one inspired phrase, he used it to focus the inchoate thinking of the Aesthetic movement.

K is for Kiss. That which sealed his fate. In court, cross-examined by Edward Carson, he was doing fine until he was asked if had kissed one of a number of working-class minors. "Certainly not," he said. "He was far too ugly."

L is for Lily, which he allegedly carried through the London streets. Actually, Wilde denied having done so, but was gratified that he'd made the world believe he had.

M is for "Sebastian Melmoth." The nom de plume Wilde adopted on leaving Reading Jail. It's from the novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin, which he revered. Maturin was his maternal great-uncle.

N is for Newdigate Prize, the Oxford poetry award Wilde won in 1879 with Ravenna, despite its awful, glutinous iambics.

O is for Oxford. Where Wilde spent four years, at Magdalen College, changing from a geeky-looking cove to a floppy-haired, floppy-tied, teapot-stanced "bard of beauty."

P is for Patience. Gilbert and Sullivan's sparkling caricature of the Aesthetic movement, in which the figure of Bunthorne is clearly Wilde.

Q is for the Marquess of Queensbury, inventor of the rules of boxing, father of Lord Alfred Douglas and spittle-flecked hater of Wilde for seducing his son from the path of manliness. He was, by all accounts, a nasty, crude, brutal, shouting, coarse and staggeringly insensitive man who once introduced his mistress to his wife and proposed they try a threesome.

R is for Reading Gaol where Wilde was incarcerated for two years with hard labour.

S is for Speranza, as Wilde's mother was known. Born Joan Francesca Elgee, she was built on generous lines and had an impetuous, romantic nature.

T is for 16 Tite St in Chelsea, where Wilde lived after his marriage to Constance Lloyd.

U is for the United States. Where, in 1881, he conducted the most triumphant transatlantic author tour since the heyday of Dickens, lecturing on the "English Renaissance" to Harvard students in knee-breeches and dandy velvets and advising Californian frontier scouts on tasteful home decor.

V is for Vera, or the Nihilists, which was Wilde's first play. Set in medieval Russia, it features among the dramatis personae Tsar Ivan the Terrible and masked conspirators. Just before it was to be staged, the non-fictional Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and it was thought insensitive to the royal family to stage a drama that clearly favoured the insurgents.

W is for Sir William Wilde, Oscar's father. Officially the Surgeon-Oculist-in-Ordinary to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, he was a shocking piece of work - a scruffy, hirsute, hard-drinking womaniser who fathered several illegitimate children.

X is for X-rated. Rehearsals of the London production of Salome in 1891 were halted when the Lord Chamberlain's office banned the play. Not because it was decadent, but because some forgotten statute prohibited the representation of Biblical characters on the English stage. Also for the infamous eXplosion of diarrhoea with which Wilde ended his life.

Y is for Yellow Book, the "Illustrated Quarterly" that epitomised the soul of the 1890s, from its sickly cover tint to the short-lived reign of its first art director, Aubrey Beardsley. Amazingly, Wilde never had anything published in it; he was shut out by the dual animosity of Beardsley and the editor John Lane (who published Salome).

Z is for the zeitgeist which Wilde embodied - the fag-end of Victorianism, the fascination with surfaces, the institutionalised hypocrisy, the capacity for outrage. Wilde revelled in his wider identity, even though it destroyed him in the end. "I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age," he wrote in De Profundis."I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myths and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."