The British Museum in London. Photo / Unsplash
More than a century after his death, Oscar Wilde is posthumously receiving something taken from him long ago: his library card.
On June 15, 1895, the Irish poet and playwright was excluded from the British Museum’s reading room, the precursor to the British Library.
The museum revoked his access after Wilde’s trial and conviction for gross indecency, a Victorian-era crime used to punish men for relationships with other men.
Wilde was already imprisoned when the library decided to bar him.
“So he wouldn’t have known about it, which was probably as well,” Merlin Holland, a grandson of Wilde’s, said in a statement issued by the library.
“I think it would have just added to his misery to feel that one of the world’s great libraries had banned him from books just as the law had banned him from daily life.”
Holland predicted in a phone interview that his grandfather would have been pleased with the library’s reinstatement of his card, known as a reader pass, even if it was only symbolic.
“It’s a delightful gesture of reconciliation, I suppose,” said Holland, who has just finished writing a book about Wilde.
“Moreover it’s the gesture of a cultural institute to a man of letters, which is the most important thing to realise.”
Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison after the trial, which scandalised Victorian society and shredded Wilde’s reputation.
He was held in a correctional facility in Reading, England, which served as the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
After his release from prison, Wilde went to France — where it was not illegal to be gay — and lived out the final few years of his life in exile. He died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46.
His front-page obituary in the New York Times on December 1, 1900, reported that Wilde had died from meningitis in an “obscure hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris”.
The British Library said this summer that it would restore the card, announcing the decision on the anniversary of the day Wilde was excluded from the library, which now falls during Pride Month.
Last week’s event at the library, where Holland was to be handed a Reader Pass bearing Wilde’s name, coincided with Wilde’s birthday.
The British Library has a large collection of Wilde’s works, including De Profundis, the 50,000-word love letter that he wrote in jail to his paramour, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.
The library’s collection also includes manuscripts of some of Wilde’s best-known plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband and Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“It’s yet another recognition by the British establishment that Oscar Wilde was poorly treated,” Darcy Sullivan, a spokesperson for the Oscar Wilde Society, said.
“It’s just another sign of how much society has caught up with Oscar Wilde and with sexuality and with ideas about transgression.”
His conviction and imprisonment ruined Wilde’s life, Sullivan said. “It took a while for his reputation to be revived.”
Restoring his access to the library — even if only symbolic — was another way of welcoming him back into modern life, Sullivan added.
Most days, Wilde’s spirit still looms over London and his words are spoken by contemporary actors most nights on a stage in the West End.
A production of The Importance of Being Earnest starring Ncuti Gatwa is running to January.
And a limited run of Salome, a one-act play that Wilde wrote in 1891 and was banned in Britain at the time, closed this month.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Claire Moses
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