Oscar Wilde - Sheridan Morley

The story of Oscar Wilde has usually been told in terms of hubris - as the story of a child of the gods, lavishly endowed with every talent except that of restraint. This biography, however, argues that there is a more prosaic explanation of his theatrical triumphs and social collapse: Wilde was a child not of the gods, but of the Victorians, and his tragedy was that he allowed himself to remain one.;To understand what happened to Wilde it is important, Sheridan Morley asserts, to understand the climate in which he lived. By no means the cloistered, poetic hothouse in which early biographers were keen to place him, it was instead the commercial theatre and publishing world of 1890s London. A shrewd self-publicist with an eye for the headlines, Wilde had a journalist's sense of occasion, but he left behind him the mystery of how anyone with so well-developed a sense of his own image could have failed to see the trap he was preparing for himself.;In this illustrated reappraisal of Wilde, his work, his life and his times, Morley seeks to unravel the enigma that has fascinated many thoughout the century since his death.