Then came a grueling schedule that took him all over the country (Salt Lake City, April 11) finally returning to New York City in October 1882.Two months later he sailed for England. To Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Baltimore and Boston, dropping, along the way, his Apollo Lodge attire. He wore the costume of the Oxford Masonic Apollo Lodge, which immediately grabbed his audience’s attention by its oddity: they had no idea of its origin. His first lecture, a week later, was, of course, sold out to the tune of $1211.00. What better publicity could there be for his American production than to invite the High Priest of Aestheticism to give a series of lectures American presenters wanted him to explain “The Beautiful.” Wilde arrived in New York on January 2, 1882, answering the customs officer’s question: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” The press hounded him and kept their London colleagues informed of his progress. Richard D’Oyly Carte not only ran the company presenting the opera on both sides of the pond, but also arranged lecture tours. Patience opened in New York in September, 1881, and was proving to be a great success there. ![]() No wonder Wilde could, that year, say to a friend: “I should never have believed, had I not experienced it, how easy it is to become the most prominent figure in society.” As it turned out, Vera was cancelled when certain authorities, including perhaps the Russian government, realized that Life (the recent assassination of Czar Alexander II – not to mention that of America’s President Garfield) was far too closely imitating Art (the play deals with a plot to assassinate a Czar in 1800). Patience concerns two poets rivaling for the love of the dairy-maid of the title along the way, Gilbert has great fun with the Aesthetic movement. He was becoming famous though: “It’s extraordinary how soon one gets known in London.” Poems was published in both England and America in 1881 a play, Vera, was announced for performance in December of that year while in April the latest opera by Gilbert and Sullivan opened. He wrote: essays, book reviews, poems he applied for various positions, including some fellowships at Oxford, but was turned down. In November he passed the Divinity examination and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, and shortly after that he was awarded a rare “double first” – first class honors in Latin and Greek. He also flirted, at times quite seriously, with converting to Catholicism. There he perfected his pose, begun in Trinity, as the High Priest of Aestheticism. (Many years later another great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, would attend the school.) There, Oscar proved to be a brilliant student of Latin and Greek the school awarded him a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin from there he went in 1874, again on scholarship, to Magdalen College at Oxford University. He was sent to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a town in the north-west of the country. 1, Merrion Square, probably the most fashionable address in the city. ![]() His father, Sir Willliam, was a noted Ear-Nose-Throat surgeon his mother’s nom de plume was Speranza and she hosted extravagant soirées in their Dublin home, No. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Ireland on October 16, 1854.
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