Oscar Wilde | Biography, Books, & Facts - Britannica

Early life and education

Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, William Wilde, was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee), was a nationalist poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore who wrote under the name Speranza. Wilde was one of three children. His elder brother, Willie, became a journalist, and his younger sister, Isola, died of a fever when she was 10. As a child, Wilde was baptized a Roman Catholic at his mother’s behest, despite his family’s affiliation with the Anglican church; presumably, this act signified his mother’s rejection of the Protestant landlord class and its values, since Wilde received no further education in the Catholic faith.

After attending Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College Dublin (1871–74) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honors. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter’s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater’s urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d’art, resulted in his famous remark, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!”

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