Oscar Wilde

On this episode

About this episode

Melvyn Bragg examines Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes. In February 1895 Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers, he was known on both sides of the Atlantic, he was feted in London society and celebrated in the West End where An Ideal Husband continued to play to packed houses as The Importance of Being Earnest opened to ecstatic reviews. “The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world” he is reputed to have said, and he seemed on course to do just that. But in April that year he was arrested for the crime of ‘gross indecency’ and his swift decent from omnipotence began; it ended five years later, when exiled and humiliated he died, famously ‘beyond his means’, in a…