Oscar Wilde

“There is only one genius in England—and they have put him in jail.” That startling verdict opens Edgar Saltus’s portrait of Oscar Wilde, a man who could turn a dinner-table jest into an omen.

Writing in the 1910s, Saltus looks back on the Wilde he met in New York and London: the theatrical wit at Delmonico’s, then the husband and father in Tite Street who protested that respectability did not suit him. Wilde dazzles with epigrams, sings of a king who lets his people starve, and gives his overcoat to a shivering stranger; beneath the comedy, Saltus senses a destiny sharpening its claws. His account follows the uneasy passage from celebrated brilliance toward public peril, asking whether Wilde’s genius could protect him from the world—or from himself. What did that sudden flicker of dread mean?

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