Discover the Importance of Being Oscar Wilde with a Layover in Dublin

Did you know Irish author Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years then changed his name and exiled himself to France…all for being gay?! This is the Oscar Wilde, the one that wrote The Importance of Being Earnest (my favorite play!) and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I have to admit, I knew little about Wilde upon landing in Dublin, Ireland other than that he’s the author of my favorite play (sorry, Shakespeare!). I had a 20 hour layover in Dublin, Ireland (counting leaving and returning to the airport, and catching some zzzz’s) so I was determined to make the most of it by visiting three locations related to Wilde, all within walking distance from my hotel. So here’s how you too can essentially take a crash course in the importance of Being Oscar Wilde with a short layover in Dublin.

As Dublin is one of the most literary destination-filled cities I could possibly land in, I had to be judicious in using my time. Having only a few hours of actual sightseeing time, I’d made an itinerary ahead of time.

My Dublin Oscar Wilde Itinerary

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• Taxi to the hotel. Shower because I’d just flown 9 or so hours. Feel human again.
• Visit the Oscar Wilde House Museum
• See the famous Oscar Wilde sculpture in the park across the street from the museum
• Dinner at Kennedy’s Pub
• Return to the hotel. Sleep. Return to the airport.

Oscar Wilde House Museum

While I wasn’t in Dublin on the right day of the week to join one of the Wilde House guided tours, luckily the house is still open for self-guided visits the rest of the week. So I walked about ten minutes from the hotel to the museum, which had us coming up on it from the back. Perhaps it was the jet-lag beginning to set in, but I almost would have walked right by it! With banners in the window saying “American College Dublin”, at first I thought it was just a college building. It wasn’t until I focused in on the small sandwich board by the doorway, and the temporary-looking vinyl banner tied to the wrought iron rails out front, that I realized I had in fact come upon my destination.

Oscar Wilde’s parents were fairly well off socialites, and this townhouse had been theirs. This was the house Oscar lived in as a child. Luckily our tour started with a short film that provided us with a summary of the tumultuous life of the author so that we could put the rooms in the house that we would see next into context.

One of the rooms upstairs was a large spacious living room. This was the room where anybody who was anybody would come to be seen. Wilde’s mother held salons here and one of the frequent guests at these salons was none other than Bram Stoker! Yes, the author of Dracula. With that kind of influence in the house, is it any wonder Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is also a gothic thriller?

We also learned that when Stoker wanted to retreat from the hubbub of the salon, he would make his way downstairs to the library. Naturally, this room with its built-in glass fronted bookshelves became my instant favorite the moment I entered it. I could just imagine Stoker, perhaps with an arm on the fireplace mantle, having a discussion with young Oscar.

Although growing up in the lap of luxury, Wilde’s life wasn’t so easy. If you’ve read The Picture of Dorian Gray, you might suspect that the author was gay. However, had you met him as a young man, he would have left you in no doubt. Even though he did marry a woman and fathered a couple children with her. He spent little time with his family though, and more time running around with a particular young man.

Despite it being illegal to be homosexual in Britain at the time, Wilde and his also wealthy beau, a young man nicknamed Bosie, ran around Dublin and London together living loud and proud. Bosie, whose full title was Lord Alfred Douglas, unfortunately had a father who very much disapproved of his son besmirching the family name. Perhaps because of both their family’s standing and wealth, Wilde and his lover had been able to stay in fancy hotels, carouse through nights of endless drinking, and generally flaunt their relationship in public, that is until Wilde made a HUGE mistake. Bosie convinced Wilde to sue Bosie’s father for slander. At this point, authorities had no choice but to look into the matter, and of course they came up with loads of evidence that Wilde was gay. So in the most salacious trial of the century, Wilde was convicted of “sodomy” and “gross indecency” and jailed for two years. Bosie was not jailed due to not enough evidence, I assume this had something to do with his father’s wealth. I do think perhaps Wilde should have been smarter, or more careful, or less haughty, but it must have been so difficult being told not to express who he really was.

One of the most impactful rooms in the house museum was nearly empty. A black outline on the floor, taking only a fraction of the room, marked out the small footprint of the cell Wilde was jailed in. The other side of the room had white display cabinets with some of his works, like The Importance of Being Earnest, which had been a hit with audiences at the time. It was a strange juxtaposition seeing the literature bringing him fame just across from a representation of the prison cell which ultimately brought him fame in the worst way.

While Wilde sat in jail, his wife, with their two boys, moved to France and further distanced themselves from the shame by changing their last names to Holland. When Wilde was finally released from jail, he too exiled himself elsewhere in France, and began going by the pseudonym “Sebastian Melmoth,” and found Bosie again. I don’t know if Bosie and Wilde had run around Paris, rather than London originally, if they would have been spared the trial and Wilde’s jail time. But the whole story had me feeling very melancholy as I stood in Wilde’s childhood bedroom at the top of the house where I could see through the window the sculpture of him in the park just across the street. He was never able to return to the UK. He never knew that eventually his hometown would not only legalize being gay, but would embrace him as the celebrity author he is. I’m sure he never could have imagined that his childhood home would be preserved to celebrate him and there would be multiple life-size statues of him found throughout the city.

Oscar Wilde Sculpture in Merrion Square Park

Leaving the museum, I crossed the street and headed down the block towards the break in the iron fence providing entrance to the park in which I’d seen the sculpture from the upper floor window across the street. As I walked, two girls holding hands passed me on the sidewalk just where I could see Wilde’s statue vaguely through the fence and shrubbery behind them. I wondered if they realized the significance of being able to hold hands just here, or if they were perhaps doing it on purpose. It was the perfect gesture to the time period that had made Wilde’s life a living hell.

I’ve seen images of the famous Oscar Wilde Sculpture depicting the author relaxing on a rock, but suddenly being there in person was thrilling. This lifesize sculpture is stunning for several reasons. I realized that Wilde was an exceptionally tall man! And I’d read that the jacket of the sculpture was carved out of one piece of jade! The artistry is really quite amazing when you get up close. I stood there transfixed. It seemed unreal that I was standing here. It wasn’t my final destination for this trip, but the short layover had allowed me to make a brief stop at somewhere that had been on my bucket list but I didn’t think I would get to yet for quite some time.

Kennedy’s Pub

With a fog of jet-lag and hunger beginning to finally catch up with me, it was time to find dinner and the second life-size Oscar Wilde statue. Luckily it wasn’t far. The nearby Kennedy’s pub has a lifesize statue of Wilde sitting on a bench out front. I sat down next to the depiction of the author in bronze.

Just hours before, I could not have appreciated what it meant for this statue to be here. Now I understand the immensity of it. It’s not just a statue. It signifies Ireland’s decriminalization of homosexuality, which only happened in 1993! And the country followed up in 2015 by legalizing same sex marriage. And now tourists like me can take funny photos next to a statue of this brilliant writer.

As for Kennedy’s literary connections, not only did Oscar Wilde once drink there, but James Joyce frequented the pub as well. I sat down at a table near a wall with a plaque dedicated to James Joyce. As we were on our way to Paris, I’d just recently finished reading The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher. The book is about Sylvia Beach, her bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and the struggle she went through to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses. Thus I felt a little sad I hadn’t also had time to visit locations associated with Joyce during my layover. I definitely need to return to Dublin.

Also, just in case you’re wondering, of course my first inclination was to visit the famous Trinity College Library Long Room while in Dublin. Unfortunately, I learned from their website that due to a conservation project, the whole room was devoid of books, except for four shelves so you could “get an idea” of what the room might look like when the books are there. So naturally, I decided to skip the library this time.

By the time our food showed up, I nearly had fallen asleep on the table. Jet lag was finally kicking in. It was too bad our time in Dublin was up, but I was more excited now that we’d be visiting Paris later in the trip because it meant that I could pay a visit to the final resting place of the author who’d exiled himself from Ireland and never returned home.

Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

A couple weeks later I stood in Père Lachaise Cemetery at the tomb of Oscar Wilde. I am glad that in the end, his real name, rather than “Sebastian Melmoth”, is written in big bold letters across his tomb: OSCAR WILDE, and that his tomb is big and loud and proud like he was.

I was also somewhat surprised to find that the famous tomb has been cleaned of all the lipstick prints that it’s become known for and plexiglass panels now surround the monument to keep it clean. And as I stood there, one woman leaned in and kissed the plexiglass! And walking around to the back, I noticed closed condom packets thrown down between the glass and the tomb. I can only assume that Wilde would be thrilled at all this attention.

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