It’s Easter Sunday. The going down of the sun on Easter Sunday.
Let’s begin with a strange little flourish of absurdity.
Some old calendars, we’re told,
put the biblical Flood on this day, April 5th.
Forty days.
Forty nights.
The heavens opening.
The waters rising.
Everything swept away.
Well.
If ever there was a flood in a human life,
it was the flood that came for Oscar Wilde.
On this very day, April 5th, 1895.
Yes, here in London.
At the Old Bailey,
Wilde’s libel case collapsed.
And with it,
so did the life he had built.
Not all at once,
not in one neat theatrical crash.
It was worse than that.
It was the first great crack in the dam.
The moment the waters came through.
The moment when the brilliant drawing-room comedy that was Oscar Wilde’s London existence suddenly turned into catastrophe.
And what a London story this is.
Because Wilde was not just anybody.
He was not just a writer.
He was, by then,
one of the most famous men in London.
He was the man of the moment. Novelist,
playwright,
wit,
lion of society,
peacock,
performer,
talker,
conjuror.
He had conquered the town.
Think of it.
The author of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The man whose plays were packing theatres.
The dazzling dinner-party presence.
The great epigram machine in human form.
Oscar Wilde did not so much enter a room as occupy it.
And then came disaster
in the form of a marquess.
The Marquess of Queensberry. Father of Lord Alfred Douglas – Bosie –
Wilde’s lover.
Queensberry was a rough customer, all belligerence and bluster and upper-class thuggery.
A man who,
when he wanted to make trouble, did not send a discreet note on scented paper.
He came with a cudgel.
Socially speaking,
a very large cudgel.
He left a card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club
accusing him, in effect, of sodomy. Misspelt,
crudely written,
but perfectly clear in intention.
A slap in the face.
A public insult.
A challenge.
And Wilde,
against the advice of people who knew better,
decided to sue him for criminal libel.
It was a catastrophic mistake.
You can see why he did it.
Wilde had spent his whole life creating Oscar Wilde.
The style,
the pose,
the brilliance,
the authority.
To let such an accusation stand must have felt impossible.
But the moment he brought that action,
he stepped into a trap.
Because in a libel case like this, Queensberry’s defence did not have to prove he was a pleasant fellow. He had to prove that the charge was substantially true.
And once that became the issue, Wilde’s own life was put on trial.
Enter Edward Carson.
Now there’s a twist the playwrights would have rejected as too neat.
Carson and Wilde –
both born in Dublin.
Both born in 1854.
Both Trinity College men.
Both brilliant with words.
Two Irishmen.
Same vintage.
Same intellectual world.
Facing each other across a London courtroom.
Only one of them is going to walk out intact.
And Carson is very, very good.
That is the thing Wilde either does not see or sees too late.
Carson is not there to be dazzled. He is there to dismantle.
At first Wilde is magnificent.
Of course he is.
He sparkles.
He parries.
He turns questions into performances.
You can almost hear the courtroom leaning toward him.
But this is not a West End first night.
This is a courtroom.
And wit is not body armour.
Carson shifts the ground.
From literature to life.
From paradox to particulars.
From what Wilde wrote…
to what Wilde did.
Now the temperature drops.
Names are introduced.
Young men.
Meetings.
Gifts.
Rooms.
Encounters.
And that is when the flood really begins.
Because London can forgive many things –
but not that.
Not when it is dragged out into the open,
named,
itemised,
nailed down.
Wilde had thought he was prosecuting Queensberry.
In fact,
he had invited the law,
the press,
and public opinion to prise open his private life and examine it under a harsh white light.
And on April 5th,
Wilde’s case collapsed.
That is the date.
That is the moment.
Not yet the prison sentence.
Not yet the full ruin.
But the turning point.
The dam breaking.
Within hours,
everything is moving against him.
Queensberry is acquitted.
The evidence is passed to the authorities.
And soon Wilde himself will be arrested.
That is how fast the waters rise.
And London,
needless to say, watches.
London always watches.
The clubs.
The theatres.
The newspapers.
The foyers and supper rooms and private boxes.
The same city that had laughed at his lines now leans in for the spectacle of his fall.
And that is part of what makes it so painful.
Wilde understood London better than almost anyone.
Its surfaces.
Its hypocrisies.
Its love of performance.
Its appetite for scandal.
He knew the jungle.
But he couldn’t outwit the hunters.
And yet –
here is the final twist.
Queensberry wins.
Victorian England destroys him.
But Wilde outlives them all.
Not in body.
That poor body is finished within five years.
But in language.
In theatre.
In legend.
The judges are dust.
The lawyers are footnotes.
The marquess is a bad-tempered anecdote.
Oscar Wilde still gets the last line.
And that, perhaps,
is the only dry ground in the whole unhappy story.
April 5th, 1895.
The day the waters came in.
And tomorrow?
We head south.
Way south of the Old Bailey.
Way south of Mayfair drawing rooms and West End polish.
Into heat.
Into noise.
Into colour.
Into a place where London doesn’t perform –
it pulses.
Brixton Market.
A riot of voices.
A carnival of smells.
A street-long feast.
Plantain and saltfish.
Coffee and chatter.
Music leaking out of doorways. Traders who’ve seen it all and will tell you so.
It’s London.
But not the London you think you know.
London calling.
London Walks at your service.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
See you tomorrow.