Abstract
Irish novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was born into an intellectual and patriotic family. His mother, Jane, Lady Wilde (1821-1896), was a popular poet and Irish nationalist; his father, William Wilde (1815-1876) was an accomplished medical doctor and collector of Irish folktales. Instilled with the literary and political influences of his parents, Wilde established a reputation for himself as an intellectual and aesthete at the end of the nineteenth century. Here, the Punch cartoonist, John Bernard Partridge (1861-1945), imagines Wilde in soldier’s uniform, poking fun at Wilde’s national identity, the troubled production history of his French play Salome (1891), and English censorship.
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