The Complete Short Fiction

1854       Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wilde born (he added ‘Wills' in the 1870s) on 16 October at 21 Westland Row, Dublin.

1855       His family move to 1 Merrion Square in Dublin.

1857       Birth of Isola Wilde, Oscar's sister.

1858       Birth of Constance Mary Lloyd, Wilde's future wife.

1864       Wilde's father is knighted following his appointment as Queen Victoria's ‘Surgeon Oculist' the previous year. Wilde attends Portora Royal School, Enniskillen.

1867       Death of Isola Wilde.

1871–4   At Trinity College, Dublin, reading Classics and Ancient History.

1874–8   At Magdalen College, Oxford, reading Classics and Ancient History (‘Greats').

1875       Travels in Italy with his tutor from Dublin, J. P. Mahaffy.

1876       First poems published in Dublin University Magazine. Death of Sir William Wilde.

1877       Further travels in Italy, and in Greece.

1878       Wins the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in Oxford with ‘Ravenna'. Takes a double first from Oxford. Moves to London and starts to establish himself as a popularizer of Aestheticism.

1879       Meets Constance Lloyd.

1881       
Poems
published at his own expense; not well received critically.

1882       Lecture tour of North America, speaking on art, aesthetics and decoration. Revised edition of
Poems
published.

1883       His first play,
Vera; or, The Nihilists
performed in New York; it is not a success.

1884       Marries Constance Lloyd in London, honeymoon in Paris and Dieppe.

1885       Moves into 16 Tite Street, Chelsea. Cyril Wilde born.

1886       Vyvyan Wilde born. Meets Robert Ross, to become his lifelong friend and, in 1897, his literary executor. Ross might have been Wilde's first homosexual lover.

1887       Becomes the editor
of Lady's World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society
, and changes its name to
Woman's World
. Publication of ‘The Canterville Ghost' and ‘Lord Arthur Savil's Crime'.

1888       
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
published; on the whole well-received.

1889       ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison' (on the forger and poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright), ‘The Decay of Lying' (a dialogue in praise of artifice over nature and art over morality), ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.' (on the supposed identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets) all published.

1890       
The Picture of Dorian Gray
published in the July number of
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine
; fierce debate between Wilde and hostile critics ensues. ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism' (later revised and included in
Intentions
as ‘The Critic as Artist') published.

1891       Wilde's first meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie').
The Duchess of Padua
performed in New York. ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism' and ‘Preface to Dorian Gray' published in February and March in the
Fortnightly Review
. The revised and extended edition of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
published by Ward, Lock and Company in April.
Intentions
(collection of critical essays),
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
and
A House of Pomegranates
(fairy-tales) published.

1892       
Lady Windermere's Fan
performed at St James's Theatre, London (February to July).

1893       
Salomé
published in French.
A Woman of No Importance
performed at Haymarket Theatre, London.

1894       
Salome
published in English with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley; Douglas is the dedicatee.
The Sphinx
, a poem
with illustrations by Charles Ricketts, published.

1895       
An Ideal Husband
opens at Haymarket Theatre in January; it is followed by the hugely successful
The Importance of Being Earnest
at St James's Theatre in February. On 28 February Wilde returns to his club, the Albemarle, to find a card from Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accusing Wilde of ‘posing as a somdomite' (sodomite). Wilde quickly takes out an action accusing Queensberry of criminal libel. In April Queensberry appears at the Old Bailey and is acquitted, following a successful plea of justification on the basis that Wilde was guilty of homosexual behaviour. Wilde is immediately arrested, after ignoring his friends' advice to flee the country. In May he is tried twice at the Old Bailey, and on 25 May sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person'. In July he is sent to Wandsworth Prison. In November he is declared bankrupt, and shortly afterwards transferred to Reading Gaol.

1896       Death of Wilde's mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (‘Speranza').

1897       Wilde writes the long letter to Douglas that would be later entitled ‘De Profundis'. In May Wilde is released from prison, and sails for Dieppe by the night ferry. He never returns to Britain.

1898       
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
published pseudonymously as C.3.3, Wilde's cell-number in Reading Gaol. Wilde moves to Paris in February. Constance Wilde (who had by now changed her name to Holland) dies.

1899       Willie (b. 1852), Wilde's elder brother, dies.

1900       In January Queensberry dies. By July Wilde himself is very ill with a blood infection. On 29 November he is received into the Roman Catholic Church, and dies on 30 November in the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris.

1905       An abridged version of
De Profundis
, edited by Robert Ross, published.

1908       The
Collected Works
, edited by Robert Ross, are published.

This volume of Oscar Wilde's short fiction collects those stories originally published in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Most appeared first in periodicals and were then collected in three separate books:
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
(1888),
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
(1891) and
A House of Pomegranates
(1891). This volume prints in addition Wilde's ‘Poems in Prose' and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.' – a periodical essay, part-fiction and part-literary criticism, published in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
in 1889.
¹
These works are some of Wilde's earliest, written during his middle thirties when he was still trying to establish himself as a serious writer in the London literary world. Indeed, Wilde found his first volume of fiction,
The Happy Prince
, difficult to place; in 1888 he submitted the manuscript to Macmillan, one of the most distinguished literary publishers of the time. At Oxford Wilde knew a son of the family, George Macmillan, and he assiduously used this undergraduate connection to try to sell his early work to the firm. The report of Macmillan's anonymous reader, however, was less than favourable, and it contained what has proved to be one of the least perspicacious judgements in nineteenth-century literary history:

There is undoubtedly point and cleverness in the way in wh[ich] these stories are told. The writer has, no doubt, the literary knack – the point and finish. You feel at once the hand of the man who knows how to write. Two or three of the stories are very pretty, but I can hardly say as a whole that they have any striking imaginative brilliance – nor do I think that they would be likely to rush into marked popularity. They are pretty and bright, but they hardly strike into the reader's mind. They are good and respectable. Whether they are more than that, I doubt.
²