Oscar wilde how many children

One question remains, did Oscar Wilde have children? Constance and Oscar had their first child Cyril a year after their marriage in A year later, Constance gave birth to her second son Vyvyan Wilde, later Vyvyan Holland on the 3 rd of November, Vyvyan remembered his father Oscar Wilde being a loving father.

Despite Vyvyan recalling a happy childhood with parents Oscar and Constance Wilde, both Vyvyan and Cyril were separated from their father after his imprisonment for gross indecency in This was during a period when it was illegal for being found to be homosexual. Wilde was sentenced two years in prison and underwent hard labor during this period. He was released two years later, but by this time it was too late. She emigrated to Switzerland with her sons to start a new life.

Although Wilde and Constance never got divorced, Cyril and Vyvyan would never see their father again. They started a new life in Switzerland with their mother, now Constance Holland. After Constance moved her sons to Switzerland, she placed them in a boarding school in Germany. Vyvyan did not enjoy his time at boarding school, his mother moved him to Monaco to a Jesuit school.

He would later attend a public school named Stonyhurtst College in England. Later in life, in , Vyvyan would study law at Cambridge University. Spoilt, selfish and vastly in love with what he believed was his own genius, Bosie the name derived from Lady Queensberry's pet-name of "Boysie" for her third son entered the Wildes' life in Constance, immersed in spiritualism she did herself no favours in that murky world by reporting to Oscar on the secret rituals involved in joining the ludicrous Order of the Golden Dawn , was often absent from home.

Oscar, while addressing his wife as "the great lamp" of a cathedral shrine, made ominous reference — in that same moving dedication of his second collection of children's stories — to "individual side chapels" dedicated to "other saints". Warning had been given. By the summer of , Bosie Douglas had usurped Constance's place. But following Wilde's break with his expensive, tempestuous and untalented young lover Bosie's translation from the French of Wilde's Salome was so poor that it had to be rewritten by the embarrassed author , it was Constance who succumbed to Lord Alfred's pleas.

In February , she invited him to return. All too well known is the inglorious part played by Bosie in Wilde's vertiginous downfall, in , at the height of his fame. It was Bosie who urged Wilde to prosecute Lord Queensberry for the infamous "posing Somdomite" card left, without an envelope, at Wilde's club. It was Bosie's careless gifts of suits, their pockets still filled with incriminating letters, that linked Wilde to the world of rent-boys into which his young lover had led him.

It was Bosie who hurt Constance's reputation most, by declaring her responsible for the failure of Wilde's marriage. Moyle is at her best in describing the tragic final years. Constance, often presented as a hard and unforgiving woman, is more convincingly portrayed here as a valiant wife. She visited Wilde in prison. She paid his expenses when he left it. She planned, as he did, for a reunion.

When Bosie "that dreadful person" resurfaced with more appetising invitations, Constance accused Wilde only of being "weak as water". She was among the first to praise The Ballad of Reading Gaol ". Constance died in exile, aged Wilde he died two years later, in laid flowers on her grave in Genoa. Douglas, briefly imprisoned himself for libelling Winston Churchill, continued to diminish her. Outliving them all, he died of heart failure in Lancing, in Moyle's account, the first to draw on more than of Constance's unpublished letters, is delightful, sad, and entirely convincing; her last chapters reduced this hardened reader to tears.