Oscar Wilde House

The Georgian home where Oscar Wilde grew up

In 1855, a noted ocular surgeon from Roscommon named Sir William Wilde—some of whose surgical techniques are still in use today—and his elephantine wife Jane—a liberal firebrand and literary hostess who wrote stirringly bad but earnest revolutionary poetry under the pseudonym Speranza—moved from No. 21 Westland Row two blocks south to fashionable Georgian address of No. 1 Merrion Square with their son Willie and his baby brother, Oscar Wilde.

The family continued to live here throughout young Oscar’s education—first nearby at Trinity College (where he came in first in his class’s first year, won a scholarship in his second year, and rounded out his Trinity education in his third year of winning the Berkeley gold-medal in Greek), then at Magdalen College at Oxford.

It was at Oxford that Wilde begin to develop his decadent aesthetic, rapier wit, and literary style.

He returned home to Dublin for a spell in 1878, only to find that his childhood sweetheart, Florence Balcombe (yes, a girl), had gone and become engaged to his an buddy and fellow Trinitonian, the very man who had recommended Wilde for membership in the University Philosophical Society (the world’s oldest student debate scoiety and paper reading club)—another Irish scribbler named Bram Stoker.

Oscar Wilde left Dublin for London, and never looked back—although there is a fun polychrome statue of him in the lovely park on Merrion Square, reclining louchely on a boulder facing his childhood home, crafted from precious granites, green nephrite jade, white jadeite, and thulite (a kind of riotous extravagance of which we can always assume the famously flamboyant Oscar would approve).

Oscar’s parents suffered from similar kinds of sex scandals and financial difficulties that would soon plague their son. Oscar’s father died in 1876 practically penniless, and Jane was forced to leave No. 1 Merrion Square in 1879, following her sons to London where she lived with Oscar’s older brother, Willie, in relative poverty, writing for fashion magazines and publishing books about Irish folklore, a passion she had shared with her late husband.

The Merrion Square house fell on hard times as well, eventually subdivided into small apartments, until finally being boarded up in 1971. Luckily, the house and its two neighbors were purchased by the American College Dublin, and in 1994 they were able to reopen it as a learning center and memorial to Oscar Wilde, visitable by appointment.

(Incidentally: Westland Row forms the eastern boundary of the Trinity College campus, and the house at No. 21 Westland Row, where Oscar was born, is now the college’s Oscar Wilde Centre, which offers postgraduate degrees in creative writing.)

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