Oscar Wilde is known today for his satirical wit, but he maintained a lifelong interest in political affairs — one which would lead him to Irish nationalism, women’s suffrage and the fight against capitalism.
Wilde lived a full life, albeit a short one. Born in October 1854 at Dublin’s Westland Row, but raised primarily at nearby Merrion Square, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was the son of two of the great eccentrics—and intellects—of nineteenth-century Dublin. His father, William Wilde, was a pioneering surgeon and medical authority, who accepted a Knighthood in Dublin Castle, the home of British rule on the island of Ireland. By comparison, his mother Jane Wilde spent much of her life seeking to break that connection with Britain. A folklorist, poet and essayist, she wrote under the pen-name Speranza, the Italian word for hope.
The Nation and Young Ireland
The household in which Wilde was raised was one of intense political discussion, encouraged by Speranza who saw the home as something of a political salon. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett was invited by Speranza to come ‘explain what female liberty means’, in a city where the question of women’s suffrage failed to gain the same traction as on the neighbouring island for some decades.
As a poet, Speranza’s output appeared in the pages of The Nation, a seperatist newspaper aligned with the Young Ireland movement. The title—Young Ireland, and thus the Young Irelanders—was a bestowed reference to the emerging national-republican movements sweeping the continent in the 1840s, in particular Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy.
A break with the conservative constitutional nationalism of Daniel O’Connell, the Young Irelanders heralded the Second French Revolution with the observation that ‘dynasties and thrones are not half so important as workshops, farms and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and thrones, and even provisional governments, are good for anything exactly in proportion as they secure fair play, justice, and freedom to those who labour.’ The movement led an abortive insurrection in 1848 against the backdrop of famine and starvation, Speranza’s poetry encouraging ‘Fainting forms, hunger-stricken’ into revolt.
Speranza, later quoted by James Connolly in the pages of Labour in Irish History, frequently hosted veterans of the Young Ireland movement in the family home, Wilde later recalling that ‘with regards those men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a Catholic child is the saints of the cathedral.’
A Different Kind of Separatism: Wilde in America
Wilde’s comments on the Young Irelanders were made during a speaking tour of the United States in 1881, the young poet embarking on a journey across the country speaking on aestheticism, but discovering that audiences were instead drawn by the chance to hear Speranza’s son.