‘A Wilde Idea’ from Punch, or the London Charivari

9 July, 1892

Storage Journal AP101 P8

London: Published at the Office, 85 Fleet Street

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.