DON GONYEA, HOST:
Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. Those are Oscar Wilde's words. He was, of course, a 19th century Irish poet, playwright and author. But being himself, a gay man in Victorian England, landed him in prison, and he was stripped of one of his most treasured possessions - his library card. This week, the British Library made amends. NPR's Lauren Frayer reports from London.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oscar Wilde, the brilliantly successful playwright whose wicked, witty quips are still today's most popular epigrams.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Oscar Wilde was the man about town in 1890s London, author of the bestselling novel "The Picture Of Dorian Gray," the stage comedy "The Importance Of Being Earnest," and so many witty one-liners, like only dull people are brilliant at breakfast, and the truth is rarely pure and never simple. He poked fun with his prose but clashed in his own life with conservative norms of the Victorian era.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: When a century and a reign were approaching their end.
FRAYER: In 1895, an aristocrat accused him of sodomy, a crime at the time, and Wilde found himself at the center of a celebrity trial.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Did any improprieties ever take place between you and Mr. Parker?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Oscar Wilde) None whatsoever.
FRAYER: Those are actors voicing the transcript for a BBC documentary of the legal proceedings, where details of Wilde's personal life came out - cross-dressers, male prostitutes. One newspaper at the time called it one of the most sensational events in the criminal annals of England. It all ended in a conviction for Wilde of gross indecency and prison time with hard labor.
MERLIN HOLLAND: You have to understand that when I was a young man, homophobia in England was still alive and well.
FRAYER: Merlin Holland is nearly 80, and he's Oscar Wilde's grandson. Wilde married a woman and had two children, one of whom was Holland's father. He recalls getting a call from the British library a few years ago.
HOLLAND: Somebody was burrowing around in the archives, and they discovered that when Oscar Wilde had been convicted and been sent to prison, they'd canceled his library card, so they said, uh-oh. The British Museum was homophobic back then.
FRAYER: It was the British Museum's Reading Room, precursor to the British library, and it was actually just policy that any conviction triggered the cancellation of your library card, no matter the nature of the crime. But for a man of letters like Wilde, his grandson says it must have added insult to injury if, that is, he even knew about it. He was in prison when this happened.
HOLLAND: After justice had denied him access to society, for a library to deny him access to books would have probably broken his heart. So it's just as well he didn't know.
FRAYER: On what would have been Wilde's 171st birthday, the British Library recently reissued that canceled library card...
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CAROL BLACK: And to address this obvious injustice.
FRAYER: ...To his grandson, Merlin Holland, at a ceremony in London. Here's Dame Carol Black, chair of the British Library's board.
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BLACK: Merlin, on behalf of your grandfather, please, will you accept the...
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FRAYER: Now, Oscar Wilde's newly reissued library card does have his picture on it, and so his grandson acknowledges that he can't use it.
HOLLAND: Unless I part my hair in the middle and grow it long and start wearing velvet knickerbockers, they won't allow me in (laughter).
FRAYER: But he says he will keep this card as a memento to his grandfather who died in 1,900 in a Paris hotel room with particularly garish wallpaper. Legend has it, Oscar Wilde's last words were, my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death, and one or the other of us has got to go. And that's where he died at age 46 in exile. Lauren Frayer, NPR News, London. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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