oscar wilde letter to bosie de profundis

When he was a child swathed in irons to hold him together it used to make me sick to look at him and think that he could be called my son.' None more so than Alfred, although his other son, Percy, was described by his father as a 'sicked-up looking creature, as if he had come up the wrong way. He was a vicious man who damned his family to misery. Murray reminds us what a monster the Marquess was. Indeed, it increasingly seems as though it was both protagonists' heterosexuality which proved their downfall.īosie had the added burden of genetic instability to cope with. Yet he would turn both straight and Catholic post-Wilde. An early experimenter with his own sex, Douglas came to Magdalen as the leader of 'the cause', a campaigner by default. Beloved of Wilde, betrayed by Wilde, betrayer of Wilde, Douglas was a man-boy who played on his charm until it ran out, then raged against Fate for that mortal fact.Īfter a colourful introduction to the 'black Douglases', Murray's well-researched account soon has us in the thick of the affair, and by telling it from Douglas's point of view, the author gives us an illuminating new angle, especially on Bosie's sexuality.

Douglas Murray's rehabilitation of his subject is a brave attempt to redeem a character immured in the calumny of legend. I'm afraid it's an idea which might occur more than once to the reader wading through incident after paranoid incident of hurt, reproach, libel suit and vicious sonnet in Bosie's life story, all employed by this 'golden boy' in the relentless pursuit of his own ends.

Oscar wilde letter to bosie de profundis