Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts, imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.

In the aftermath of his trials for “gross indecency” at the Old Bailey in 1895, Wilde was bankrupted, his plays removed from the West End stage and his name erased from all public discussion except as a codename for “unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort” – or gay men, as we would now call them. 

Wilde’s London trial was paralleled by a number of high-profile cases in which men who were found to have had relationships with other men were also imprisoned. These included the Dublin Castle scandal of 1884, when a number of men working in the Castle administration were tried for having homosexual relations. Papers from the case include a number of letters that police seized to help secure conviction, letters that reveal touching evidence of a lively network of friends and lovers in  Dublin at that time, an underground culture of men who loved other men.