Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in the city of Dublin, Ireland. He was born into and lived in the prejudiced and etiquette-ridden years of the Late Victorian Age. Actions and language of the individuals were required to conform to rigid rules of behavior and ethics. Even the canons of art and literature were laid down and had to be adhered to. It was this state of affairs that Wilde made it his mission in life to break down, and it is a remarkable tribute to his character that he largely succeeded in doing so (Holland 5).
             Oscar Wilde was the second son of the famous eye surgeon William Robert Wilde and Jane Frances Wilde, more commonly known by her literary name as Speranza. Jane was noted for collecting Irish folk stories in the western hills in the late 1870s (Jacobus 753). A brother, William Robert Kingsbury Wills Wilde, born September 26, 1852, preceded Wilde. He was followed by a sister, Isola Francesca Emily Wilde who was born on April 2, 1857. The Wilde household was an eccentric, sometimes scandalous, but unquestionably learned environment in which to grow up. At this period Dublin was a city whose cultural interests were a mixture of the cosmopolitan and the parochial. Wilde benefited from the best that Irish education had to offer. He attended the famous public school Portora Royal, and then he won a scholarship to Trinity College in 1871.
             Wilde left Trinity bestowed with honors and took a Classical scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford. It was there that powerful scholars such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Benjamin Jowett impressed him. Their classical studies attempted to reconcile the Socratic method with Christianity and modern philosophy (Stokes 8). Also at Oxford, Wilde dropped his Irish brogue and became in contact with the Aesthetic Movement. He proclaimed himself a "Professor of Aesthetics," and adopted a bizarre dress code. The purpose of his dress was to start...