One hundred years ago, in the London of the elderly Queen Victoria, the trials of Oscar Wilde offered the court of public opinion its first opportunity to debate the ethics of homosexuality; unfortunately for Wilde, his trials offered the nation's legal system the same opportunity. Oscar Wilde-Novelist, poet, playwright, aesthete, reputed homosexual, enigma-was tried and convicted of practicing indecent acts and sentenced to two years of hard labor, dying less than three years after his release. Reading Wilde commemorates the centenary of the Wilde trials by returning to the many sites visited, and profoundly changed, by Oscar Wilde. The essays trace his powerful impact in the aesthetic, political, spiritual, and moral circles if late Victorian England.
