Son and parents: Speranza and Sir William Wilde

In an agonized passage in De Profundis, Oscar Wilde writes that his parents ‘had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.’ Throughout his life, Wilde had been deeply proud of his parents’ achievements, and the legacy they had bequeathed him, a fact that makes the self-lacerating passage above seem all the more poignant and painful. The context for the passage was of course his own humiliating trial and imprisonment, and the recent death of his mother while he was in Reading Gaol (having been refused permission to visit her during her final illness).