Oscar Wilde
A Dubliner who took every honour Oxford had and made a trade of wit: a lecture tour of America, fairy tales written for his own children, the single novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and four comedies, of which “The Importance of Being Earnest” has never left the stage. At the height of his fame he sued the father of his lover for libel, lost, and at the trial his own letters were turned against him: two years’ hard labour for “gross indecency”. Prison produced “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and the confession “De Profundis”. He came out ruined and broken, left for France under an assumed name and died in a Paris hotel in 1900, aged forty-six.
He was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854 at 03:00 Dublin mean time — Ireland kept its own time until 1916. The hour comes from the family record.