From the moment Oscar Fingal O’ Flahertie Wills Wilde took his first breath on 16 October 1854, he was cloaked in the romance of Celtic myth and folklore. His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, who had adopted ‘Speranza’, meaning ‘Hope’, as her preferred moniker, understood the import of names. An enthusiastic folklorist, Lady Wilde picked the name Oscar for her youngest son from the pages of James Macpherson’s poetic Ossian chronicles, an epic retelling of Irish legends. Raised in ‘The Land of the EverYoung’ or ‘Tir-nan-Og’, MacPherson’s ‘Oscar’ was the gifted offspring of warrior-poet Ossian and the golden haired fairy Niamh. It goes without saying that great things were expected from both the mythological Oscar and his namesake.
Photographs taken of Wilde as a toddler show him dressed in girl’s clothing, which had nothing to do with sexual orientation and everything to do withVictorian fashion. However, in places where belief in folklore and superstition was still strong little boys were often clad in female attire to keep the child-stealing faeries, or as they were known in Ireland, at bay. (Allegedly girls were less desirable until they reached childbearing). Although this must have been a harrowing experience for the boy, to Speranza it was proof that Oscar’s future would be far from ordinary. She had written as much in her exemplary tome . Published in 1887, when Oscar was just three years old, the book captured the spirit of Ireland’s faerie-haunted landscape, the eerie raths and brooding mountains that were thought to be strongholds. According to Lady Wilde, not everyone has the ability to hear the banshee’s keening, but those who do, like young Oscar, are both blessed and cursed: “Music and poetry are fairy gifts and the possessors of them show kinship to the spirit race – therefore they are watched over by the spirits of life, which are prophecy and inspiration; and by the spirit of doom, which is the revealer of the secrets of death.”
