Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College Oxford

Abstract

Ward’s¹ rooms were in a somewhat remote part of college, on the top floor of a building overhanging the deep and ‘drumly’ Cherwell. I often escaped from my noisy Etonian² friends, and spent happy hours in Ward’s eyrie, enjoying his company and his pleasant talk. ‘Do you know the man who has the rooms below me?’ he said, one day. ‘No, I don’t,’ I replied, ‘but whoever he is, he has got the jolliest rooms in college.’ ‘Why, he is a demy³ who hails from Trinity College, Dublin, where he got medals and things. A most interesting chap: I’ll get him to come up here and meet you. You ought to hear him talk!’ And so began my first acquaintance with Oscar O’Flaherty Wills Wilde, of whom, ne res pereat,⁴ I propose to set down here and now all that I remember.

Extracted from ‘Oscar Wilde As I Knew Him’, In Victorian Days and Other Papers (New York: Longmans, 1939) pp. 115–43. Editor’s title.