The Daily History Chronicle

On April 3rd, 1895, Oscar Wild the most celebrated wit in Victorian England entered London’s Old Bailey courthouse to prosecute the man who had publicly called him a sodomite. Every friend he had told him to run. He stayed. What followed was the systematic destruction of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest literary minds, carried out by a society drowning in its own moral hypocrisy. But the complete story is more complicated than the martyr narrative allows and its echoes in the present moment are impossible to ignore.