Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland to prominent intellectuals William Wilde and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde. Though they were not aristocrats, the Wildes were well-off and provided Oscar with a fine education. Oscar was especially influenced by his mother, a brilliantly witty raconteur; as a child, he was frequently invited to socialize with her intellectual circle of friends.
Wilde entered Trinity College in 1871 and focused his academic studies on the classics and theories of aestheticism. In 1874, he transferred to Oxford and studied under the divergent tutorials of John Ruskin (a social theorist and Renaissance man) and Walter Pater (a proponent of the new school of...
