When working on my biography of Oscar Wilde, I found tracking my subject’s footsteps to be a welcome diversion from toiling in the library. And a useful one, too. I was fascinated to find the modest, terraced house on Westland Row, in Dublin, where he was born, and, just around the corner, the handsome, high-ceilinged mansion on Merrion Square to which the family moved when Wilde was barely a year old. It seemed little wonder that, raised under such a roof, he developed an assured sense of his own importance.
Tracking Wilde’s movements led me not only on happy wanderings through the streets of Oxford (where he honed his wit), London (where he made his name), and Paris (where he expanded his artistic horizons and lived out his exile), but also along less familiar ways: across the Peloponnese on a bicycle (following the course taken, on horseback, by the undergraduate Wilde and three friends in the spring of 1877); to Bad Homburg, Germany, where Wilde “took the waters” after the season of overindulgence that followed his first theatrical success, with Lady Windermere’s Fan; to the unglamorous seaside town of Worthing, in West Sussex, where he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest; to the cramped cell in Reading Gaol, Berkshire, in which Wilde served most of his two-year prison sentence; to the roof of the Palermo Cathedral, where he chatted up the youthful sacristans.
