EXHIBITION
Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis
A love letter rediscovered
7 March – 1 October 2025
One of the greatest love letters ever written, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis was the only work that the Irish writer completed during his two-year imprisonment. Now, 125 years after Wilde’s death, MoLI is proud to present a new film installation rediscovering this moving and richly layered text – perhaps the most raw and honest version of Wilde available to us, at times deeply philosophical, at times white with rage, at times heartbreakingly tender.
Addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas – or Bosie – whose presence in Wilde’s life was the catalyst for his incarceration for ‘gross indecency’, De Profundis shows a less visible side to Wilde’s writing and personality. Most of what we experience and know of Wilde is his wit and humour, his sharpness, his flamboyance, his virtuosic command of the English language. De Profundis shows us the serious artist, the thinker, the philosopher, the sensitive and profound aesthete that lives in his prose and poetry.
A fresh perspective on Wilde’s brilliant mind and tragic life, MoLI’s De Profundis installation presents key passages of the text through the voices of a contemporary community of LGBTQ+ writers, artists and activists. Here, we are immersed deep in Oscar Wilde’s own psychological struggle, his working through sorrow, his feelings of betrayal, his wide-angled lens on his own condition, his aesthetic and spiritual worldview and, despite everything, his enduring affection for Bosie.
THEATRE
Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes
An afternoon with Oscar Wilde
Sundays 6, 13, 20, 27 July, 12pm and 2pm
Sundays 3, 10, 17, 24 August, 12pm and 2pm
Join us for an afternoon of Oscar Wilde with Neil Titley's Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes. Presented in a special, limited run and performed by actor Will Govan, this wonderfully witty and sincere show will teleport audience goers to 1898 Paris, one year after Wilde’s release from prison.
The play draws on Wilde’s letters, essays and anecdotes to bring his spirit to life in a 60-minute performance which will appeal as much to those who know little about the writer as it will to those who admire his work. Titley balances Wilde’s almost dutiful humour with an unsentimental portrayal of his suffering in Reading Gaol, and his bitter perception of man’s inhumanity to man.
UK born actor Will Govan attended the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London, before pursuing a career in publishing & journalism as the co-founder of The Moth magazine. Having performed Shakespeare in his youth, Will has recently returned to his first artistic love and revived the award-winning Moth Productions theatre to take on the role of Oscar Wilde in Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes.
“Charming and witty” – The Irish Times
“Funny and melancholic” – The Times
Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was a poet, playwright, novelist and one of the most prominent literary figures of the late Victorian era. He was the second son of Sir William Wilde, a noted surgeon, and Jane Wilde, a poet and nationalist. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, and later Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became known for his flamboyant personality, wit, and embrace of the Aesthetic movement, which advocated “art for art’s sake”.
Wilde first gained public attention through his poetry and lectures on aesthetics, but his fame soared with his social comedies. His major works include the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), an exquisite gothic tale about vanity and moral corruption, and a series of successful plays: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The latter is considered his masterpiece, a comedy of manners that brilliantly satirizes the Victorian society that he himself was a central figure in. Also notable are his very beautiful and melancholic stories for children – amongst the wonderful first editions recently transferred to MoLI in the Dublin Writers Museum Collection is the first printing of Wilde’s The Happy Prince.
Wilde's success was overshadowed by scandal when his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas led to a public feud with Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. In 1895, Wilde sued the Marquess for libel, a move that backfired when evidence of Wilde’s homosexuality emerged—a criminal offense at the time. Wilde was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years of hard labor. His time in prison deeply affected him, both physically and mentally. After his release, he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a poignant long form poem that reflects both on his experiences in prison and the suffering that takes place there.
On 19 May 1897, Oscar Wilde left Reading Prison a broken and impoverished man. He boarded a steam boat for France the same evening. Among Oscar Wilde’s few possessions was an 80-page handwritten manuscript, written on 20 folio sheets of blue prison paper – something he had written across the previous January, February and March, in his tiny cell. That manuscript would be published after Wilde’s death as De Profundis, and would have a storied publishing life, not appearing in full until 1962.
Oscar Wilde died in Paris of meningitis on 30 November 1900, a mere three years later.
