WRITER OSCAR Wilde may be a “globalised” icon, but a new study returns him and his family to their west of Ireland roots, according to an NUI Galway academic.
Wilde is synonymous with London, Paris and with his family home in Dublin’s Merrion Square, but his roots were firmly on the shores of Lough Corrib, according to Prof Adrian Frazier, a lecturer at NUIG.
Prof Frazier was speaking at this weekend's publication in Charlie Byrne's Bookshop, Galway, of More Lives Than One, a study of seven generations of the Wilde family by Galway poet and teacher Gerard Hanberry.
The 300-year saga traces the Wilde family fortunes from a north of England ironmonger, tempted to Dublin by an early 18th-century construction boom, down to Oscar Wilde’s great grandson, Lucian, an Oxford-based computer programmer.
There is no evidence that the family were once “de Wilde” and descended from a Dutch soldier, or that one of their antecedents was a Cromwellian officer, according to Hanberry.
Lucian’s father Merlin Holland is an author and expert on his grandfather’s life and works and has done much to restore his name, the author has noted. Hanberry has unearthed information on Wilde’s time in prison, his father’s cover-up of the deaths of several daughters born out of wedlock and on Lady Wilde’s poverty before she died.
Initial interest in a classic book written by Oscar's father and eye and ear surgeon William, led Hanberry to carry out extensive research over 10 years. William Wilde wrote Lough Corribits Shores and Islandsat a time when the family had a summer house in Cong and a hunting lodge in Lough Fee in Connemara.
Oscar’s mother, Lady Wilde or Speranza, was a celebrated poet of the Young Ireland movement, but died in dire straits while her son was in Reading Gaol. She had asked for her son to be brought from prison to see her before she died, but the request was denied.
