Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. Wilde kept his homosexuality a secret. He married and had two sons. But in 1891, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young British poet and aristocrat 16 years his junior.

He was put on trial for gross indecency in 1895 after the details of his affair were made public. On May 25, 1895, Oscar Wilde was taken to prison. He spent the first several months at London’s Pentonville Prison. Wilde was later transferred to London’s Reading Gaol, where he remained until his release in 1897.

He spent the last three years of his life living in exile in France, where he composed his last work The Ballad of Reading Gaol, about an execution that took place while he was imprisoned there.