Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He was part of the ‘art for art's sake’ movement at the end of the nineteenth century. He went to England as a young man and studied Classics at Oxford University.

After university, he moved to London. He worked as the editor of a women’s magazine, and wrote poems, a novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and several comic plays. Their clever dialogues are very funny, and they were extremely popular when they first appeared in London theatres. In 1894, Wilde married Constance Lloyd. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.