Showing results by author "Oscar Wilde" in Classics

When the American Otis family buys the English mansion Canterville Chase, they ignore warnings that it is haunted. Far from being frightened by the ghost of Sir Simon, a centuries-old spirit, the Otises baffle him by offering stain remover for his bloodstains and lubricant for his noisy chains. While the family's mischievous twins terrorize the specter, he falls into despair. Only the compassion of young Virginia can help the tormented ghost find redemption and eternal rest in this clever satire about cultural clashes.

 Over 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in audio. This volume restores material, including instances of graphic homosexual content, removed by the novel's first editor, who feared it would be "offensive" to Victorians. 

Immerse yourself in a world where the wonderful Stephen Fry reads some of the more memorable Children’s short stories written by one of our most successful playwrights of all time. A brilliant combination of reader and writer come together in these seven short stories available on digital...

Oscar Wilde's Salome was originally published in French in 1891 and translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas. This one-act play, a sinister tale of a woman scorned and her vengeance, has become a landmark of Decadent literature. The play tells the biblical story of Salome, stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who, to her stepfather's dismay but to the delight of her mother Herodias, requests the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter as a reward for dancing the dance of the seven veils.

Hughie Erskine is in love and wants to marry, but the girl's father will not allow it, since Erskine has no money. Erskine's friend Alan Trevor is a painter, and he visits him at his studio one day to find him with a pitiable beggar—the model for his painting. Erskine only has one coin, on which he depends for transportation, but he decides he can walk for a couple of weeks and gives the beggar the coin.

Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope. In this moving poetic study of his experiences in the Victorian penal system, Wilde relates the relentlessness and tedium of prison life, and of the haunted thoughts which trouble these "souls in agony" within their "numbered tombs". Oscar Wilde wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" after his two-year imprisonment at the establishment. During his incarceration, a former trooper was convicted of the murder of his wife and hanged at the Gaol. This event is central to the poem's narrative.

Between 1895 and 1897 Oscar Wilde served a prison sentence for offences "of gross indecency". Most of this time was spent at Reading Gaol, where Wilde encountered another prisoner, Harles Thomas Wooldridge, sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Wooldrige was hanged at the gaol on 7th July, 1896. Wilde wrote the poem in France in 1897 after his release from prison. The poem is a long reflection on the inequity and ineffectiveness of statutory punishment and the redeeming power of the Christian message of forgiveness.