British Library Restores Oscar Wilde’s Card 130 Years After Revocation
The British Library reissues Oscar Wilde’s reader’s card, reversing his 1895 exclusion after conviction for homosexuality.
The British Library has quietly rewritten a line of history. On what would have been Oscar Wilde’s 171st birthday, the institution reissued his reader’s card—130 years after it was stripped away when he was convicted for “gross indecency.”
The playwright who once filled the British Museum’s Reading Room with wit and ink was erased from its registers in June 1895, three weeks into his sentence at Pentonville Prison. His crime: loving another man. The trustees noted it dryly, “Mr O. Wilde excluded from the reading room.” Nothing more.
Now, his name returns in print. A new card, stamped with an expiry date matching his death—30 November 1900—was presented to his grandson, writer Merlin Holland, who called it “a lovely gesture of forgiveness.”
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Wilde’s manuscripts—The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, De Profundis—already rest within the library’s vaults. Today, his card joins them, not as an artifact of shame, but as a fragment of justice delayed.
The ceremony included actor Rupert Everett, who once played Wilde onscreen, and a rare public acknowledgment from the library’s chair, Dame Carol Black: “We hope to not only honour Wilde’s memory but acknowledge the injustices he endured.”
The laughter that once scandalized London echoes faintly through the stacks again—Oscar Wilde, reader restored.
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