Tom Crewe is not here to talk about Oscar Wilde. Yet he’s hard to ignore. The legacy of the beloved writer and poet – who was imprisoned in 1895 on charges of gross indecency – hangs over Crewe’s debut novel The New Life like a thick, grey cloud on the horizon. The book, an alternative history chronicling gay existence in Victorian England, was written in part as a corrective to some of the popular myths about The Picture of Dorian Gray’s author. A puncture to the great Wilde parade float.
“We fixate on the case of Wilde,” Crewe tells me. “He’s been elevated as this supreme gay martyr, a sort of gay grandfather figure for everyone. The more I thought about that, the more perverse it seemed – because, in a way, Wilde set back this moment. He helped destroy this optimistic moment of gay rights, because he got himself into a court case he didn’t need to get himself into [Wilde’s arrest followed a failed libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had called him a sodomite] and then he stood up in court and denied being gay. He’s not an obvious hero in the story – and yet he’s been made one.”
