Stephen Fry

A terrible symbolic poem you could write about that, that leads from the jollity of the Victorian middle classes to faeces and blood by way of Richard Doyley Cart.

It's just a peculiar and horrible coincidence that it was Richard Doily Carter who produced Gilbert and Sullivan, their operas, and made a fortune from it, of course.

And he always took them over to Broadway as well.

And when they wrote Patience, an extract from which we've just heard, which was a parody, a guying, a satire on the aesthetic young men, Whistler and Wilde and their set...

Bunthorne was the character.

Richard Dollycutt realised that patients wouldn't play in New York because they had no concept of these people.

The British knew about them because of punch cartoons of them, you know, going down the strand with a lily in my hand and all that sort of thing, saying everything was too utterly utter.

And it didn't mean anything to America.

America had just come out of the Civil War, for heaven's sake.

It wasn't yet the Gilded Age quite.

So he offered Wilde a huge sum of money to go to America to tour around and lecture and let everybody look at him and understand the nature of the Aesthete.

So Wilde went and he...

He gave possibly the first ever lectures ever given on interior decoration.

He called them the house beautiful.

And he lectured on Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance silversmith.

And he was quite a sensation, famously arriving in the customs hall saying he had nothing to declare but his genius.

He then, of course, some people think he may have developed syphilis from a female prostitute at some point along his journey, maybe in Leadville, Colorado, where he went.

He returned to England and determined to be an MP and a respectable figure and a great man and he'd write novels and maybe plays.

And he met Constance and married her.

But fast, fast forward to the very terrible moment where he's standing in the dock, having lost his libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury.