Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
The building that appears on this note is Reading Gaol; one of the prisons that stole Oscar Wilde’s spirit and health. Once he was released, he spent his last three years of life impoverished and in exile.
