British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader card 130 years after it was revoked' The Guardian, June 13, 2025

 Dalya Alberge, The Guardian; British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader card 130 years after it was revoked

"The British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass, 130 years after its trustees cancelled it following his conviction for gross indecency.

A contemporary pass bearing the name of the Irish author and playwright will be officially presented to his grandson, Merlin Holland, at an event in October, it will be announced on Sunday...

The decision to revoke the pass is recorded in board minutes in 1895, when homosexuality was illegal: “The Trustees directed that Mr Oscar Wilde, admitted as a reader in 1879 and sentenced at the Central Criminal Court on 25th May to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour, be excluded from future use of the Museum’s Reading Room.”...

Holland said: “Oscar had been in Pentonville prison for three weeks when his [pass] to the British Museum Reading Room [now the British Library] was cancelled, so he wouldn’t have known about it, which was probably as well … It would have just added to his misery to feel that one of the world’s great libraries had banned him from books just as the law had banned him from daily life. But the restitution of his ticket is a lovely gesture of forgiveness and I’m sure his spirit will be touched.”

In 2017, Wilde was assumed to be among more than 50,000 gay and bisexual men who were posthumously pardoned, although the Ministry of Justice said no individuals would be named."

Forbidden love: the original Dorian Gray revealed, direct from Oscar Wilde’s pen; The Guardian, September 8, 2018

Donna Ferguson, The Guardian; Forbidden love: the original Dorian Gray revealed, direct from Oscar Wilde’s pen

"It is the first time the original manuscript in Wilde’s own writing has been published and demonstrates how he self-censored some of the most romantic paragraphs. He tones down the more overt references to the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s relationship with Dorian, crossing out his confession that “the world becomes young to me when I hold his hand”.

Yet the manuscript also includes passages – later removed from the novel we know today – that show how Wilde wanted to shock his Victorian readers by openly writing about homosexual feelings. For example, this declaration of love by Basil for Dorian on page 147: “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman… I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.”"