Oscar Wilde: His Towering Genius and Heartbreaking Downfall
A New Ethic — The Times of Oscar Wilde — 1854 to 1900
He joined a world in the midst of a historic shift.
A century before Oscar Wilde’s birth, European economics was a comparably small affair. Folks farmed to produce their own food and often built their own tools to do that farming. If they needed something they could not provide for themselves, they would trade.
By the time of Oscar’s birth however, the industrial revolution was decades old. Family-based agriculture and small cottage industry was largely out the window in favor of factory jobs and machines.
The industrial revolution began in Great Britain and spread across the world. The first half of the 1800’s is largely considered by historians to be a reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleon.
Oscar’s life took place in a new period of revolution leading up to World War I, a decade and a half after his death.
By the year of Oscar’s birth, most of Europe had copied Britain’s manufacturing technology, gaining some of their lost ground, though England was still well in the lead.
Giant canals, railroads, and, combining British and American inventions, steam engines were built — all in response to a…
