A 4.3 bar named, one assumes, after Oscar Wilde – the wittiest man in London, destroyed by the city that adored him
Oscar Bar and Restaurant holds a 4.3 from four hundred and twenty-three people, and carries a name that, in central London, can really only point to one man: Oscar Wilde, the greatest wit of the age, and the most famous victim of Victorian hypocrisy.
The wittiest man in London
For a period in the 1880s and 90s, Oscar Wilde was the most brilliant talker and the most quotable writer in England. His plays filled the theatres, his epigrams filled the newspapers, and his conversation was, by universal account, the finest entertainment in London. To have Wilde at your dinner table was to have won the evening.
He was also, by his own cheerful admission, a poser, a dandy, and a self-publicist of genius – a man who understood fame and image decades before anyone had the vocabulary for it. “The only thing worse than being talked about,” he said, “is not being talked about,” and he lived it.
The destruction
And then London destroyed him. Wilde was prosecuted for “gross indecency” – for his homosexuality – in a sequence of trials that gripped and scandalised the nation. He was convicted, sentenced to two years’ hard labour, and broken by it. He emerged from prison bankrupt, exiled, and ruined, and died a few years later in a Paris hotel room, poor and largely abandoned, at forty-six.
The city that had adored him, quoted him, and filled his theatres turned on him with savage speed the moment he was exposed, and the same wit and flamboyance that had made him the toast of London became, overnight, the evidence against him. The Prat’s history desk notes that Wilde’s fate is one of the darkest stories in London’s cultural history: a man celebrated for exactly the qualities that were then used to destroy him.
Naming a bar after him
There is something both fitting and poignant about naming a convivial bar after Wilde. Fitting, because he loved good company, good talk, and good living, and would have adored a well-made cocktail and a room full of clever conversation. Poignant, because the city that now cheerfully puts his name over a bar is the same city that imprisoned him for who he was.
His rehabilitation is complete – Wilde is now a hero, a martyr, a byword for wit and for the injustice done to him – and a bar bearing his name is a small part of that long, posthumous restoration. He would, one suspects, have found the whole thing deeply ironic, and said something perfect about it.
The bar
A 4.3 across four hundred and twenty-three people is a solid, real-sample score, at a hotel bar spanning a wide price range. The reviews describe a comfortable, stylish room doing good drinks and food – a pleasant place for exactly the kind of witty evening its namesake prized.
Verdict
A comfortable hotel bar named after Oscar Wilde, the wittiest man in London and its most famous victim, in a city that destroyed him and now sells cocktails under his name.
Go, order something, and raise a glass to Oscar, who would have loved the drink, sharpened the conversation, and had the last, best word on the irony of it all.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
