Oscar Wilde, A Parnellite Home Ruler and Gladstonian Liberal: Wilde's career at the Eighty Club (1887–1895)

This article offers a full account of our findings concerning Oscar Wilde’s membership of the Eighty Club, a Liberal political organization founded for the promotion of Liberalism within the House of Commons and among the British electorate. Wilde joined the club in 1887 and was a member until 1895. By joining Wilde publically declared his approval of the position on Irish constitutional independence arrived at by the Liberal leader William Gladstone in the winter of 1885/6, when he converted to the Home Rule cause and subsequently formed an alliance with Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). When the record of Wilde’s eight-year Eighty Club career is set in the wider context of his political statements and writings concerning the Irish Question, and his multifarious nationalist social and political activities, a clear picture emerges of Wilde as an emphatic Parnellite Home Ruler.