Welcome to Oscar Wilde House at Number One Merrion Square North, Dublin. Today our beautifully preserved building houses the prestigious American College Dublin. The university offers a range of courses including performing arts and creative writing.
The world famous poet and dramatist, we imagine, would be delighted that his childhood home is now a centre for such studies. Long before Oscar made his mark on the world, this was one of the most famous households in Dublin.
Oscar’s parents, William and Jane, moved here in 1855, a few months after Oscar was born, and for the proceeding two decades Number One Merrion Square was the cultural epicentre of Dublin.
The Wilde children, Willie, Oscar and Isola experienced something of an idyllic childhood in this house and in the park opposite.
They were schooled at home by two governesses and, unusually for Victorian times, they were present at many of the dinners and social events their parents held through the years.
Lady Jane Wilde, Oscar’s mother, was a poet, writer and translator. For almost two decades she ran a highly-successful weekly salon on the first floor of Number One Merrion Square. Artists, musicians, poets, politicians and philosophers would gather here to share ideas and entertain each other.
Through Jane’s revolutionary verse and editorials for the radical newspaper The Nation, under the pen name Speranza, she became a hero to the Irish people during the Great Famine and for decades afterwards. In 1891, a Dublin magazine held a poll for its readers to name the Greatest Living Irish Woman.
Speranza, who was by then 70 years old, won the vote by a landslide. One of her most famous accomplishments was the translation from the German of the gothic novel Sidonia the Sorceress, which was published in 1849, two years before her marriage.
This book inspired several paintings by the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. William Morris produced a luxurious edition of Jane’s translation of the novel in 1893. In 2021, the 200th anniversary of her birth, the Irish postal service, An Post, issued a commemorative postage stamp to honour her.
Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, was a celebrated eye and ear surgeon who was famous across Europe.
A Victorian polymath, he was interested not only in medicine but archaeology, Irish and European folk tales, statistics, topography and travel writing. Our library still houses the book cases he installed. Moreover, it was in this very room, amid a haze of tobacco smoke, that the young Bram Stoker, anxious for a break from the busy salons, would sit down with Sir William to discuss the ancient myths and legends of Ireland, Central Europe and Egypt.
As a young man William Wilde had visited the land of the Pharaohs and had climbed The Great Pyramid of Giza. The rear ground floor of Number One Merrion Square was part of Sir William’s medical practice.
His consultation room on the first floor boasts a gallery of Victorian medical cabinets, which house some of the instruments he invented.
It’s no surprise then that this truly amazing couple were the parents to a genius such as Oscar Wilde.
We are delighted to announce that Oscar Wilde’s childhood nursery is now open for visitors to the house. It is on the top floor of this four-storey Georgian building.
The first floor was the scene of Speranza’s famous salons, which ran from around 1859 to 1874. Jane held gatherings each Saturday afternoon, inviting the great and the good to participate in conversation, debate, poetry and song. Artists such as Bram Stoker, John B Yeats and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu were frequent visitors. As were many famous writers and persons of interest who happened to be visiting Dublin.
The original 250-year-old Irish oak floorboards on which these gatherings took place remain in excellent throughout our building today.
According to one commentator, as a child Oscar ‘heard every subject discussed and every creed defended and demolished at his parents’ table, where were to be found not only the brilliant genius of Ireland, but also celebrities of Europe and America … he considers that the best of his education in boyhood was obtained from this association with his father and mother and their remarkable friends’.