The British Library will reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass 130 years after it was revoked by the British Museum’s Reading Room following his conviction for “gross indecency”. The pass will be presented to Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, at a commemorative event in October 2025. Wilde, who had first obtained his card in 1879, had it formally cancelled on June 15, 1895 after he was imprisoned following one of the most infamous trials of the Victorian era. Why was his reading pass revoked? The chain of events that ultimately culminated in Wilde’s expulsion from the library began with a calling card. Left at Wilde’s club by the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom Wilde was in a relationship with, the card accused him of being a “posing somdomite.” A grave charge as homosexuality was a criminal offence at the time. Rather than ignore the jibe, Wilde sued for libel. At trial, the defence seized on semantics, insisting Queensberry had meant “posing as a sodomite”, not asserting it as fact, otherwise, the Marquess asserted, he would have shot Wilde “on sight”. Though Queensberry was the defendant, it was Wilde who found himself under scrutiny. The libel case collapsed. He would go on to face two further trials, eventually being convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years in prison. Shortly after his sentencing, the British Museum’s trustees recorded the cancellation of his privileges in their minutes: “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.” Wilde's reaction to the expulsion It is unclear whether Wilde knew of his expulsion. In a June 13 interview to The Guardian, Holland said: “Oscar had been in Pentonville prison for three weeks when his pass was cancelled, so he wouldn’t have known about it, which was probably as well. It would have 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, more than a century after Wilde’s death, the UK government issued posthumous pardons to thousands convicted under historical anti-homosexuality laws.
