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DRINKS FEATURES
INFAMOUS DRINKERS FROM HISTORY
OSCAR WILDE
Oscar Wilde is almost as famous for his promiscuity and his love of drink as he is for his literary genius.
Born in Dublin in 1854 the son of a surgeon and a writer, he moved to England to study at Oxford, and rapidly developed a taste for all that was beautiful and opulent.
Wilde married in 1884, but was a promiscuous homosexual with a penchant for young boys, whose lack of discretion in a hypocritical Victorian England was to later lead to his downfall and eventual imprisonment for gross indecency.
Although rarely branded as an actual alcoholic, perhaps because he was such an eloquent drunk, Wilde’s love of liquor has been well documented. He famously commented that, ‘the only way to overcome temptation is to yield to it’, and he certainly lived by this motto. His favourite spirits were advocaat, absinthe and brandy, but he also reportedly drank champagne all day long and constantly smoked opium.
Absinthe was very popular amongst artistic circles, and was said to produce strange hallucinations, as Wilde once described: "The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things."
He revelled in telling a story about how once when visiting a silver mine in Colorado, he got lowered into the mine in a rickety bucket in order to enjoy a three course meal down there. The ‘meal’ however, consisted of whiskey for starters, whiskey for main course and whiskey for pudding!
Wilde could dress as extravagantly as he behaved, usually wearing fur coats, red waistcoats and velvet jackets; getting his hair styled daily by a hairdresser and chain smoking gold tipped cigarettes.
When he was released from prison in 1897, he wiled away the last three years of his life drinking absinthe in French cafes. Prison had not changed his ways, however, and he quickly resumed his promiscuous lifestyle. Outrageous to the end – he even drank champagne on his death bed!
Famous Oscar Wilde quotes:
'Work is the curse of the drinking classes'
'I can resist everything except temptation.'
'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'
'I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.'
'Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.'
'To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.'
'One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.'
'Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.' |
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