When Oscar Wilde arrived in New York on 3 January 1882 to embark on a lecture tour, he is reported to have sauntered through customs and said to officials: ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius.’ He could have delivered the same line eight years earlier on his arrival in England to continue his studies. He had left his first alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, with the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek and recognition as an accomplished classics scholar. At Magdalen College, Oxford he would carry on displaying, or flaunting, his intellect. But while his genius took root at Trinity, many of the other features that we associate with him only bloomed into traits or talents when he was at Magdalen.

Wilde’s first university career was something of a false start. At Trinity he had dazzled academically but had failed to shine socially. He regarded most of his cohorts as boors who had no interest in art or poetry. They considered him intelligent but sullen. He was instantly smitten with Oxford and when he started his first term at Magdalen in 1874, he made up for lost time by forming alliances with like-minded friends. At Trinity, he seldom had guests in his dirty student digs; at Magdalen, he hosted Sunday soirées fuelled by music, tobacco, fine talk and bowls of gin-and-whisky punch in his elegantly – if eccentrically – decorated college rooms.

Many were entranced by this exotic outsider. Wilde was conspicuous for his soft Irish accent, long hair, conversational abilities and brilliant mind. His three years at Trinity gave him an intellectual advantage but he kept quiet about his earlier studies and sometimes lied about his age so as to convey to his Oxford contemporaries that his seemingly effortless achievements in Greco-Roman literature, philosophy and ancient history should be attributed to precocity. ‘His qualities were not ordinary’, said Wilde’s best friend and fellow Magdalen classicist, William Welsford Ward, ‘and we, his intimate friends, did not judge him by the ordinary standards.’

As well as forging strong friendships, Wilde reinvented himself at Oxford by developing his persona, his image, his verse and his aesthetic outlook. He embraced Freemasonry. He was inspired by John Ruskin’s lectures on art and beauty. He wrote poems that were published in the Dublin University Magazine. He subverted authority, falling foul of professors and proctors, and was rusticated and fined half of his annual scholarship money for returning late from a tour across Europe. He did all of this while attired in flamboyant clothes – loud shirts, blue neckties, checked suits and a brimmed hat perched jauntily on one ear. ‘He never looked well-dressed’, remarked one friend, ‘he looked “dressed up”.’ According to his biographer, Michèle Mendelssohn, Wilde’s radical adaptations of classic menswear ‘made him look like an Englishman reflected in an Irishman’s funhouse mirror’.

It was also at Oxford that Wilde made inroads into achieving fame. His reputation spread from his peers to his professors. By the time he graduated in 1878 he had become a larger-than-life Oxford icon who reigned supreme at social gatherings and whose quips were reported in the press. A decade later he was a world-renowned writer and aesthete. ‘Oxford was paradise to me,’ he once said – a stark contrast to the hell in which he found himself at the height of his fame.

The exhibition at Magdalen College explores Wilde’s time there as a student 150 years ago, and the success and disgrace that followed. Employing a wealth of diverse material from the college archives, from Wilde’s early years in Dublin to his exile in France, Magdalen’s Wilde makes for an insightful show about a fascinating character.

The Dublin section provides a glimpse of where Wilde started out from. The star attraction is a beguiling model of 1 Merrion Square, the four-storey house that Wilde grew up in. The property, which needed six servants to run, was also a place of work and entertainment for Wilde’s parents: Sir William Wilde, a prominent eye and ear surgeon, ran his medical practice from the ground floor; Lady Jane Wilde used the address to host intimate, glittering salons. Both parents also wrote, and we see here their very different types of work. Despite being a man of science, Wilde’s father was interested in folklore, as evinced by his 1852 tome Irish Popular Superstitions. From Wilde’s mother, a nationalist, suffragist and poet, who gained fame writing for the revolutionary Young Ireland nationalist movement, there is a book of poems dedicated to her two sons.

The section on Magdalen brings Wilde properly into view. Photographs show how different the university was then. Wilde and his fellow undergraduates, all male, are wearing college caps and gowns during their academic day. Among the photographs are letters written on college notepaper, mostly from Wilde to his closest friend Ward. In one letter, from July 1876, Wilde tells him that he got a first in his initial set of exams. With customary bravado, he is said to have ‘swaggered horribly’ about his results, but here, to Ward, he discloses the pain he feels from his father’s death in April: ‘I think God has dealt very hardly with us.’ The following year Wilde started to worry about his exams, and in a letter written in autumn he announces to Ward: ‘I am reading hard for a fourth in Greats (How are the mighty fallen!!).’ Wilde went on to secure a first and Ward wrote to him at once to congratulate him after reading the news in The Times. Wilde expressed his delight in a letter dated July 1878. ‘My Dear old Boy, You are the best of fellows to telegraph your congratulations – there were none I valued more.’ He then adds: ‘The dons are “astonied” beyond words – the Bad Boy doing so well in the end!’

Wilde didn’t just write to Ward, he also drew him, albeit on a window of what is today known as the ‘Oscar Wilde Room’. The scratched sketch on the framed pane is a lively caricature. It was rediscovered by the College Works Department in 2003. Another lost-and-found curio is a gold friendship ring that Wilde and his Magdalen chum Reginald Harding gave to Ward for Christmas 1876. Designed like a buckled belt and inscribed with all three men’s initials (‘OFOFWW’ for Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde), the ring was stolen from Magdalen in 2002 and discovered and returned in 2019 by a Dutch art expert and commodities broker.

Certain exhibits stand out here. A diary of Ward’s 16-year-old sister, Florence, chronicles a visit she made to Oxford in June 1876 and the balls and concerts she attended with Wilde (who also introduced her to champagne cocktails). Wilde’s signed receipt for his ‘demyship’ – a form of scholarship unique to Magdalen – comes with the note that, despite his allowance from both the college and his family, he spent freely while at Magdalen, running up debts with his tailor, his jeweller and the High Street emporium, Spiers. (Wilde became accustomed to ignoring pleas for payment, stating that, at Oxford, ‘the realities of sordid life were kept at a distance’.) Finally, a facsimile of a questionnaire Wilde completed in 1877 reveals much about a young man on the cusp of celebrity. In answer to ‘Favourite poets’, Wilde has put ‘Euripides, Keats, Theocritus and myself.’ In response to ‘What is your aim in life?’ Wilde, in a classic case of be careful what you wish for, has written ‘Success: fame or even notoriety.’

Two published poems track Wilde’s literary development. An 1876 issue of the Dublin University Magazine lies open at ‘The Dole of the King’s Daughter’, penned while Wilde was at Oxford. An 1878 first edition of Ravenna announces on its title page that it is the winner of that year’s Newdigate Prize.

As we leave the Magdalen section and follow the trajectory of Wilde’s career we find many more first editions of his major works. His debut collection, Poems (1881), stands proud, despite being dismissed as either derivative or unwholesome by critics. (The Oxford Union requested Wilde present a copy to their library, then changed their minds and rejected it; Punch satirised it, writing ‘The poet is Wilde, but the poetry’s tame.’)

Salomé, published in French in 1892, appears in a sumptuously designed cover. Wilde claimed this was in tribute to Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, who was by then his lover. As Wilde wrote to a friend, ‘Bosie is very gilt-haired and I have bound Salome in purple to suit him.’ Other beautifully crafted books include The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) in Japanese vellum over millboard, and The Sphinx (1894), adorned with Art Nouveau figures and elaborate floral swirls by the illustrator Charles Ricketts, who remained Wilde’s lifelong friend.

Two first editions of Wilde’s sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, are exhibited. The first incarnation is in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine from July 1890. Conservative readers were appalled by Wilde’s story: the Scots Reviewer branded it suitable ‘for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys’, while W.H. Smith’s, then Britain’s foremost lending library, banned this issue of Lippincott’s from their shelves. The second incarnation is the first book edition, which appeared a year later. Wilde added 28,000 words to the magazine text and moderated the artist Basil Hallward’s expressions of love for Dorian. Wilde’s copy editor urged him to expunge Lord Henry Wotton’s assertion that ‘The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.’ Wilde refused.

Two books on display show how Wilde’s publishers dealt with his eventual fall from grace. Although An Ideal Husband opened at the Haymarket on 3 January 1895 and ran for 111 performances, the play did not appear in print until 1899 and did not bear Wilde’s name. This first edition states only that the play is ‘by the author of Lady Windermere’s Fan’. Wilde was just as anonymous one year earlier: the first edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published not under his toxic name but rather his prison designation, C.3.3.

A section on Wilde’s lecture tour of America in 1882 includes one of the definitive portraits of the artist as a young man. To publicise the tour, New York studio photographer Napoleon Sarony took a picture of Wilde reclining on a sofa and resplendent in full aesthetic garb. Wilde captivated audiences from all walks of life with his views on art for art’s sake as two different exhibits show. A book from the American performer and impersonator Helen Potter is filled with her impressions of Wilde’s manner of speech. Cards advertising a Manhattan cigar company feature Wildean dandies and aesthetic iconography.

Some exhibits are from a period that is perhaps best described as the calm before the storm. We see Wilde as a family man through touching letters to his son, and a card on which he and his wife Constance send their best wishes for a happy new year. We also see him at the zenith of his career by way of drafts, final scripts and theatre programmes relating to his blockbusting plays of the early 1890s – society comedies which managed to thrill and scandalise London audiences. Then in 1895 those storm clouds gathered. On 25 May, when An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were playing to full houses in West End theatres, Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. As he wrote earlier in Dorian Gray: ‘It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.’

The exhibition’s section on Wilde’s downfall proves sobering. There is a letter from Wilde to Constance on 28 February 1895 – the same day he received a card from Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accusing him of being a ‘posing somdomite [sic]’. Wilde’s scrawled and barely legible handwriting speaks volumes about his agitation. There follows a series of remarkable illustrations that appeared in a police newspaper. One depicts Wilde in the dock in a packed courtroom in what is called ‘the most sensational trial of the century’; another shows a crowded auction house and the sale of his household effects. Complementing this is an auction catalogue listing the contents of the Wildes’ family home that were to be sold off to pay for Queensberry’s legal costs. The inventory is painstakingly detailed: along with standard furniture, books, artworks and letters are Persian rugs, Indian matting, Chinese lanterns, linoleum, curtains and crockery. Wilde’s sons’ toys are also for sale, and so, too, is their rabbit hutch.

One display case houses the chunky key to Wilde’s cell in Reading Gaol. Later we find the calling card for ‘Mr Sebastian Melmoth’, the alias Wilde assumed after leaving prison in 1897 – a nod to the restless, homeless and tormented protagonist of the 1820 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Wilde’s great-uncle, Charles Maturin. Wilde’s own wanderings ended in 1900. His death certificate in French is yellowing and blandly bureaucratic, but its message is clear: on 30 November a life was cut short.

In places we come across items that are only tangentially connected to Wilde’s life. He may have dedicated his first play, The Duchess of Padua, to the actress Ellen Terry, but do we really need to see her opera glasses? Wilde may have remarked: ‘Every day I find it harder and harder to live up to my blue china,’ but does that merit the inclusion of a Royal Worcester cup and saucer that didn’t belong to him?

These are minor gripes though. The array of books and letters are worth the admission price alone. Miscellaneous exhibits delight: a mischievous caricature by Aubrey Beardsley of Wilde writing Salomé with help from French Verbs at a Glance, a French dictionary and a textbook offering French for beginners; audio readings of Wilde’s work, including his poem ‘Magdalen Walks’, about the college in springtime; and, rather bizarrely, a plaster impression of Wilde’s left hand. To provide extra context, there is a selection of Vanity Fair cartoons and potted biographies of key players in Wilde’s story, from writers to actors to stage-managers. The Marquess of Queensberry is particularly striking: clad in a grey suit with white gloves and a top hat, he faces away but still looks like a man with an agenda, standing defiantly, his feet apart, with one hand on his hip and the other skewering an umbrella into the ground.

‘The two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison,’ Wilde said looking back on his short yet eventful life. Magdalen’s Wilde encompasses both those turning points and much from in between. While Wilde’s calamitous fall remains grimly appealing, it is fascinating to discover how at Oxford he found his feet and made his mark.

Magdalen’s Wilde is at Magdalen College, Oxford until 16 April.