LONDON -- Today, Oscar Wilde earns everlasting respect.
His name will be unveiled on a diamond-shaped pane of stained blue glass, above the tomb of Chaucer, overlooking the grave of Tennyson, around the corner from the memorial to Shakespeare, 20 paces from the final resting place of Dickens.
The writer who a century ago earned fame for his wit, and infamy and imprisonment for his homosexuality, rejoins Great Britain's literary establishment at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
"Oscar Wilde would be of two minds about this," said his grandson, Merlin Holland. "On one side, he'd be extremely happy that his work would be given the recognition that it deserves -- that he would no longer be considered a lightweight, second-division author. On the other side, he'd say, 'If this is the establishment accepting me, where did I go wrong?' "
The playwright of the Victorian age is back in style.
One of his classic plays, "An Ideal Husband," is due to open on Broadway in April. The British Broadcasting Corp. is to televise a one-hour Wilde biography. There is talk of turning Wilde's rise and fall into a movie.
The man, who died in 1900, even has a fan club, the 150-member Oscar Wilde Society.
"Here is someone who has gone from being the outcast of outcasts to being enthroned in the holy place for writers and poets," said Andrew McDonald, a society member. "That says something about changing literary traits and changes in English society."
Wilde ruled London's West End theater district when his masterpiece, "The Importance of Being Earnest," premiered 100 years ago today. It was a society send-up, filled with dual identities, outlandish situations, and, some claim, references to the playwright's homosexuality. Within four months, though, Wilde would be exposed as a homosexual and imprisoned for two years at hard labor.
The play still ran, but Wilde's name was blotted from the posters.
"The scandal has always dominated the Wilde story and very often obscured the man's literary greatness," Mr. Holland said.
Mr. Holland, 49, a free-lance writer living in London, is the only child of the younger of Wilde's two sons, Vyvyan. For the past 20 years he has studied his grandfather's works, reassembling a jigsaw puzzle of a man clearly ahead of his time.
"I looked at everything largely because people have expected me to be a walking encyclopedia," he said. "Through doing that, you begin to live under the man's skin."
There is Wilde, the Irish-born nationalist and classical scholar, the self-absorbed writer who upon his arrival in New York, is famously said to have told a customs officer, "I have nothing to declare except my genius."
He was a brilliant conversationalist, a master playwright, poet, novelist and children's author. He had an analytical side, too. His writings about prisons and socialism remain current.
Wilde wrote: "It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."
But Wilde could not shield himself from scandal, even though he was a bright star in a small social world of aristocrats. The Victorian era was a permissive one, belying a reputation for extolling the virtues of the upright and the uptight. Wilde's dalliances with men were largely accepted in this elite circle. His downfall came, though, when he clashed with the Marquess of Queensberry.
The pawn was Queensberry's son, Lord Alfred Douglas.
Wilde loved the son, a vain young man who sought revenge against his father, the marquess. But it was Wilde who was destroyed. Queensberry began a campaign of insults against the playwright, and Wilde brought a libel suit against the nobleman. But the case turned against Wilde. Evidence was produced that Wilde consorted with male prostitutes. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years. Broken financially and physically, Wilde went to Paris, where he died, aged 46.
But his works and the tale of his downfall lived on.
David Angus Douglas, the 12th Marquess of Queensberry, rejects his great-grandfather's actions, which included an attempt to confront Wilde on the opening night of "The Importance of Being Earnest."
"Wilde had done something which at that time seemed to be socially and completely unacceptable, which was of course, is a load of nonsense," Lord Queensberry said. "There must have been just as many gay people in the 19th century as today, they just didn't come out of the closet."
Wilde's imprisonment, though, would eventually inspire others. According to the Sunday Telegraph, Wilde has become "the patron saint of the dandy tendency in 20th-century English letters"; indeed, his life is cited as the exemplar for undergraduates seeking to express themselves through art.
Mr. Holland has little time for those who recently tried and failed to have the British Home Secretary give Wilde a pardon.
"I just feel in some ways you can't rewrite Oscar Wilde's tragedy," he said. "What is a pardon going to do? It's a great tragedy. Why change it?"
Besides, Mr. Holland said, what stands the test of time is Wilde's work. That's why Wilde will enter Poets' Corner.
"Literary critics told me that this was a man of genius whose time had come," said the Very Rev. Michael Mayne, the Dean of Westminster Abbey, the person who chose Wilde for Poets' Corner after prominent writers began lobbying for his inclusion.
"I think Wilde could not have been commemorated in this way soon after his death," he said. "The Victorians were blinded by what he had done and blinded by the scandal. We live in rather different times. He paid a very heavy price for what he had done. One needs to look at his life with a certain compassion and at his work with a good deal of admiration."
Dean Mayne said Wilde more than met Westminster's criteria, which included the durability of the writer's work over 100 years and the contribution the work made to society. As for Wilde's lifestyle, Poets' Corner is dotted with writers whose lives were tarnished by scandalous behavior.
"I've had one letter of protest, which is astonishing," Dean Mayne said. "It came from an extreme conservative evangelical who said, 'How dare you memorialize a sodomite?' "
So today, the famous men and women of British letters will come to Westminster Abbey, and head toward its south transept, to honor a new member of an exclusive club. So too will gather the heirs to Great Britain's literary tragedy, a century after a marquess set out to destroy a playwright.
"Such an extraordinary story," Dean Mayne said. "There is something satisfying by the fact it has come full circle."