Either That Wallpaper Goes ...

It's actually most unlikely that these were Oscar Wilde's very last words. It was in his final days, when he was living in a dingy Paris hotel – increasingly isolated due to his public humiliation in being found guilty of gross indecency – that he is reliably reported to have remarked, during one of his final trips outside, "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go."

According to Wikipedia, this was documented in a biography of Wilde, published in 1988, by the American literary critic and biographer Richard Ellman (who also wrote highly–acclaimed biographies of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats).

One of the few friends who remained loyal to Wilde following his conviction, and who supported him after his release from prison, was the English author and aesthete Reginald 'Reggie' Turner (1869–1938). Turner was at Wilde's bedside when he died, but he doesn't seem to have recorded any last words.

© Haydn Thompson 2021