Oscar’s Missing 1895 Posters

It is part of the legend of Oscar Wilde that, when he was prosecuted for gross indecency, the managers of the two theatres where An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were being performed tried to keep the shows running by covering up Wilde’s name on the posters. How and when did this take place? And why have these posters been conspicuously missing depsite their notoriety?

In the July 2026 edition of Intentions, the Oscar Wilde Society’s newsletter, theatre historian and the society’s deputy chair Robert Whelan explores what happened. His fascinating report also reveals why the count of performances for both the London productions playing at the time of Wilde’s scandal, An Ideal Husband at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James’s Theatre, were wrong.