Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, in politics on trial, I'm going to be talking about perhaps the most notorious trials of the late 19th century,

certainly in England. The trials of Oscar Wilde. They were, for Wilde himself, a disaster, a personal tragedy.

They destroyed him. But they were also something more. They were a glimpse of an entire society, how it saw itself

and how it failed to see itself.

In the last episode, which was also about the downfall of a prominent Irishman in England,

Parnel, it was the story of two trials, a criminal investigation and then a divorce trial.

Today, the downfall of another Irishman in England, it's the story of three trials, one libel trial and two

criminal trials. All three took place an incredibly brief period of time, one of the shocking things,

one of the many shocking things seen now about the trials of Oscar Wilde is all three of those

trials took place in the space of two months,

April to May 1895. And once this process was started, it was like a train running down the

track with no one able to stop it. It was out of control. And it just accelerated through wildlife

and destroyed him. All three of the trials in this case were

jury trials. But one of the unusual features of them is the different role that the jury played in

each case. In the libel trial, the jury was in the end given very, very little discretion. It was instructed by the judge

about the verdict it had to reach. It was given one question on which it was allowed to pass judgment,

but the direction was very, very clear. In the second trial, the first criminal trial,

the jury couldn't reach a verdict, which is a mystery which remains unsolved to this day.

No one knows what happened in that jury room. How and why, at least one person, resisted

the rush to judgment. In the third trial, the second criminal trial, the jury was unanimous,

and returned its verdict very quickly. All of these things

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