The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1983 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. The novel takes the form of a diary kept by Oscar Wilde during the last months of his life in Paris, from August to November 1900. Exiled, impoverished, and dying, Wilde reviews his life — the early triumphs, the love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the trials, the imprisonment in Reading Gaol, and the exile that followed.
Ackroyd’s achievement was the voice: he wrote in a pastiche of Wilde’s style so accomplished that it was impossible to distinguish the fictional diary from genuine Wilde prose. The wit, the epigrams, the self-dramatization, the underlying melancholy — all were perfectly rendered.
Collecting The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
First edition (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1983): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine in jacket: $100–$300
- US first edition (Harper & Row): $40–$100
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Ackroyd’s debut novel, Somerset Maugham Prize winner.
Wilde’s Final Voice
Ackroyd imagines Oscar Wilde’s diary during his final months in Paris, after prison and exile. The voice is a remarkable act of literary ventriloquism: Wilde’s wit, his cadences, his mixture of self-pity and self-knowledge are sustained through the novel’s length. Ackroyd’s Wilde is not the triumphant wit of the plays but the broken man of the De Profundis letter — though even in defeat, the prose sparkles.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Ackroyd approach biography in fiction? Ackroyd’s novels frequently inhabit real historical figures — Wilde, Chatterton, Dr Dee, Dan Leno — and give them voices that blend historical research with literary invention. He is not interested in documentary accuracy but in the imaginative truth of character: what it felt like to be these people, to see the world through their eyes.