Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde
Place of origin:	Earth
Appearances:	DWAM: Bat Attack!

Oscar Wilde was a 19th century Irish writer. During his days at the University of Oxford, an alien infected him with a disease that turned him into a Vampire. Returning home to Dublin, he passed the disease to Florence Balcombe. Some twenty years later he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol where the prison doctor experimented on him. After the Doctor cured Wilde of his vampirism, he then left for Paris. (DWAM: Bat Attack!) Once he arrived in Paris, he was met by Iris Wildthyme and an unknown incarnation of the Doctor prior to the eighth. (EDA: The Scarlet Empress)

In 1865 America, Wilde was impersonated by Robert Knox in the lead-up to assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (BFA: Assassin in the Limelight)

References

• In a yet earlier incarnation, the Doctor recalled having met Wilde. (ST: The Clanging Chimes of Doom) Later the Doctor mentioned having met George Bernard Shaw at a party hosted by Wilde (EDA: The Gallifrey Chronicles).
• In his tenth incarnation, the Doctor joked that his first incarnation had got his walking stick in an adventure involving Wilde and "midget assassins". (IDW: The Forgotten)
• Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward were two people that Professor Whitaker wished he could use his Time Scoop to meet. (DWN: Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion)

In real life, Wilde was infamously imprisoned for committing homosexual acts, under then-Draconian British law. Although a few of the sources above make reference to his imprisonment, none give the specific reason for his incarceration, nor make any other reference to his homosexuality. The Doctor Who universe is thus effectively silent as to Wilde's sexual orientation.