Oscar Wilde/Tear Jerker

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  • The Nightingale And The Rose, one of several children's stories written by Oscar Wilde, has a similar effect on this troper. Even attempting to recount a summary of The Little Match Girl makes her tear up, but that story made her weep like a child. Mostly because the sheer fact that it was written by Oscar Wilde lulls her into a false sense of security and then...
    • Seconded. Don't, under any circumstances, read it unless you want to become suicidally depressed.
    • Never forget The Young King, specially the coronation scene where God himself approves of the humble new sovereign when his own noblemen reject him. "A king higher than any of us has crowned you, my son!"
    • The Libri Vox recordings don't help either- one set, Happy Prince and a couple others, is read by a woman with a rather soft voice and a very cute accent. It makes it much, much worse. She manages to make a damp firework (albeit an anthropomorphic comic relief firework) come across as incredibly moving and highly tragic.
    • "The Fisherman and His Soul": Its power as a Tear Jerker is even lampshaded in the end, when the priest who ordered that the bodies of the fisherman and his mermaid girlfriend be buried in unconsecrated ground tries to speak in his homily about the Ire Of God, but he can't do so and speaks about the Love Of God and makes his audience bawl. And then he finds out why... the flowers in the church come from the Star Crossed Lovers' tombs.
    • The Birthday of the Infanta
    • Basically every Oscar Wilde-penned bit of scribbling that isn't for the stage is worth a cry or two (and even then, watch out for Lady Windemere's Fan and A Woman Of No Importance), but especially De Profundis, Wilde's essays on Christ and Socialism, his letters to the newspapers about prison conditions, or anything he ever said about love, unless the reader wants to be wrung out like a dishcloth. And if the readers ignore the disclaimer above, they'd do well not to follow those pieces up with a perusal of Ellman's biography of Wilde, as it will likely leave them with the desire to dig up a few famous corpses and strangle them; the man is utterly Moe.
  • The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written just after his release from the titular prison.

"Something was dead in each of us,
and what was dead was Hope."

"I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in goal
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long."

    • And the excerpt that was made epitaph on Wilde's tomb,

"And alien tears will fill for him,
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn."

  • If you read up more on the Wilde family after Oscar's arrest, it turns into a Tear Jerker. Constance dies, leaving her sons in the care of her family who try to bar them from seeing their father ever again. The sons finding out about his death and what got him arrested. Cyril, Wilde's eldest son, is killed by a sniper serving in WWI. Wilde's youngest son, Vivian, loses his wife before he comes home from WWI... it's amazing that Vivian made it to 80 without losing his mind to grief.
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