Radio Listener with Jim Gilchrist: Great Lives|Jack London’s People of the Abyss|Ship of Dreams

OSCAR Wilde may have been a brilliant wit and writer but, according to author, miserabilist and psychogeographer Will Self, he also set back gay rights in Britain by 30 years.

Self, whose novel Dorian: An Imitation was an updating of Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, makes the claim, having nominated Wilde for this Tuesday’s GREAT LIVES. Wilde was at the height of his success when the libel case he brought against the Marquess of Queensberry over his relationship with Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, triggered the trial, imprisonment and exile which hounded him to an early death. The scandal sent seismic tremors through British cultural life, but to what extent did it impact on attitudes to homosexuality?

Franny Moyle, biographer of Wilde’s wife, Constance, discusses the issue with Self and the programme’s presenter, Matthew Parris.

Wilde’s rarefied world of aesthetics and well-honed epigrams was as far removed as you could get from the grim realities of life for the underclass living in conditions which appalled the American author and social activist Jack London when he arrived in England in 1902.

What he encountered among the poor of London’s East End drove him to write a damning account, and in JACK LONDON’S people OF THE ABYSS, Dan Cruickshank, who himself lives in the East End, follows in London’s footsteps to evoke just what the American saw and why the author of such rugged classics as Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf claimed Children of the Abyss to be the book of which he was most proud.

Privilege doesn’t necessarily fend off ill fortune, however. Ask the socialites on the Titanic, as they struggled to get into too few lifeboats, a century ago next week. The anniversary continues to be marked by numerous programmes, including a five-part series, SHIP OF DREAMS, in which author Jeanette Winterson looks at the glittering illusions and harsh realities of the ill-starred vessel, tapping into audio archive accounts from survivors and artefacts which have been raised from the world’s most famous wreck.

GREAT LIVES

Tuesday, Radio 4, 4:30pm

Jack London’s people of the abyss

Monday, Radio 4, 4pm

Ship of Dreams

Monday-Friday, Radio 4, 1:45pm