by Reading Victorian Tragedies While Contemporary Politics Deteriorates
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Oscar Wilde’s Ghost Reviewing Modern Ireland
I’m reading Oscar Wilde while the news plays about contemporary Irish politics. The juxtaposition is devastating. Wilde was persecuted for being himself. Modern Ireland is, theoretically, past that. But somehow the pattern repeats.
Literature teaches you that history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. The Victorian obsession with propriety and reputation has just become the modern obsession with electoral performance and image management. Same game, different costumes.
The 1900s As Political Mirror
I’m fascinated by the period right after the Irish independence push. Yeats. Joyce. Synge. All writing at the moment when Ireland was trying to figure out what it wanted to be. The literature is brilliant because it’s wrestling with the same questions we’re wrestling with now: identity, culture, what we owe each other as a nation.
The difference is they did it with more beautiful prose. Yeats wrote about Irish identity with genuine poetry. Now we argue about it on Twitter in 280 characters.
The Tragedy Continues
What strikes me about reading Victorian literature while following Irish politics is how little has changed. The same tribal divisions. The same inability to see across group lines. The same certainty that the other side is wrong, immoral, and doesn’t deserve power.
Wilde understood tragedy because he lived it. He understood that humans are capable of brilliant insight and spectacular stupidity simultaneously. He understood that the things we’re most certain about are usually the things we understand least.
Literature as Political Education
I think every politician should be required to read Irish literature from the 1900s before making policy. Not because it’s beautiful, though it is. But because it teaches humility about your own certainty. It shows that every generation thinks it’s figured out something fundamental, and every generation is partially wrong.
The Irish question of 1905 is still the Irish question of 2025. We just have better internet and worse wisdom.
For cultural commentary, read Private Eye.
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