Oscar Wilde - Adelaide Street, London, UK - Dead Poets' Society Memorials on Waymarking.com

The title of the piece is "A Conversation with Oscar Wilde" and was created by the sculptor Maggi Hambling. There are several inscriptions on the statue. At the "head" end an inscription reads:
"A / Conversation / with / Oscar Wilde / 1854 - 1900".
On top of where the feet would be it reads:
"We are all / in the gutter / but some of us / are looking at / the stars"
The vertical surface, at the feet, reads the same as the other end.

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It took years of campaigning to get a permanent tribute to Oscar Wilde erected in London, scene of his greatest triumphs. On November 30, 1998, the statue by Maggi Hambling was at last unveiled in Adelaide Street, near Trafalgar Square. It is called A Conversation with Oscar Wilde and depicts the head and shoulders of the Irish playwright carved in bronze, rising out of what looks like a granite coffin. The “conversation” comes about because the coffin is also a bench for you to sit on and share a moment with the famous wit amidst the hubbub of central London. As well as a moment, you might consider sharing a cigarette for, like the true flouter of convention he was, Oscar is defiantly smoking. You may need to lend him one, though, as the interactive element Hambling had not envisaged when she created the statue was the regularity with which the bronze cigarette would get stolen! Around the base of the monument is a line from his play Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

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