Two years’ imprisonment with or without hard labour was the maximum sentence for an offence contrary to s.11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. The Act came into force on 1 January 1886 and for the first time made ‘acts of gross indecency’ – any sexual activity short of sodomy done in private between adult men – a crime. Up until then the criminal law had been concerned only with buggery and acts against public decency or conduct tending to the corruption of youth. Section 11 had been introduced at the last moment as an amendment to an Act, the aim of which was to protect vulnerable women and girls from sexual exploitation and to suppress brothels. It was soon dubbed ‘the Blackmailer's Charter’. In the case of one Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde it could have been called ‘the father's Fury’.

The father in question was the eighth marquess of Queensberry who resented Wilde's intimate relationship with ‘Bosie’, his wayward third son, Lord Alfred Douglas. His anger wreaking havoc with his spelling, he accused Wilde of ‘posing as a somdomite’. Bosie later admitted in his Autobiography to ‘familiarities of the kind common among public school boys’ but utterly denied committing ‘the sin which takes its name from one of the cities of the Plain’. Egged on by his vengeful Adonis, Wilde hubristically prosecuted the hated father for criminal libel. Belatedly, after admitting assignations with working-class youths, he dropped the case half-way through the trial. Too late. The enraged marquess ensured that criminal proceedings were instigated against the man whom he considered to be his son's seducer.