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From Wikipedia: "Women's wigs developed in a somewhat different way. They were worn from the 18th century onwards, although at first only surreptitiously. Full wigs in the 19th and early 20th century were not fashionable. They were often worn by old ladies who had lost their hair. In the film Mr. Skeffington (1944), when Bette Davis has to wear a wig after a bout of diphtheria, it is a moment of pathos and a symbol of her frailty.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century hairdressers in England and France did a brisk business supplying postiches, or pre-made small wiglets, curls, and false buns to be incorporated into the hairstyle. The use of postiches did not diminish even as women's hair grew shorter in the decade between 1910 and 1920, but they seem to have gone out of fashion during the 1920s. In the 1960s a new type of synthetic wig was developed using a modacrylic fiber which made wigs more affordable. Reid-Meredith was a pioneer in the sales of these types of wigs."

From Wikipedia, on Wilde's affair with Alfred Douglas and how it turned out: "In mid-1891 Lionel Johnson introduced Wilde to Alfred Douglas, an undergraduate at Oxford at the time. Known to his family and friends as "Bosie", he was a handsome and spoilt young man. An intimate friendship sprang up between Wilde and Douglas and by 1893 Wilde was infatuated with Douglas and they consorted together regularly in a tempestuous affair. If Wilde was relatively indiscreet, even flamboyant, in the way he acted, Douglas was reckless in public. Wilde, who was earning up to £100 a week from his plays (his salary at The Woman's World had been £6), indulged Douglas's every whim: material, artistic or sexual.

Douglas soon dragged Wilde into the Victorian underground of gay prostitution and Wilde was introduced to a series of young, working class, male prostitutes from 1892 onwards by Alfred Taylor. These infrequent rendezvous usually took the same form: Wilde would meet the boy, offer him gifts, dine him privately and then take him to a hotel room. Unlike Wilde's idealised, pederastic relations with Ross, John Gray, and Douglas, all of whom remained part of his aesthetic circle, these consorts were uneducated and knew nothing of literature. Soon his public and private lives had become sharply divided; in De Profundis he wrote to Douglas that "It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement... I did not know that when they were to strike at me it was to be at another's piping and at another's pay."

Douglas and some Oxford friends founded a journal, The Chameleon, to which Wilde "sent a page of paradoxes originally destined for the Saturday Review". "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" was to come under attack six months later at Wilde's trial, where he was forced to defend the magazine to which he had sent his work. In any case, it became unique: The Chameleon was not published again.

Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was known for his outspoken atheism, brutish manner and creation of the modern rules of boxing. Queensberry, who feuded regularly with his son, confronted Wilde and Lord Alfred about the nature of their relationship several times, but Wilde was able to mollify him. In June 1894, he called on Wilde at 16 Tite Street, without an appointment, and clarified his stance: "I do not say that you are it, but you look it, and pose at it, which is just as bad. And if I catch you and my son again in any public restaurant I will thrash you" to which Wilde responded: "I don't know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight". His account in De Profundis was less triumphant: "It was when, in my library at Tite Street, waving his small hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father... stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out". Queensberry only described the scene once, saying Wilde had "shown him the white feather", meaning he had acted in a cowardly way. Though trying to remain calm, Wilde saw that he was becoming ensnared in a brutal family quarrel. He did not wish to bear Queensberry's insults, but he knew to confront him could lead to disaster were his liaisons disclosed publicly."

From The Gaurdian, about lesbain Victorian marriages: "During the 19th century, women in what some Victorians referred to as "female marriages" lived together, owned property in common, called each other "hubby" or "wedded wife" and were recognised as a couple, including by the traditionalists among their neighbours and friends. What is more, the literary critic Sharon Marcus has trenchantly argued in her landmark Between Women, these relationships – based as they were upon a greater degree of equality – served as a model for those who sought to reform England's restrictive marriage laws. Female marriages conducted openly in the mid-19th century would be driven underground in the following century."

From enotes.com, a segment from an essay on homosexuality in 19th-century literature: " Despite the heavy persecution of male-male sexual activity, homosexual subcultures thrived as they had for centuries. Underground institutions provided space and an economic basis for this subculture, much the way pubs and clubs might service a man's platonic social activities. The most visible subcultural activity occurred among middle- and lower-class men, many of whom were exclusively homosexual, usually passive in sex, occasionally transvestite, and whose social life consisted of participation in this subculture. Some historians contend that these men did not represent the majority of the male population who engaged in homosexual sex, but simply the most visible. Court documents suggest that most male homosexuals were married men who maintained conventionally masculine manners and families, like Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls, a war veteran and member of a respectable family who was executed for sodomy in 1833.

In general, homosexual men of the upper-middle class and the aristocracy belonged to this less visible milieu, insulated to some degree by wealth and social status. When an explicit subculture emerged later in the century among these men, it contributed to the development of homosexual identity and social rights. Historians attribute this to the influence of two phenomena: the development of a medical definition of homosexuality and the intellectual reevaluation of classical literature. The first, a medical discourse that classified individuals according to their sexual desires, owed its development to the work of sexologists throughout Europe, including Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis. The latter owed its development largely to the efforts of Benjamin Jowett, who reintroduced the teaching of Plato and other classical authors at Oxford University as part of the Oxford Great Works Curriculum. This training allowed homosexual undergraduates—including such influential intellectuals as Wilde, Walter Pater, and J. A. Symonds—to validate their desires as the resurrected spirit of Hellenism: noble, aesthetic, intellectually rigorous, even martial and athletic. Symonds and Edward Carpenter, in particular, dedicated themselves to defining a positive and coherent image of homosexual identity. Their efforts began to have some effect in the 1880s and 1890s, coexisting with a long-standing conviction that "effeminacy" and "corruption" characterized male-male desire. The traditional condemnation re-emerged in 1895 in response to Wilde's trial. While the trial brought the discussion of homosexual desire into the open, it also catalyzed the kind of active persecution that had been for some time dormant. Many homosexual men, particularly those of high social status, resettled at least temporarily on the continent, seeking to avoid scandal and prosecution. Even the ambiguous forms of same-sex love that had so far been integral to Victorian culture became suspect, and homoaffectional literature became both more explicit in its sexuality and much less common." (Full article here.)