The British Library has announced it will posthumously reinstate gay poet and playwright Oscar Wilde’s reader pass after revoking it in 1895 due to his homosexuality. 

Known at the time as the British Museum Reading Room, the venue banned Wilde after he was found guilty of “gross indecency” with men and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

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The symbolic pass will be presented to Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, at an event on October 16, Wilde’s birthday. Asked how Wilde might react to the gesture, Holland told The Guardian, “He’d probably say ‘about time’ too.”

Holland, who is also a Wilde scholar, said that his grandfather had already been imprisoned for three weeks when the British Museum Reading Room revoked his access. “So he wouldn’t have known about it, which was probably as well… It would have just added to his misery to feel that one of the world’s great libraries had banned him from books just as the law had banned him from daily life. But the restitution of his ticket is a lovely gesture of forgiveness, and I’m sure his spirit will be touched.”

Holland also said, however, that he doesn’t think his grandfather’s conviction should be pardoned as part of a 2017 UK law allowing posthumous pardons for anyone convicted under former laws that criminalized homosexuality. The law led to pardons for an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 gay and bisexual men, but the names of those men were not released. 

“Oscar didn’t think there was anything wrong in same-sex love… I’m not absolutely certain he has been pardoned… If I had to ask for a pardon, I wouldn’t, because all it would do is make the British establishment feel better about itself… History’s history, and you can’t start rewriting it.”

Laura Walker, lead curator of modern archives and manuscripts, said the reinstatement of the pass is even more important since the British Library owns a massive collection of Wilde’s manuscripts. 

“We really want to honour Wilde now and acknowledge what happened to him,” Walker told The Guardian. “Section 11 of the law, which related to the criminalization of homosexuality, was unjust.”