Life & Background
Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to a surgeon father and a poet-nationalist mother, and took a double first at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, where he absorbed Ruskin and Pater. He built a public persona around aesthetic dress and epigram, lectured across America, edited a women's magazine, and married Constance Lloyd, with whom he had two sons. Between 1892 and 1895 he wrote the society comedies that made him the most successful playwright in London. In 1895, at the height of that success, he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel over an accusation regarding his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas; the case collapsed, and Wilde was prosecuted and sentenced to two years' hard labour for gross indecency. He was released bankrupt in 1897 and died in Paris in 1900.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Jack Worthing keeps a fictitious wastrel brother called Ernest as an excuse to leave his country house for London; his friend Algernon keeps an invalid friend called Bunbury for the reverse purpose. Jack, known as Ernest in town, wants to marry Algernon's cousin Gwendolen, who declares that she could only love a man named Ernest. Her mother, Lady Bracknell, interrogates Jack and rejects him on learning he was found as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station. Algernon arrives at Jack's country house impersonating Ernest and courts Jack's ward Cecily, who has also decided she can only love an Ernest. The tangle unravels when Miss Prism, Cecily's governess, is revealed to have absent-mindedly left a baby in a handbag years earlier — the baby being Jack, whose real name turns out to be Ernest.
Subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, the play weaponises triviality: its characters treat food, clothes, and names with total gravity while treating marriage, death, and moral duty as inconveniences, and this inversion is the satire. The dialogue works by epigram and paradox, so that the wit is distributed evenly rather than owned by a single character, producing a stylised surface in which nobody speaks a sincere sentence. Bunburying — the invention of a second identity to escape social obligation — has been widely read as an encoded account of double life, and the pun on earnest sets sincerity, the great Victorian virtue, against being named Ernest, an accident of language.
Why Wilde Matters
Wilde is the central English figure of aestheticism, and his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray — with its insistence that there is no moral or immoral book, only well or badly written ones — is the standard English statement of art for art's sake. His comedies revived and perfected the comedy of manners, and Earnest is regularly named the finest English comedy after Shakespeare. His trial and imprisonment make him foundational to queer literary studies, and De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol document the aftermath in a wholly different register.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Happy Prince and Other Tales1888
- The Picture of Dorian Gray1890
- Lady Windermere's Fan1892
- A Woman of No Importance1893
- Salomé1893
- An Ideal Husband1895
- The Importance of Being Earnest1895
- De Profundis1905