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The Reformer

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Oscar Wilde

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Abstract

“It is a dangerous thing,” Lord Darlington avers in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “to reform anyone” (Wilde. Lady Windermere’s Fan. In The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray, 331–88. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Such a remark would seem to suggest a categorical resistance to reform, and Wilde was frequently skeptical of social movements, even those that would seem to dovetail with his own values. Nevertheless, it is clear that Wilde’s life and work were informed by an interest in social issues, including the advancement of women, Irish nationalism, and labor reform. By way of conclusion, this chapter considers Wilde’s approach to social reform, understood as the translation of ideas into action. Wilde’s seeming ambivalence toward reform can be better understood by placing his ideas within a nineteenth-century context in which reform had come to signify an attention to action rather than affect. In the end, Wilde would come to acknowledge the importance of material and even programmatic reform efforts, while insisting that such measures must be complemented by critical reflection and the sympathetic imagination—namely, by a universal commitment to the contemplative life.

First Burgher. What is this “reform”! What means it, eh?

Second Burgher. Faith! It mean this, to let all be as ‘tis.

I would have somewhat else.

Oscar Wilde, The Duchess of Padua

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 123–206, 175.

  2. 2.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 147.

  3. 3.

    Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (New York: New Directions, 1935), 104.

  4. 4.

    Roditi, Oscar Wilde, 113.

  5. 5.

    Patricia Behrendt, Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave, 1991), 15. Although it is almost impossible to assess whether Wilde’s conduct at trial was a matter of tragic naïvete or bravery, there is a great deal of sympathetic truth to Behrendt’s assessment. Wilde’s refusal to operate according to the rules of politics and social custom is at once exhilarating and agonizing to behold in the trial transcripts. See Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Perennial, 2004).

  6. 6.

    See Josephine M. Guy, “Oscar Wilde and Socialism,” in Oscar Wilde in Context, ed. Peter Raby and Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 242–52. See also: Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 275–280.

  7. 7.

    Wilde’s debt to writers like Peter Kropotkin, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, William Morris, and others has been established, for instance, in George Woodcock, Anarchism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963); J.D. Thomas, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”: An Essay in Context, Rice University Studies 51 (1965): 83–95; Isobel Murray (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man and Prison Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), vii-xviii; Laurence Davis, “Morris, Wilde, and Marx on the Social Preconditions of Individual Development,” Political Studies 44.4 (1996): 719–32; and Ruth Livesy, “Morris, Carpenter, Wilde, and the Political Aesthetics of Labor,” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 601–16.

  8. 8.

    In particular, Killeen observes that the terms “anarchism,” “socialism,” and “Fenianism” were often used interchangeably at the time—and none of these categories was organized around a clearly defined set of principles that would have been legible to the general reader. See Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (London: Palgrave, 2005), 110–115.

  9. 9.

    For instance, see also Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

  10. 10.

    Raymond Williams, Keywords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 202.

  11. 11.

    Joanna Innes, “‘Reform’ in English Public Life: The Fortunes of a Word,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 71–97, 84.

  12. 12.

    Joanna Innes, Introduction to Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 1–70, 62.

  13. 13.

    Innes, “Reform in English Public Life,” 96.

  14. 14.

    Williams, Keywords, 203.

  15. 15.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 180.

  16. 16.

    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 168.

  17. 17.

    Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 478. In many sources (including the Complete Letters), the recipient has been presumed to be “R. Clegg,” though the true recipient seems to have been Ernest Bernulf Clegg, whose handwriting was at times less than exemplary.

  18. 18.

    Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 179.

  19. 19.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 117. An especially rich discussion of this often overlooked play is to be found in Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, “Reconsidering Wilde’s Vera; or, The Nihilists,” in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 65–84.

  20. 20.

    Oscar Wilde, Vera, in Salome, A Florentine Tragedy, Vera (Boston: John W. Luce, 1908), 115–261, 147, 244.

  21. 21.

    Wilde, Vera, 220.

  22. 22.

    Wilde, Vera , 144. Stuart Robertson has suggested that the play “offers the spectacle of the revolutionary as a scapegoat, one whose sacrifice highlights the logic of the systems of representation to which they belong” (154). The same approach, in Robertson’s view, would inform Wilde’s decision to become both spectacle and scapegoat following his 1895 arrest. See Stuart Robertson, “The Terrorist, the Artist, and the Citizen: Oscar Wilde and Vera,” Journal for Cultural Research 18.2 (2014): 146–157.

  23. 23.

    Wilde, Vera, 240, 242.

  24. 24.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Remarkable Rocket,” in A House of Pomegranates, The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 233–54, 253.

  25. 25.

    Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 93–158, 104.

  26. 26.

    Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 477–538, 504.

  27. 27.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 102–103.

  28. 28.

    The line that follows could practically serve as an epigraph to “The Critic as Artist”: “To act is so easy, as Goethe says; to think is so hard!” Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893): 1–41, 28. Years earlier, Arnold had remarked in “To a Republican Friend” (1848): “Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem / Rather to patience prompted, than that proud / Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud.” Matthew Arnold, Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1879), 6–7.

  29. 29.

    Oscar Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 1876–8, “Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle Collection,” MS W6721 M3 N9113, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Los Angeles, CA), 0029.

  30. 30.

    Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869).

  31. 31.

    Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism,” 36. Walter Pater would note in his review of The Picture of Dorian Gray that Wilde “carries on, more perhaps than any other writer, the brilliant critical work of Matthew Arnold.” He was speaking, most immediately, of Wilde’s talent for “startling his ‘countrymen,’” a tactic that would seem calculated to promote the free and fresh current of ideas Arnold so prized. Walter Pater, “A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde,” The Bookman (November 1891): 50–60, 59.

  32. 32.

    Indeed, Arnold’s language in Culture and Anarchy (1869) seems to dovetail everywhere with Wilde’s later writings, especially on this point: “So that, here as elsewhere, the practical operations of our liberal friends, by which they set so much store, and in which they invite us to join them and to show what Mr. Bright calls a commendable interest, do not seem to us so practical for real good as they think; and our Liberal friends seem to us themselves to need to Hellenise, as we say, a little,—that is, to examine into the nature of real good, and to listen to what their consciousness tells them about it,—rather than to pursue with such heat and confidence their present practical operations.” Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 192.

  33. 33.

    Julia Prewitt-Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 67.

  34. 34.

    Lady Wilde, “Jacta Alia Est,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, together with Essays and Stories by Lady Wilde (Boston: The Aldine Publishing Company, 1910): 20–30, 20.

  35. 35.

    Both Karen Sasha Tipper and Joy Melville remark upon rumors that Lady Wilde proclaimed herself to be “the culprit, if culprit there be,” though no contemporary transcripts verify this account (Melville, 39). See Karen Sasha Anthony Tipper, A Critical Biography of Lady Jane Wilde, 1821?–1896, Irish Revolutionist, Humanist, Scholar and Poet (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 224; and Joy Melville, Mother of Oscar (London: John Murray, 1994), 38–9.

  36. 36.

    See Melville and Tipper.

  37. 37.

    Oscar Wilde, “Mr Froude’s Blue-Book,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203–206.

  38. 38.

    M.J. O’Neill, “Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Unpublished Lecture Notes of Oscar Wilde,” University Review 1.4 (1955) 29–32, 29.

  39. 39.

    O’Neill, “Irish Poets,” 30.

  40. 40.

    Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson have scrupulously annotated Wilde’s political allusions in these poems, though noting that the limited recognition the poems garnered upon publication “may have been responsible for Wilde’s decision to limit the thematic range of his later work to mainly classical, pastoral, and Decadent subjects” (xxv). It is, of course, difficult to assess to any degree of certainty whether Wilde’s movement away from political verse may have been motivated by the market, but his political leanings certainly assumed a different form from this time forward, taking for instance a more abstract and speculative form in the fairy tales. One especially illuminating discussion of Wilde’s political poetry is to be found in Nicholas Frankel, “‘Ave Imperatrix’: Oscar Wilde and the Poetry of Englishness,” Victorian Poetry 35.2 (1997): 117–37.

  41. 41.

    Oscar Wilde, “Quantum Mutata,” in Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 40 [lines 10–13]. The poem also calls to mind Ford Madox Brown’s painting “Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois” (1877), which features Cromwell in conversation with Milton over the massacre. The painting was first exhibited in Manchester, where it remains still, and I have thus far been unable to find concrete evidence of Wilde’s encounter with the painting.

  42. 42.

    See Oscar Wilde, Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 237–38, 245.

  43. 43.

    Oscar Wilde, “Libertatis Sacra Fames,” in Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 148 [lines 6–8].

  44. 44.

    Wilde, “Libertatis Sacra Fames,” 148 [lines 14].

  45. 45.

    John Sloan, Authors in Context: Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 100. The implication is that both Wilde and his mother, despite their avowed sympathies for nationalism and labor, nevertheless aspired to and celebrated a decidedly English form of aristocracy in practice.

  46. 46.

    Sloan, Oscar Wilde, 100.

  47. 47.

    Julia A. Buckler, “Melodramatizing Russia: Nineteenth-Century Views from the West,” in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, eds. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

  48. 48.

    Ruth Robbins, Oscar Wilde (London: Continuum, 2011), 24–26.

  49. 49.

    Jarlath Killeen has established, many times over, that Irish culture was an enduring rather than an occasional influence on Wilde’s work. See The Faiths of Oscar Wilde and The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (New York: Routledge, 2016). See also Jerusha McCormack, Wilde the Irishman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House, 1994).

  50. 50.

    Robbins, Oscar Wilde, 26.

  51. 51.

    Oscar Wilde, “Theoretikos,” in Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 44–5, 44.

  52. 52.

    Wilde, “Theoretikos,” 45.

  53. 53.

    Wilde, “Theoretikos,” 44.

  54. 54.

    Wilde, “Theoretikos,” 44.

  55. 55.

    Barbara Caine, “Feminism,” in Oscar Wilde in Context, ed. Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 289–96, 291.

  56. 56.

    Wilde, An Ideal Husband, in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 389–476, 401.

  57. 57.

    In An Ideal Husband , Lady Chiltern enters the stage announcing: “I have just come from the Woman’s Liberal Association, where, by the way, Robert, your name was received with loud applause […]” (197).

  58. 58.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 311.

  59. 59.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 297.

  60. 60.

    For more context regarding Wilde’s editing of Woman’s World, see Diana Maltz, “Wilde’s The Woman’s World and the Culture of Aesthetic Philanthropy,” in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003): 186–211; Molly Youngkin, “The Aesthetic Character of Oscar Wilde’s The Woman’s World,” in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 121–42.

  61. 61.

    Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 18, 19, 21, 22.

  62. 62.

    Bernard Shaw, Shaw: An Autobiography, 1856–1898 (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969), 251.

  63. 63.

    Shaw, 251.

  64. 64.

    Shaw, 248.

  65. 65.

    Shaw, 248.

  66. 66.

    For an examination of Wilde as a political thinker, see for instance: Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde.

  67. 67.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 233.

  68. 68.

    Josephine M. Guy, “‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’: A (Con) Textual History,” in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003): 59–85.

  69. 69.

    Grant Allen, “Individualism and Socialism,” Contemporary Review 55 (1889): 730–34.

  70. 70.

    Dan Bivona has recently been at work establishing new and provocative links between Wilde and Allen in a piece soon to be published, though the connection has also been explored in Lindsay Wilhelm, “Sex in Utopia: The Evolutionary Hedonism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46.2 (2018): 403–424.

  71. 71.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 470n.

  72. 72.

    Edward Sullivan reported: “He never entertained any pronounced views on social, religious or political questions while in College.” Qtd. in Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York, 1916), 38. Sullivan’s account is, of course, a subjective one, and Wilde certainly seems to have offered direct commentaries on political ideas, especially in Poems. Nevertheless, personal convictions are always difficult to verify, and Wilde’s political views do seem to vacillate a great deal, as his early poetry would seem to indicate.

  73. 73.

    Oscar Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 1876–8, “Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle Collection,” MS W6721 M3 N9113, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Los Angeles, CA): 0013.

  74. 74.

    This at least is the source Wilde mentions in the notebook. Cairnes’s critique of Comte first appeared in an 1870 essay for the Fortnightly Review, entitled “M. Compte and Political Economy.”

  75. 75.

    Oscar Wilde, Commonplace Book, in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 107–152. 121 [69]. For all references to Wilde’s Notebook Kept at Oxford and Commonplace Book, I have included the pagination from Smith and Helfand’s edition, followed by the manuscript pagination in brackets (as shown).

  76. 76.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 130 [121].

  77. 77.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 116 [43].

  78. 78.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 116 [43].

  79. 79.

    John Ruskin, Stones of Venice (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1853), 169–70.

  80. 80.

    Oscar Wilde “Art and the Handicraftsman,” in Miscellanies. Ed. Robert Ross. London: Methuen and Company, 1908. 291–308, 307.

  81. 81.

    Wilde, “Art and the Handicraftsman,” 307.

  82. 82.

    Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Morris on Tapestry,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 96–98.

  83. 83.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Beauties of Bookbinding,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 104–106. A similar sentiment is conveyed by Wilde the following week in “The Close of the ‘Arts and Crafts’”: “In old days the craftsman was a designer, he had his prentice days of quiet study, and even the painter began by grinding colours. Some little old ornament still lingers here and there, on the brass rosettes of cart-horses, in the common milk-cans of Antwerp, in the water-vessels of Italy. But even this is disappearing. ‘The tourist passes by,’ and creates a demand that commerce satisfies in an unsatisfactory manner. We have not yet arrived at a healthy state of things. […] Art depends on Life. We cannot get it from machines. And yet machines are bad only when they are our masters.” Oscar Wilde, “The Close of the ‘Arts and Crafts,’” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106–108. To be sure, Wilde goes on to remark somewhat doubtfully on classifying bookbinding as a mode of individual expression; articulating “its own beauty, its own wonder,” Wilde remains reluctant to align it with painting or literature (“Beauties of Bookbinding,” 106). In later years, Wilde would take great care in selecting the binding for many of his own works, suggesting at least that such considerations helped to augment the effect of his own writing.

  84. 84.

    Oscar Wilde, “Poetical Socialists,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 170–72, 171.

  85. 85.

    Wilde, “Art and the Handicraftsman,” in Miscellanies (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 291–308, 305.

  86. 86.

    Wilde, House Decoration, in Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross. London: Methuen and Company, 1908. 279–90, 288–89.

  87. 87.

    Wilde, “Art and the Handicraftsman,” 208.

  88. 88.

    Isobel Murray is especially attuned to Emerson’s influence on Wilde. See her notes to Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Soul of Man, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 1–37, 200, 201, 206.

  89. 89.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” in Representative Men, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1860): 215–44, 236.

  90. 90.

    Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” 235.

  91. 91.

    Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” 237.

  92. 92.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 232.

  93. 93.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 232.

  94. 94.

    Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 167.

  95. 95.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 240.

  96. 96.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 264.

  97. 97.

    The Christian Socialists constitute a relevant instance of this tendency. See, for example: Edward R. Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  98. 98.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 241.

  99. 99.

    Emerson, 232.

  100. 100.

    See Jarlath Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde.

  101. 101.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Young King,” The Complete Shorter Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979): 171–84, 175.

  102. 102.

    Wilde, “The Young King,” 183.

  103. 103.

    Wilde, “The Young King,” 184.

  104. 104.

    Oscar Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” in Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 241–77, 275.

  105. 105.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 247.

  106. 106.

    See Thomas More, Utopia (New York: Columbian Publishing Company, 1891).

  107. 107.

    Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism, 32.

  108. 108.

    Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 262.

  109. 109.

    Oscar Wilde, “A Chinese Sage,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 237–43, 238. As Jerusha McCormack has astutely noted, Wilde’s rhetoric throughout the 1890s resembles and sometimes even seems to paraphrase that of Zhuangzi. See Jerusha McCormack, “Oscar Wilde: A Daoist Sage,” in Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2018): 73–104.

  110. 110.

    Oscar Wilde, “Literary and Other Notes,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 1–11. 1.

  111. 111.

    For a detailed and illuminating treatment of the social problem novel, see Josephine M. Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual, and Communal Life (London: Macmillan, 1996).

  112. 112.

    Wilde, “Decay of Lying” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 72–103, 78.

  113. 113.

    Oscar Wilde, “Some Literary Notes,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 175–84, 180.

  114. 114.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 1045.

  115. 115.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 1046–47.

  116. 116.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 849.

  117. 117.

    Wilde, Complete Letters, 1045–1049.

  118. 118.

    Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan in Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 331–88, 12.

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    Kimberly J. Stern

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Stern, K.J. (2019). The Reformer. In: Oscar Wilde. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24604-4_6

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