Where to Start with Oscar Wilde: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Oscar Wilde — whether to begin with The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, or An Ideal Husband. A complete reading guide.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) is the most brilliantly witty writer in the English language — the playwright, novelist, and essayist whose epigrams have become so widely quoted that many are no longer attributed to him. His major works — The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, An Ideal Husband — are celebrations of wit, beauty, and the exposure of Victorian social hypocrisy, written in a prose style that achieves its effects with apparent effortlessness. His life — brilliant, social, catastrophically destroyed by his prosecution for homosexuality — is one of the great Victorian tragedies.
Where to Start
The Masterpiece Comedy: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
The essential Wilde — and the greatest comedy in English literature since Shakespeare. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff have invented fictional alter egos (Jack’s ‘Ernest’ in town, Algernon’s ‘Bunbury’ in the country) to escape their social obligations; when both fall in love and must become genuine, the complications multiply. The wit is Wilde at his most precise and most sustained: ‘To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ The play functions simultaneously as farce, comedy of manners, and social satire of Victorian hypocrisy about identity and truth.
The Gothic Novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Wilde’s only novel — and one of the essential Victorian novels. Dorian’s portrait that ages in his place is simultaneously a Gothic horror device and Wilde’s most sustained philosophical argument: about the nature of beauty, about the relationship between art and morality, about what the pursuit of pure sensual experience ultimately costs. Lord Henry Wotton is Wilde’s most brilliant creation — a dandy whose epigrams are the most dangerous things he utters — and the novel’s ending (in which the physical reality of Dorian’s corruption is finally revealed) is one of the great horror sequences in Victorian fiction.
An Ideal Husband (1895)
Wilde’s second-greatest play — a comedy of political blackmail and social hypocrisy in which the apparently ideal Sir Robert Chiltern is discovered to have built his political career on a crime, and his wife’s illusions about his perfection must be accommodated to reality. The play is more serious than The Importance of Being Earnest (its social criticism is more direct) and almost as witty; Mrs. Cheveley, the villain, is one of the great comic villains of the English stage. Best read or seen after The Importance of Being Earnest.
Wilde’s Essays
Wilde’s essays — particularly ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ — are the most complete statements of his aesthetic and social philosophy. ‘The Decay of Lying’ argues, in dialogue form, that life imitates art rather than art imitating life: that nature and human behaviour are shaped by artistic representations rather than the reverse. ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ is Wilde’s most explicitly political essay — an argument that socialism would liberate human beings to pursue their individual development. Both are available in various essay collections and demonstrate Wilde as a serious thinker, not merely a wit.
Reading Wilde
Wilde’s work rewards reading aloud — his dialogue is written to be spoken, and the rhythm of his sentences is as important as their content. The epigrams, taken out of context, can seem merely clever; in context, they illuminate the hypocrisy of the characters who speak or hear them. The best approach is to read his plays as plays rather than as literary texts — attending to what each character wants, what they conceal, and how Wilde uses wit as both mask and revelation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Oscar Wilde?
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is the best starting point — Wilde's masterpiece comedy, in which two young men who have created fictional alter egos (Bunburying, in Wilde's coinage) to escape their social obligations find themselves entangled in misunderstandings about identity, name, and truth. The play is the wittiest work in the English comic tradition; every scene generates at least one line that has become a quotation. The Picture of Dorian Gray is the best starting point for readers who want Wilde's only novel — and one of the finest Gothic novels in English.
What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about?
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) follows Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man in late Victorian London, who sits for a portrait and, on the influence of the brilliant, amoral Lord Henry Wotton, wishes that the portrait would age in his place. His wish is granted: the portrait ages and records Dorian's sins while Dorian himself remains youthful and beautiful. The novel is simultaneously a Gothic horror story, a Faustian tale, an account of the relationship between beauty and morality, and a roman à clef about the Aesthetic movement and its dangers.
What makes Oscar Wilde's wit so distinctive?
Wilde's wit is distinctive for its structural precision: his epigrams work by inverting conventional wisdom or reversing expected phrases in a way that is simultaneously shocking and obviously true. 'I can resist everything except temptation'; 'The truth is rarely pure and never simple'; 'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.' The wit is never merely clever — it almost always contains a genuine insight about Victorian social hypocrisy, about the relationship between appearance and reality, about what people say and what they mean. Wilde's comedy takes seriously what his society refused to acknowledge.
What happened to Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Wilde was convicted of 'gross indecency' (homosexuality) in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour. The trial followed his disastrous libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused him of 'posing as a sodomite' (sic); Wilde, advised to drop the case, refused, and the subsequent criminal trial used evidence from the libel case. The two years' hard labour destroyed his health; he was released in 1897 and immediately left England for France, where he died in Paris in 1900, aged 46. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis (his long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written in prison) are the literary products of his imprisonment.
