by Oscar Wilde
Some years afterwards, when two beautiful children had been born to them, Lady Windermere came down on a visit to Alton Priory, a lovely old place, that had been the Duke’s wedding present to his son; and one afternoon she was sitting with Lady Arthur under a lime tree in the garden, watching the little boy and girl as they played up and down the rose-walk, like fitful sunbeams, when she suddenly took Lady Arthur’s hand in hers, and said, “Are you happy, Sybil?”
“Dear Lady Windermere, of course I am happy. Aren’t you?”
“I have no time to be happy, Sybil. I always like the last person who is introduced to me; but, as a rule, as soon as I know people I get tired of them.”
“Don’t your lions satisfy you, Lady Windermere?”
“Oh dear, no! lions are only good for one season. As soon as their manes are cut, they are the dullest creatures going. Besides, they behave very badly, if you are really nice to them. Do you remember that horrid Mr. Podgers? He was a dreadful impostor. Of course, I didn’t mind that at all, and even when he wanted to borrow money I forgave him, but I could not stand his making love to me. He has really made me hate Cheiromancy. I go in for Telepathy now:81 it is much more amusing.”
“You mustn’t say anything against Cheiromancy here, Lady Windermere; it is the only subject that Arthur does not like people to chaff about. I assure you he is quite serious over it.”
“You don’t mean to say that he believes in it, Sybil?”
“Ask him, Lady Windermere, here he is;” and Lord Arthur came up the garden with a large bunch of yellow roses in his hand, and his two children dancing round him.
“Lord Arthur?”
“Yes, Lady Windermere.”
“You don’t mean to say that you believe in Cheiromancy?”
“Of course I do,” answered Lord Arthur, smiling.
“But why?”
“Because I owe to it all the happiness of my life,” answered Lord Arthur, throwing himself into a wicker chair.
“My dear Lord Arthur, what do you owe to it?”
“Sybil,” he answered, handing his wife the roses, and looking into her violet eyes.
“What nonsense!” cried Lady Windermere.
* First published in three installments in The Court and Society Review, May 11–25, 1887, with illustrations by F. H. Townsend. Cheiromancy, the art of palm reading or telling the future from the study of the hand, was taken seriously by the late-Victorian elite. Wilde was good friends with the self-described cheiromantist Edward Heron-Allen, author of A Manual of Cheirosophy (1885) and “The Cheiromancy of To-Day” (1890). In 1885, shortly after the birth of his first child, Wilde asked Heron-Allen to “cast the child’s horoscope for us” (CL 262), and six months before “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” first appeared, Heron-Allen published a diagram of Wilde’s hand in The Daily Graphic. When contemplating the first American publication of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” Wilde invited Heron-Allen to “write a short preface on the cheiromancy of the story” (CL 328). When the story was republished in 1891, Wilde changed “a story of cheiromancy” to “a study of duty.” See also n.36 below.
1 Bentinck is an aristocratic surname associated with the Dukes of Portland and their descendants. No such place as Bentinck House existed in Wilde’s day. However, in 1881 Vanity Fair reported that “all that is notable in society and politics came early to Grafton Street [in London’s exclusive Mayfair district] and stayed late. Mrs. Bentinck’s house, which is … as full of objects of art as a museum, is of itself sufficient to please those who appreciate things of beauty, and it was filled last night with all the fair women and … best men in London, and … with that excellent music which is so great an incentive to music” (“In Society,” Vanity Fair, 9 April 1881, 207).
2 During every Parliamentary session, the Parliamentary Speaker gave two full-dress levées (formal receptions), to which peers, foreign ambassadors, ministers, and others were invited. These were important social events in fashionable society.
3 Lady Windermere’s reception is filled with characters designed to flatter readers of The Court and Society Review, the society paper in which “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” first appeared. In a few casual strokes, Wilde paints the British political, social, and artistic establishment of his day. But astute readers will notice that Wilde’s tone is satirical and subversive, and he is keenly alive to Lady Windermere’s partygoers’ pretentiousness. As Basil Hallward remarks in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “with an evening-coat and a white tie … anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.”
4 Pure gold. Princess Sophia of Carlsrühe is not alone in “talking bad French at the top of her voice.”
5Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage—published today as Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage—is still the preeminent guide to the British aristocracy.
6 Lady Windermere is at once more complicated and simpler than she appears in the eyes of her peers. She has mastered the art of appearances and she strives to incarnate the social graces extolled by Wilde’s own mother, Lady Wilde, who once wrote that “it is especially as hostess, when she reigns supreme at her own table, that a woman requires most tact, experience and varied knowledge of life.… By dignity, grace and tact she claims and receives her queenly right to the homage of courteous deference and purity of conversation” (“Social Graces”). But as her loudly spoken question “Where is my cheiromantist” indicates, Lady Windermere in fact lacks the tact and discretion to which she aspires, and like Lady Brandon in The Picture of Dorian Gray she “treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods.” She finds a real-life antecedent in Wilde’s own mother, Lady Wilde, who in the 1880s strove to transform her London home into one of the city’s leading salons: “If anyone was sitting in a corner unnoticed, Lady Wilde was sure to bring up someone to be introduced.… She generally prefaced her introductions with some such remark as ‘Mr. A. who has just written a delightful poem,’ or ‘Mrs. B., who is on the staff of the Snapdragon,’ or ‘Miss. C., whose new novel everybody is talking about’ ” (Catherine Hamilton, quoted in Horace Wyndham, Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde [London: T. V. Boardman, 1951], 172). However, Lady Wilde’s garrulousness often got the better of her, and although her receptions sometimes attracted a diverse and interesting crowd, to many of her own guests she was “a figure of fun” who dominated proceedings with her “strangely toned voice” and whose crowded rooms were filled with people one “had never heard of until Lady Wilde trotted them out” (W. B. Maxwell, quoted in Speranza, 172–73).
7 The Anarchist movement flourished and became briefly respectable in Britain in the 1880s. See Matthew Thomas, “Anarchism Infiltrates the Salon,” in Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures 1880–1914 (Ashgate, 2005), 8–9.
8 The world is built like that.
9 The junction of the wrist and the hand.
10 Lady Windermere is punning on the colloquial meaning of lions as people of note or celebrity.
11 Eton College, one of England’s preeminent private schools for boys, still draws many pupils from the British aristocracy. In “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” Erskine remarks of Eton, “There was … a good deal more play than work, but I cannot say I am sorry for that. It is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education, but what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as useful to me as anything I was taught at Cambridge” (p. 183 below).
12 An unfashionable semi-suburban neighborhood to the west of Central London. Wilde’s first biographer, Robert Sherard, remarked that Wilde “used to speak with contempt of Bayswater as the stronghold of all that was common and vulgar, and to be avoided” (The Life of Oscar Wilde [London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906], 177). In The Importance of Being Earnest, the perambulator containing the manuscript of Miss Prism’s “revoltingly sentimental” three-volume novel (and missing the baby that ought to have
been in the perambulator instead) is discovered “standing … in a remote corner of Bayswater.”
13 Lord Arthur’s reply is evasive, and we will later discover that Sybil does not “know” Lord Arthur at all.
14 An epigram borrowed from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881). Compare with Lady Bracknell’s remark in The Importance of Being Earnest, “I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”
15 The Morning Post was a prominent conservative London daily newspaper, noted for its attention to the activities of the powerful and the wealthy. In an early draft of The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell calls the Morning Post “the only document of our time from which the history of the English people in the XIXth century could be written with any regard to decorum or even decency.”
16 “A pouting expression, often conveying (mock) annoyance or distaste, or used flirtatiously” (Oxford English Dictionary, hereafter OED).
17 Militant nationalist French politician, appointed French Minister of War in 1886, whose policies appeared to be provoking a war with Imperial Germany at the time “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” was written.
18 Nemesis was an avenging goddess. According to Greek myth, the shield of Pallas Athene (the goddess of war and wisdom) displayed the decapitated head of the Gorgon Medusa.
19 The first mention in Wilde’s literary oeuvre of the secret double-life, the abiding theme of much of Wilde’s fiction and drama from 1887 to 1895.
20 In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian Gray also possesses “finely-curved” and “chiselled” lips.
21 Podgers might well speak questioningly in a low voice. By requesting payment in guineas rather than pounds, he is asking to be treated as a gentleman, not a tradesman. See, too, n.39 below. But Podgers’s genteel pretensions are betrayed in his very next breath, when he confesses that he has no club “just at present.”
22 A curtain hung over a door to prevent draughts.
23 Lord Arthur’s terrified flight through Central London prefigures that of Dorian Gray following his desertion of Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
24 Hyde Park, adjacent to the affluent Mayfair neighborhood of London where Lady Windermere dwells.
25 “I have the greatest contempt for optimism,” declares Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” Wilde’s contempt for optimism reflects the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, fashionable among British intellectuals in the 1880s and early 1890s.
26 The symbols of the metropolis—silent roadway, flickering gas lamps, solitary hansom—seem to reflect Lord Arthur’s guilt and isolation. Compare with The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which shortly after Dorian Gray commits a heinous crime, “The crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner, … A bitter blast swept across the Square. The gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches as if in pain.”
27 Marylebone Parish Church, on London’s wide and much-travelled Marylebone Road, represents the northward limit of Lord Arthur’s frightened journey by night through the poorest wards of London’s Marylebone district, to the north of Oxford Street. According to the historian David Owen, this was in Wilde’s day “a world of mean streets and closed courts,” where “prostitutes, thieves, and Irish immigrants made their headquarters,” and “a vertitable parade of prostitutes patrolled Portland Place” (The Government of Victorian London 1855–1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982], 261).
28 No street named “Rich Street” existed in Central London in Wilde’s day.
29 Belgrave Square, described by Baedeker’s Guide as “the center of West End pride and fashion,” anchors London’s affluent Belgravia district. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack Worthing owns a house in Belgrave Square, and even today it is the most aristocratic and prestigious of London addresses. Covent Garden was until 1974 the site of London’s principal fruit, vegetable, and flower market.
30 Compare with Wilde’s description of Covent Garden wagoners in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain. He followed into the Market, and watched the men unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them.”
31 Chocolate has been called “the Gods’ breakfast.” Wilde’s career coincided with “the great chocolate boom,” when manufacturers in Europe and North America sought increasingly novel ways of bringing chocolate to the masses, and when consumption and imports of cocoa increased dramatically. However, drinking chocolate had been an established part of the English aristocratic breakfast in the 1700s, and Wilde invokes it here—as he will again in The Picture of Dorian Gray—for its longstanding associations with “a degenerate loose-living aristocracy, addicted to luxury and oblivious to … suffering” (Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch, Chocolate: A Global History [London: Reaktion Books, 2009], 45).
32 See n.22 above.
33 A central tenet of aesthetic and decadent writing. See for instance Ernest Dowson’s poem “Extreme Unction”:
Upon the eyes, the lips, the feet,
On all the passages of sense,
The atoning oil is spread with sweet
Renewal of lost innocence.
34 In the 1870s a great quantity of small, mold-cast, terracotta figurines, about four to eight inches high and dating from the fourth or third century BCE, were excavated around Tanagra, in east-central Greece. They quickly became prized by collectors. By likening Sybil to a Tanagra figurine, Lord Arthur makes clear that his love for her—like Dorian Gray’s love for her namesake in The Picture of Dorian Gray—is based on aesthetic criteria, not sexual or emotional ones.
35 The “sins” of the Renaissance house of the Borgias were legendary in Wilde’s day, and Wilde alludes to them again in The Picture of Dorian Gray. See too p. 94 n.7 below.
36 Wilde’s ironic and witty paean to duty, one of many criticisms of duty in his works, subverts a paramount Victorian virtue. To accentuate the irony here, Wilde altered his subtitle from “A Story of Cheiromancy” to “A Study of Duty” upon the story’s republication in 1891. See headnote to title above.
37 Wilde’s contempt for action over thought and language, merely hinted at here, becomes explicit in his witty dialogue “The Critic As Artist”—the first part of which is subtitled “remarks upon the importance of doing nothing”—where he calls action a “delusion” and “the last resource of those who do not know how to dream.” For Wilde “there is no mode of action … that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other.” Action is “simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do,” he adds: “It is a blind thing dependent on external influences … a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant in its direction.… Its basis is the lack of imagination.”
38 In Victorian times, a number of prominent aristocrats lived on Curzon Street, in the heart of London’s expensive Mayfair district, including the writer and former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield. The street features prominently in a number of Wilde’s works: it is home to Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, to Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, and to Mrs. Erlynne in
Lady Windermere’s Fan. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Curzon Street is the fashionable residence of Becky Sharp and her husband.
39 That is, 100 guineas, the fulfillment of Lord Arthur’s earlier promise to pay Podgers in guineas. A guinea was the equivalent of one pound plus one shilling. For the genteel associations of guineas as a form of payment, see n.21 above.
40 A fictional gentleman’s club, possibly inspired by the presence of Buckingham House, the London residence of the Dukes of Buckingham, in Pall Mall in the heart of London’s clubland.
41 On republishing the story in 1891, Wilde inserted “vulgar” before “society newspapers.” The Court and Society Review, in which “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” was first published, was itself a society newspaper.
42Ruff’s Guide to the Turf and Bailey’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes. These sporting periodicals recur in Wilde’s “The Model Millionaire.”
43 Possibly the British Pharmocopooeia (1867) or the The New Pharmacopoeia of the Royal College of Physicians of London (1788).
44 No such book exists, although the 1870s and 1880s saw the publication of numerous handbooks to toxicology and forensic medicine.
