L. 31. Willis’s: an upscale restaurant near the theater district.
L. 8. ready money: money paid in cash on the spot as opposed to on an account.
L. 26. German sounds a thoroughly respectable language: German seems here to play the boring cousin to French, which is consistently associated with raciness. See note for p. 206, L. 6.
L. 8. domesticity: a name used about the house, an informality.
L. 15. Grosvenor Square: a very affluent address in Mayfair, London, and therefore not a place that the mobs would normally find themselves. Lady Bracknell’s image is therefore one of anarchy loosed amid the wealthy.
L. 17. Between seven and eight thousand a year: Eight thousand pounds in the 1890s was equivalent to approximately £500,000 or $800,000 today. Regarding such money conversions, however, see note for p. 20, L. 5.
L. 35. Belgrave Square: a very good address in the Belgravia district of London, south of Hyde Park’s eastern end—a bit farther away from the Mayfair and theater district addresses than are most of the fashionable residences referenced throughout Wilde’s play; let: rented out.
L. 13. Liberal Unionist: in effect, a conservative liberal. A political crisis in the late 1880s turned on whether to grant “Home Rule,” or self-government, to Ireland. The Liberal prime minister Gladstone had advocated that step, thus forcing those Liberals who opposed him to define themselves as Unionists, advocating a united rather than a divided Britain.
L. 13. Tories: conservatives of the Tory party.
L. 5. Victoria Station: one of London’s major train stations, primarily for trains setting out to southern locations such as Brighton. L. 14. contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life… worst excesses of the French Revolution: Throughout the nineteenth century, conservative Britons ritually invoked the French Revolution as a figure for regrettable anarchism, but Lady Bracknell’s reference to “family life” is a more specific—and darkly comic—reference to the mob’s invasion of the royal family’s residence in Paris on October 6, 1789.
LL. 1-2. Wedding March: In Wilde’s time, both Richard Wagner’s music from Lohengrin (1850) and Felix Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843) were familiar in English wedding contexts, although the protocol of playing Wagner on the way in and Mendelssohn on the way out was perhaps less fixed than it is today, and Algernon might play either here.
L. 11. Gorgon: a repulsive woman, very generally, but the term indicates more specifically any of three Greek mythological females with snakes for hair. To look upon a Gorgon would turn the beholder into stone.
p. 201, L. 20. apoplexy: generally indicating what we today call a stroke.
L. 21. Empire: A step down in social manners from the Club, the Empire was a Leicester Square theater that staged mime shows and dances, most deemed unsuitable for women, and the environs of the theater were known for male and female prostitution.
SECOND ACT
L. 6. utilitarian: Miss Prism uses the term as a synonym for practical or mundane activity. Wilde himself knew the term’s more elaborated social-philosophical usage, in which utilitarianism indicates a program of rational analysis aimed at creating social reforms according to their ability to serve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. For literary writers from Charles Dickens to Wilde, utilitarianism was often a byword for excessively arid and analytical perspectives on human and social experience. In this passage as in several others in this Act, Wilde suggests that Miss Prism and Cecily are each a bit out of their depth in their usage of terms. See also following note.
L. 6. German, and geology: Cecily and Miss Prism view these two areas of study variously as innocuous, boring, or morally improving, but Wilde is inviting us to recognize as well two of the most culturally explosive topics of the period. Historical scholarship in German made the first powerful case for the Bible as a piecemeal text brought to its current form by mundane routes of historical transmission rather than by divine inspiration; meanwhile, geological evidence had confronted Victorians with disturbingly concrete evidence that the age of the earth radically exceeded the four thousand years or so that a literalist reading of the Bible suggested.
L. 25. Mudie: a famous lending library of the period.
L. 28. Egeria: a tutelary goddess of Roman mythology.
LL. 2-3. Political Economy: the study of economy on a scientific basis, incorporating theories of sociality, human nature, and politics; Fall of the Rupee: The rupee, the monetary unit of India, had declined steadily after 1875, when British imperial aspirations in India began to be more emphatic and intrusive.
L. 25. cousin: In addressing his pretended niece Cecily this way, Algernon calls on a looser sense of cousin that includes any collateral relative more distant than a brother or sister.
L. 28. Australia: Although once a penal colony and place of last resort for Britons at loose ends, Australia was no longer exactly that in Wilde’s time. All the same, literary works could still bank on that history by styling Australia as the ultimate backwater and exile from society.
L. 6. Quixotic: characterized by striving after a lofty vision, especially if the vision is false or unrealizable; after the protagonist of the novel Don Quixote (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes.
L. 13. button-hole: a flower or small spray of flowers worn by men in a lapel buttonhole.
L. 15. Maréchale Niel: also Marachel Niel, a variety of rose. This rose is yellow, exquisite, and not very hardy—in keeping with familiar preoccupations of the aesthetically attuned in Wilde’s time.
L. 16. manna: a food miraculously supplied to the Children of Israel during their progress through the wilderness. See Exodus 16.
L. 30. dog-cart: a fashionable open carriage, evolved from any of several styles that had enclosed spaces in which sportsmen could bring along their hounds.
LL. 8-9. The home… proper sphere for the man: Gwendolen reverses the then-familiar sentiment that women were properly active within the home while men were creatures of public life and money-making.
L. 17. lorgnette: a pair of eyeglasses held up by means of a handle, frequently with magnifying lenses for use at the opera or theater.
L. 35. Morning Post: a daily newspaper that emphasized the doings of the fashionable.
L. 31. footman: a uniformed servant, especially one who attends carriages.
THIRD ACT
L. 1. Terminus: in conventional Victorian usage, the end-stop of a train line or tram line. It was not common usage, however, to capitalize the word as Wilde here does. With an eye to the homoerotic subtext of this play, readers can plausibly see an anal imagery in Wilde’s subtle highlighting of the term—the rectum understood as “terminus” of the gastrointestinal tract. See also note for p. 188, L. 17.
L. 9. Court Guides: a list of society individuals who have been presented to the English royalty court.
LL. 30-31. a hundred and thirty thousand pounds. … in the Funds: The Funds were investment-grade shares in the National Debt, thus a fluid and modern way of holding one’s wealth and also congenial to Lady Bracknell, given her earlier declaration to Jack that wealth in land is burdensome by comparison (see p. 197, LL. 23-35). The amount of Cecily’s wealth is immense, the equivalent of some £8.5 million or $13 million today. Regarding such money conversions, however, see note for p. 20, L. 5.
L. 22. Oxonian: a graduate of Oxford, from which university Wilde himself had graduated.
L. 13. not be very long before you are of age: Lady Bracknell is assuming that Cecily will be legally independent at 21 years of age.
L. 36. Anabaptists: Chasuble’s implication is obscure. He draws on the general association of Protestant dissenters with a “heretical” repudiation of Anglican views on the sacraments and holy orders. Anabaptists in particular are named for their practice of supplementary baptism, either as a ritual or as a one-time event aimed at remedying an infantile baptism deemed ineffective because involuntary.
L. 2. perambulator: a baby carriage.
L
. 6. Bayswater: a region in west central London, but also quite some way from Victoria Station.
L. 20. Gower Street omnibus: a horse-drawn public conveyance operating in the area of Gower Street, in a part of London called Blooms-bury which is associated with education and learning. L. 22. temperance: word used by a movement devoted to the elimination of drunkenness.
L. 23. Leamington: an English spa town.
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2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Terrence McNally
Biographical note © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Notes © 2003 by Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900.
The importance of being earnest and other plays / Oscar Wilde ;
introduction by Terrence McNally ; notes by Michael F. Davis.—2003
Modern Library paperback ed.
p. cm.
Contents: Lady Windermere’s fan—An ideal husband—
The importance of being earnest.
eISBN: 978-0-307-75745-6
I. Title.
PR5815 2003
822′.8—dc21 2003044566
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.0
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: And Other Plays
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