Oscar Wilde: Victorian or Not?

Up to this point, we have examined two periods, the Romantic and the Victorian, each of which was defined primarily in terms of time.  The Romantic period, we said ran basically from 1789 to 1832. (Froisy)  The Victorian period which immediately followed ran on until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.  There were some general trends associated with each period and, by and large, the writers who wrote during those eras tended to follow them.  The thing, however, that classified a writer as Romantic or Victorian was not whether he was a trend follower, but when did he/she actually write.

Oscar Wilde

Now we must answer the question about whether a certain writer, namely, Oscar Wilde, was or was not a Victorian.  Of course, the immediate answer is that he was without question a Victorian writer; his heyday was the late 19^th Century, the Victorian era.  But we know the question cannot be answered so simply because we are asked to answer in a way that tells us that the basis of the question had nothing to do with time but with things like style, and technique, and the writer’s willingness to publish things that did not exactly run true to the Victorian ideal. 

The suggestion is that Oscar Wilde was not a Victorian writer because he satirized Victorian morals, Victorian attitudes, especially toward sex, and Victorian manners and thinking in general.  Two of Wilde’s poems, Impression du Matin and The Harlot’s House, touch on the theme of prostitution, the whole idea behind these two satirical poems being that:  Hark! here, in the heart of prim and proper, Victorian England, there are prostitutes and men who frequent them.  These are the real Victorian virtues.  That is what he was saying.

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, in the second volume of her autobiography, wrote appreciatively of “Victorian values” in a moral-political sense.  She pointed out, among other things, the period’s many “voluntary and charitable societies.”  She wrote that she “never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values,’ or Victorian virtues.’” (Thatcher, 627)  She obviously was not clear as to what, exactly, those Victorian virtues were, but it is just as clear that she did not mean anything like Oscar Wilde intended when he wrote the aforementioned poems.

Dr. D. M. Lloyd-Jones

Perhaps a London doctor-turned-preacher, born in the Victorian era, a one-time assistant to the Royal Physician, who ministered in London for more than 40 years during the next century, and who preached a wrote a great deal about the Victorian era, can shed light on whether or not Oscar Wilde was or was not a Victorian.  Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones pastored at Westminster Chapel from the time of World War II to about 1970.  Of the Victorian period, he said, “It is an era of which I am a critic.” (Lloyd-Jones, Knowing the Times, 241).  On Victorian morality, Lloyd-Jones preached that Victorianism was a way of living in the 19^th Century, wherein “people were compelled by Act of Parliament, as it were, to live a certain kind of life.” (Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans, 66).

In a moral-religious sense, Victorianism, said Lloyd-Jones, was nothing more than “the spirit of the age.” (Lloyd-Jones, Knowing the Times, 241).  I apologize for the length of this next quote, but I think it goes right to the heart of the Victorian age and to this question about Oscar Wilde—

“The mid-Victorian era … years of crowded churches and chapels, years of great religious success, years when almost everybody went to a place of worship, and everybody was talking about building bigger buildings … I believe that one of the first and most urgent things the Christian church has to do today [6 July, 1965] is to forget the Victorian era, and go back to the previous century, and perhaps also to the one before that.  The Victorian era always seems to me to have been a very artificial era.  It seemed so prosperous, it seemed so wonderful.  And the people of that age were convinced that it was.  They were sure that they were advancing towards perfection.  Even those who rejected the biological theory of evolution as such seemed to assume it in a religious sense.  The church was expanding and the missionary societies were growing and developing—the whole world was going to become Christian.  They held their great conferences and they did not hesitate to say that they could produce a plan to evangelize the whole world within a given period of time.  How pathetic it all was … quite artificial … there was a rottenness at the centre.” (Lloyd-Jones, Knowing the Times, 226-227)

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a “dandy.” (Greenblatt, 1686)  The most perceptive thing about him was that he was astute enough to see that there was plenty to make fun of in Victorianism—especially as it was practiced in his day.  That, really, is what the whole aesthetic “movement” was all about.  The man spent his adult life ridiculing Victorian “virtues” and earned quite a name for himself and made what appears to be a pretty good living at it.  But Oscar Wilde suffered the breakup of his family, was imprisoned for two years near the end of his life, at hard labor, and spent the remainder of his days in shameful exile in another country because he had a George Gordon, Lord Byron problem.   It is quite foolish to try to separate the literature of these times from the lives of the men and women who wrote it.  His whole life, and in all his works, Oscar Wilde pretended to be something he was not.  Oscar Wilde was the quintessential Victorian.

Works Cited.

Froisy, Carol.  Lecture Notes, Week 1.  Literature 211.  American Public University. 

Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams.  Eds.   The Norton Anthology to English Literature.  8^th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Lloyd-Jones, D. M.  Knowing the Times: Addresses Delivered on Various Occasions 1942-1977.  London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1989.

_______.  The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors.  London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987.

Thatcher, Margaret.  Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years.  New York: HarperCollins, 1993.