An Ideal Husband
By Oscar Wilde
Sir Robert – a member of the House of Commons and junior government minister – and his wife, Lady Chiltern, are hosting a gathering that includes his friend Lord Goring, a dandified bachelor, Chiltern’s sister Mabel, and other guests. During the party, Mrs Cheveley, an enemy of Lady Chiltern from their schooldays, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert into supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina.
Her late mentor and lover, Baron Arnheim, induced the young Chiltern to sell him a Cabinet secret – which enabled Arnheim to buy shares in the Suez Canal Company three days before the British government announced its purchase of the company. Arnheim’s payoff was the basis of Sir Robert’s fortune, and Mrs Cheveley has Robert’s letter to Arnheim as proof of his crime. Fearing the ruin of career and marriage, Sir Robert submits to her demands. When Mrs Cheveley pointedly informs Lady Chiltern of Sir Robert’s change of heart regarding the canal scheme, the morally inflexible Lady Chiltern, unaware of both her husband’s past and the blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert renege on his promise to Mrs Cheveley.
For Lady Chiltern, their marriage is predicated on her having an “ideal husband”—a model spouse in both private and public life whom she can worship; thus, Sir Robert must remain unimpeachable in all his decisions. Sir Robert complies with her wishes and seals his doom. Toward the end of Act I, Mabel and Lord Goring come upon a diamond brooch that Goring gave someone many years ago. He takes the brooch and asks Mabel to tell him if anyone comes to retrieve it.
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Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin (now home of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College), the second of three children born to an Anglo-Irish couple: Jane, née Elgee, and Sir William Wilde.
Biography
Oscar was two years younger than his brother, William (Willie) Wilde. Jane Wilde was a niece (by marriage) of the novelist, playwright, and clergyman Charles Maturin (1780–1824), who may have influenced her own literary career. She mistakenly believed that she was of Italian ancestry, and under the pseudonym “Speranza” (the Italian word for ‘hope’), she wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848; she was a lifelong Irish nationalist.
Jane Wilde read the Young Irelanders’ poetry to Oscar and Willie, inculcating a love of these poets in her sons. Her interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece and Rome in her home. Sir William Wilde was Ireland’s leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore. A renowned philanthropist, his dispensary for caring for the city’s poor at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road. On his father’s side, Wilde was descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, who went to Ireland with King William of Orange’s invading army in 1690, and numerous Anglo-Irish ancestors. On his mother’s side, Wilde’s ancestors included a bricklayer from County Durham, who emigrated to Ireland sometime in the 1770s.
Wilde was baptized as an infant in St. Mark’s Church, Dublin, the local Church of Ireland (Anglican) church. When the church was closed, the records were moved to the nearby St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street. Davis Coakley mentions a second baptism by a Catholic priest, Father Prideaux Fox, who befriended Oscar’s mother c. 1859. According to Fox’s testimony in Donahoe’s Magazine in 1905, Jane Wilde would visit his chapel in Glencree, County Wicklow, for Mass and would take her sons with her. She asked Father Fox in this period to baptize her sons.
Oscar Wilde
