Oscar Wilde premiered The Importance of Being Earnest at St. James's Theatre in February 1895, to the greatest success of his career. Two weeks later he was arrested. The play concerns two young men, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, who have invented fictional persons. Jack has a dissolute younger brother Ernest in London; Algernon has a permanent invalid named Bunbury in the country, in order to escape social obligations at will. Both become entangled when they attempt to court women who have independently decided that they will only love a man named Ernest, and complications multiply as Jack's obscure origins are traced through Lady Bracknell's investigation.
The play's formal achievement is the construction of a comedy in which every joke is simultaneously a reversal of expected logic. "The truth is rarely pure and never simple" is not a paradox about epistemology; it is Jack explaining why his fictional brother is more complicated than a real one would be. "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness" is Lady Bracknell treating social obligation as natural law and bereavement as a failure of personal management. Wilde's method is to take aristocratic social values with complete seriousness as a formal system, then apply them to situations where their absurdity as a guide to human life is immediately apparent.
The Importance of Being Earnest is the most perfectly maintained comic machine in English drama. Each of the three acts sustains the same pressure of wit without the relaxations that most comic writing allows for dramatic variety. Reading it, rather than watching it, reveals the structural precision that stage performance sometimes obscures: the distribution of the play's best lines follows a logic about character. Algernon is more purely witty than Jack, who occasionally allows sentiment to interfere; Gwendolen is sharper than Cecily, who has the advantage of sincerity. The play was written in three weeks and under emotional pressure Wilde was not acknowledging publicly, which adds a biographical dimension to its sustained surface brilliance.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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