To some extent, however, it has created an imbalance which threatens to play into the hands of the critics. The great majority of books written about Wilde has concentrated on the man, and passed fleetingly over the works as being merely secondary expressions of his life as an art form, a problem for which he himself is partly to blame. He has left us with that enduring vision of Wilde as the supreme showman whom nobody, at his peril, should attempt to take seriously. ‘Art,’ as he said, ‘is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.’ Both were themes which dominated his life.

It is this apparent lack of seriousness on which the greater part of his popular reputation rests and anecdote has done little to change it. Two of the permanent hallmarks of Wildean humour, for example, were an affected indifference to hard work as well as the effortless ease of his own genius. Asked by the critic W. E. Henley how often he went into the office during his editorship of the Woman’s World, Oscar replied, ‘I used to go three times a week for an hour a day, but I have since struck off one of the days.’ And when George Alexander asked him to cut the ‘Gribsby’ scene from The Importance of Being Earnest (restored in the present edition) Wilde could not resist remarking, ‘Do you realise, Alec, this scene you feel is superfluous cost me terrible exhausting labour and heart-rending nerve-racking strain. I assure you on my honour that it must have taken fully five minutes to write.’

Even while he was still at Oxford, Wilde was at pains to cultivate this image of creative idleness. He would read the 19th century poets rather than studying the classical texts for his degree course, or at least that was the impression he liked to give. One of his contemporaries though, David Hunter-Blair, recalled many years later, ‘Of course Wilde worked hard for the high academic honours which he achieved at Oxford. He liked to pose as a dilettante trifling with his books; but I knew of the hours of assiduous reading often into the early hours of the morning. He read surreptitiously in his small and stuffy bedroom. Books lay in apparently hopeless confusion though he knew where to lay his hands on each in every corner.’

This is the Wilde most of us are accustomed to see, the Wilde who admitted to Andre Gide ‘J’ai mis tout mon génie dans ma vie, je n’ai mis que mon talent dans mes oeuvres.’ He persuaded us of its authenticity a hundred years ago and it is still the form in which the public wishes to enjoy his company—witty, nonconformist and faintly perfumed with decadence. Under-standably, they are not qualities which persuade those who inhabit the rarefied atmosphere of pure literary criticism to grant him first division status.

But in the last thirty years, parts of the academic world have started to reassess Oscar Wilde on their own terms, digging beneath the veneer of superficiality and revealing a very different character to the one we thought we knew. All the old magic remains but it is given an added dimension by seeing him occasionally without his mask. We begin to see that, far from lounging nonchalantly through life, very early on he showed a strong determination to succeed as a writer. Put him alongside any ambitious young journalist of the 1990s and compare their paths to success. A couple of youthful literary indiscretions, a period of probation as a critic and reviewer, the editorship of a national magazine and the succès de scandale of a first novel, and the whole liberally peppered with self-publicity—plus ça change. And if Wilde did not have the power of radio and television to rely on, at least he had the lecture hall and the theatre to reach his public direct.

From the moment he left Oxford he was hard at work promoting himself. He made it his business to be seen at any social gathering of importance and at first nights, and courted the friendship of actresses in the public eye – Ellen Terry, Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt. Then, with little more than a volume of self-published poems to his credit, he was offered a lecture tour in America by Richard D’Oyly Carte to coincide with his production of Patience. Naturally he seized the opportunity. But the programme, originally planned to last four months stretched to nearly a year and it was far from being just as a sedate lecture tour for the self-appointed ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, a young dandy in velvet knee-breeches, rising languidly at mid-day to parade himself across the country as a live ‘aesthete’ for the audiences of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera. In reality detailed research has shown that he faced a punishing schedule of 140 lectures in 260 days from the East to the West coast and up into Canada without the help of air travel and fast trains. He also made sure that he met Walt Whitman, Henry Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes; he arranged for Vera to be staged in New York the following year; and was commissioned to write The Duchess of Padua. He had taken the calculated risk of ridicule and turned it entirely to his advantage both financially and in terms of his reputation.

On his return to England Wilde added his ‘Personal Impressions of America’ to his repertoire and continued lecturing as a source of income until 1888. Indeed, from 1883 until early in 1885 it was almost his only source of income. He was acutely aware of this and tried on several occasions to have himself made an inspector of schools, as Matthew Arnold had done before him, but without success. In 1885 he even writes to an unidentified correspondent: ‘Believe me that it is impossible to live by literature. By journalism a man may make an income but rarely by pure literary work. I would strongly advise you to make some profession, such as that of a tutor, the basis and mainstay of your life, and to keep literature for your finest, rarest moments.