And just to take up your gateway metaphor and run with it. When you read this book, you will become addicted to reading. So be warned. There will be no coming back after this. The first one's free. That's right. It's not free, but you know what I mean. Yeah.

Exactly. It makes Nancy Reagan's DARE program. Dare to read, boys and girls. Dare to read. All right. Well, now that you're all excited about why literature still Nancy Reagan

was just saying no well

yeah but she started the dare program okay

all right that was still good yeah okay I remember that when I was just saying no but she started the dare program so

we want you to just say yes to books right dare to read see we're turning it upside down. We're going to talk about today, or we're going to start talking about Oscar Wilde, the late Victorian movement, the aesthetic movement. Just put this play in its context, its imaginative context, and start to play An Ideal Husband, probably just getting through the first act today and doing acts two and three next time. Now, Mr. Banks, this was another one of your picks. I accidentally did the schedule where it's like three of your picks in a row here.

Yeah. So I had wanted to do another Oscar Wilde play because I remember quite, quite enjoying myself with you and with Cindy, with the illustrious Cindy when we did The Importance of Being Earnest. And this play and The Importance of Being Earnest, they're both great plays, but don't read them back to back because you'll get the characters confused because they're made up of the same types of people and even like kind of the same pairings of people. But yes, this is a play I have read before, but not for, I don't think I've read this one for 15 years or so, I'm going to say.

I have actually never read it. I saw the movie when it came out in 1999. And there is a

very good movie version.

But I hadn't read it, so I'm quite enjoying it, and I don't remember how it ends, so this is going to be exciting. I put myself in your hands, in your capable hands to guide me through this play.

Being a wild comedy, there are no dull bits. Oscar Wilde's plays, we'll get to the character of the play itself, but he and P.G. Woodhouse have in common that basically every paragraph, if not every sentence, has something that makes you howl with laughter. And their sense of humor. Well,

I did look it up the last time because I was so curious. And P.G. Woodhouse does list Oscar Wilde as an influence.

I think that's kind of obvious. You brought it up with the ant, the kind of bossy, imperious ant. Yeah, Aunt Agatha

and whatever the ant was in The Importance of Being Earnest, but they're basically the same character. Aunt

Augusta.

That was it. Aunt Augusta.

Even the names. Yeah, just basically the same kind

of character. And the witty wordplay and the sort of delighting in the-

Foppery. Also

just kind of the light. What am I trying to say? It's

like a world made of champagne bubbles, kind of. It's

very well said. Oh,

well, thank you very much. You must be a poet, my dear. I try. And

you are. Oh, yeah, a world of champagne bubbles. That's a frivolous world.

Effervescent and unreal and sweet and, yeah, kind of just fun.

Exactly. All right, so let's start off by putting this play and Oscar Wilde in general in a certain context. We talk on this podcast a lot about Victorian literature, but this is late Victorian literature, 1895. And so there's some different things going on. Why don't you tell us about that?

So by this point in Victorian social and literary history, I think you start to see a generation of writers. Oscar Wilde is born in 1854 himself. He dies in 1900. So that means he lives his entire rather short life in the Victorian period. And the particular customs and mores and standards of what is and is not respectable behavior, I think by this time, people are getting sort of self-conscious about them and starting to find them a bit funny. And Oscar Wilde is part of that movement in literature and society in the 1880s and 90s. The 90s were often referred to as the gay 90s or the yellow 90s, the decadent 90s, the 1890s this is, where the younger people are starting to laugh at their parents' furniture and morals.

Right. So the Victorian era, again, putting it into a slightly larger context, you have the Regency era of the early 19th century. So like the Jane Austen era and the Prince Regent who ran the country was known for his incredible decadence. And so England had a reputation similar to, say, Louis XIV in the court of Versailles.

Yeah, their monarchy had lost in – it had lost face. That's the only way I can say it. You had a mad king and a foppish and resolute and irresponsible son. Yes. That says George III and George IV. And Victoria did much. I mean, she was a constitutional monarch who could not just speak laws into existence and declare war by her own will, but she did rebuild the moral stature of the monarchy by her own example. And yeah.

So she got to be thrown in 1837. She's what, 18 years old at the time? Very young. Very young. And for a lot that we sort of make fun of Victorian prudishness and some of the kind of wacky morality that they held to, the truth is that Victoria and the nation were responding to, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth, right? It was responding to a very, very decadent period. And so she set the moral tone. And so you have a, oh gosh, you have a royal family that is just the height of respectability, right?

Between her and Prince Albert, which was

a love match. They have a very large family. They're devoted to each other now. They had like 10 or 11 children. A lot of children. It seems like she was eternally pregnant. And she really did set the moral tone. Middle class respectability, English respectability, family values, all of that kind of stuff. And it was what the nation needed at the time. Now, like so many things, it went rather far, and we criticized a lot of that. I mean, in Victoria's own life, as some of her children grew up and became the next- Kind of rebelled

against- Yeah, the

next version of dissolute Like you said, pendulum swings. Pendulum swings. I mean, her son, the next king, Edward, he was a mess. Scandal after scandal and quite the thorn in his parents' side. But yeah, so a couple of different things come to mind when I think about late Victorian literature. And there's two different kinds. We should probably, we'll say that as well. There's the aesthetic movement that Oscar Wilde was a part of, but there was also kind of the hyper-realism movement as well. People like George Moore and others. Maybe I'd probably be a seeing that. Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw, the tail

end. Right. Kipling in his ways sometimes. Kipling. Yeah. Kipling kind of is all over the map though. Yeah. Some

of Thomas Hardy stuff later

on. Definitely Thomas Hardy. Yeah. Some of George Meredith occasions.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not just the Oscar Wilde movement, but that's the one I'm primarily focusing on. So you get the sense, you don't get the sense. The Victorians are very concerned about projecting a certain respectability and morality into the world. And after a while, this starts to get poked at as kind of a hypocrisy, that you have a public morality and you have a private morality. This was something that the late Victorian writers, particularly Oscar Wilde, were very interested in poking their finger at, that there's this veneer of respectability in our society, but does it go past the surface at all? Yeah.

And if you get into the soul of anyone or anything, they're going to have their foibles and their failures. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. In some ways, it almost reminds me of the 1950s in the United States and how that super squeaky clean 1950 inevitably turns into the sexual revolution of the 1960s, right? Like there's only so long that you can promote that. We're perfect. Everything's great at home. We've got it all together before the next generation rises up and says, yeah, we lived with you. That is totally not true. You're faking this. And in the pursuit of quote unquote, something authentic, you end up, well, sometimes going too far as happened in the United States. So that's one thing that's going on, poking at the veneer of respectability. The other thing that's going on is we talk a lot, a lot on this podcast about Victorian didacticism. So part of that, and I should stop now before anybody listens to this and says, she's just really poking at all the Victorians. I love the Victorians. So do you. I would highly recommend that you listen to our series on Charles Dickens' Hard Times to know that we absolutely do like quite a few Victorian authors. I'm trying to put us in the mindset of how the late Victorians are viewing the past century so that you can understand what it is they're trying to do. The

cult of domesticity and middle-class, snugly married, philoprogenitive, just kind of middle-class morality.

Middle-class morality. And I should say too that, so I did my master's work on this particular issue and I'll try to keep this very, very PG, but at the same time that people were really promoting this, like you said, domesticity, it really was called the cult of domesticity. And, you know, the husband and the wife, you know, middle class values, you know, a boy, a girl, a dog, a nursemaid, a governess, you know, the height of respectability. At the same time, you had things like the birth of modern pornography. You had such widespread prostitution and venereal disease, syphilis really run rampant through this period. So you can totally understand why some people are saying, hey, you guys are projecting that, but you're totally not living that. This is a fraud. And so some authors begin to poke at that. Now, going back to the didacticism era, not all Victorians, okay, so Charles Dickens and George MacDonald and others, you kind of have two strains. So if you listen to the Samuel Coleridge series we did, I talked a lot about what was going on there with the imagination. And so you have that romantic strain coming from Coleridge, which embraces the imagination, which says that the imagination is a faculty of truth and it should be cultivated and nurtured. And so you have writers working in that tradition, Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, et cetera. But then you have against that, the view that we need facts. People need, children need facts. Adults need facts.

And along with facts, also uplift.

Uplift, inspiring stories, basically turning everything they could into a very heavy handed Sunday school lesson. Even to the point- I

just want to say, you can kind of quote Dickens on both sides of this line. Yeah. Because I would say the Dickens of the old curiosity shop is kind of the very cushioned middle class, let's make everyone feel good and comfortable in... Anyway, that kind of thing. But please go on. I cut you off.

Well, Charles Dickens is fascinating for many reasons. And again, I would recommend our series on hard times. We're both big Charles Dickens fans. And he himself, a great lover of home life and domesticity and all of those things. And we're not criticizing any of those things. We're quite domestic ourselves and we enjoy our home life. The issue was whether or not that projection was real. That is what people were pushing against, that it didn't seem real. So the didacticism was so heavy. For example, Charles Dickens wrote an essay quite objecting to the fact that certain groups had rewritten fairy tales and turned them into very serious Sunday school lessons. One of them, they rewrote some fairy tales to make them tracks for temperance. Yes. Like, you know, therefore, boys and girls, don't drink gin.

Instead of the witch's house being made of candy, it was, you know, a bunch of bottles of, you know, intoxicating beverages. And then, you know, Hansel and Gretel, there was no turning back for them. That was

exactly it. And it was just getting nuts. Everything was this super, super heavy handed moral lesson. And we made the joke about just saying no in the D.A program. I mean, in fairness, there was a very, very serious problem with gin in the Victorian period and the working class.

It was- Yeah, there's a reason why the temperance- Yeah, exactly. I mean, it has been described

as akin to our modern meth problem in this country. So it was a big deal, but Dickens and others, and myself included, did not think that the proper way to respond to this was to turn fairy tales into temperance tracks. I was actually joking about this in my good books class this last week. And I said, so like, imagine if the American Dental Association decided to rewrite Hansel and Gretel, right? So Hansel and Gretel go to the gingerbread house and they just start eating the candy. And then the witch comes out, oh, little children. And she pulls out toothbrushes. Don't forget to brush. You need to brush after having candy. gosh

yeah somebody

somewhere is listening to this saying that should happen if

i were to sum this up in one sentence um there was a best-selling victorian novel by uh charles reed and charles reed was a talented man but he he actually wrote a novel um a popular book called it is never too Late to Mend. Yeah. What to do with this. What to do with this. There you go. So

like the worst offenders, I would say nobody's reading them anymore. They've kind of gone away.

Or we've selected their books where they kind of sin against their own rules. Right. So Wilkie Collins, I think. Wilkie Collins was like, he was very much an improver and a writer of the novel as pastoral tract. But the books of his that we still read are kind of the ones that he wrote for pleasure. But yeah, I read a novel of his called Basil this last year. Terrible book. I'm surprised I got to the end of it. it's and it's the whole thing is kind of a long screed about victorian marriage laws um described disguised as a sort of uh sort of uh potboiler melodrama but it's yeah it's a yeah there's um even very very gifted people and wilkie collins was a supremely gifted man uh yeah that was just kind of the the agree the environment they lived in and they didn't always transcend it so um there you go even somebody who i

adore like george elliott she she slides and she slides into the preaching at times she does and then the series we did on agnes gray and we talked a lot about the brontes that's another one i would recommend to you if you're interested in learning more about the Victorians. She also, I think Anne Bronte definitely crosses the line.

She's a pastor's daughter. She's a pastor's daughter.

No judging. She can't help it. She can be very preachy. So that's the context then. Also, like you said, the Victorians are the first generation who is concerned, and I would say obsessed with self-improvement. They want to improve. They're going to read a book that is going to improve them. Full of improving

characters in situations. Here's one. I mean, so Tess of the D'Urbervilles, as you know, was kind of created a scandal. It was, I mean, everybody read it and everyone condemned it. And Thomas Hardy got some mean, what, not fan mail, enemy mail, anti-fan mail from people who... One letter I think I saw in a biography of his where he was told that he had made his heroine, his fallen woman, too likable and too sympathetic. And you shouldn't do that with a woman like that. That

book is genius.

It is, but there you go. I

adore that book. If you're listening to this recording, we just had to cut something out because my husband just spoiled the ending of Tess of the Durban Vills. But that's okay. I thought everyone knew the ending. Well, no, no, we can't. Several hundred years is not enough for spoiler loss. But he had a great hearty quote about perhaps the natural. I know I

couldn't help myself.

You did. You did. If you come to All Fellows Eve on the Patreon and we'll tell you what the rest of the story was. So into that backdrop of heavy didacticism begins the aesthetic movement in the late Victorian period. It actually starts in France and gets filtered into the- It's always the French. It's always the French. Gets filtered into England through one of your favorite writers, Walter Pater. So tell us a little bit about the aesthetic movement. So

the aesthetic movement has for its marching orders, its watchwords, its motto, art for art's sake, or l'art pour l'art in French. And in France, it's associated with a variety of authors. I would say Gustave Flaubert. It is kind of, especially the early books, the sort of the more romantic Flaubert, like The Temptation of St. Anthony or Salambo. And another author actually, very important in Weil's own development named Joris Carl Hoismans. He's a French author with a Dutch name. He wrote a book called Arbour or Against the Grain, sometimes translated as Against Nature, which if you've ever read The Portrait of Dorian Gray, that is the famous unnamed yellow book that Dorian reads, which corrupts him. And it is a book about a man of leisure who is bored with life. So he decides to indulge himself in all of the principal sins in the litany, basically, and surround himself with collecting odd objects of antiques, works of art, rare books, gems. He buys a tortoise and encrusts its shell with jewels, and ruins various people's lives in a variety of rather cruel ways, all in the name of pursuing sensation. So that would be an example of a very, usually a very amoral sort of work, whether in the visual arts or in fiction, which celebrates defiance of convention, defiance of the established order, and indulgence of the refined senses, I suppose. That was kind of a wandering description, but I think it gives an idea.

Yeah. And I would like to highlight a few other things about the aesthetic movement as well. So, if you go back to my metaphor of everything's a pendulum, the pendulum swings. And so you have this very heavy didacticism in the Victorian, you know, art scene. Everything's got to have a moral. Everything's got to have a message. Everything's got to improve us. And so certain artists start to think, well, that just makes the art suffer. If we're so heavy handed with a message, that just makes the art suffer. In some ways, it kind of reminds me of what I dealt with in the 80s at a Christian school. I was in high school at a Christian school and I had very strong sensibilities about what art should be like. I remember it was life-

Did you have a position on warning labels on records?

Oh boy, did I. Boy, did I. still mad about that oh boy did i ever have some feelings about that as if as if the government could have a rating system to decide what was moral enough for our ears yeah don't even get me started on that but um now i've lost my train of thought oh i i remember when i finally discovered dorothy sayers and the mind of the maker and other things like that, just feeling so affirmed because she says the same thing. But in the 80s, when you had really the booming of the Christian subculture, and what I mean by that is like the Christian t-shirts and the Christian songs and the Christian books and everything was kind of like, if you like this worldly band, listen to this Christian band. If you like this worldly author, you know, listen

to this.