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men. [Extreme vanity] marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organization, artist or criminal’ (139). That such views were not confined to ‘specialists’ is suggested by the fact that the
Scots Observer
pointed out that if Wilde’s ‘assumption of vanity’ (displayed in
Dorian Gray
and in his defence of it) was sincere it would ‘betoken either the madman or the criminal’ (Mason, 134).
    8 Algernon explains to Jack (or Ernest when he is in town) the principles of Bunburying in Act I of
The Importance of Being Earnest:
ALGERNON: You have invented a very useful young brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable.
… Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.
    9 Vivian’s complaint in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘the transformation of Dr Jekyll reads dangerously like something out of the
Lancet
[a medical paper]’ is testimony to its imaginative appeal for Wilde.
    10 Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror
, edited by Robert Mighall (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2002), 60.
    11 The statute which convicted Wilde was an amendment to an Act ‘to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes’. The principal aim of the Act was to protect young girls from the exploitation of brothel-keepers who ran a ‘trade’ in virgins, when it raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen years. Section 11, however, dealt with intimate acts between male persons, a more precise legal proscription of homosexual activities than had hitherto been enacted. The Act outlawed any and all ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person’, whether in public or private, and carried a maximum sentence of two years with hard labour, Wilde’s own sentence. On Wilde’s experience of blackmail, see Ellmann, 362, 366–7.

    12 When a reviewer from the
St James’s Gazette
, who had hinted at criminal proceedings against Wilde, challenged the author about the sincerity of what he was describing, Wilde claimed that he meant ‘every word of what I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in
Dorian Gray
’. The reviewer replied, ‘Then… all I can say is that if you do mean them you are likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days’ (Ellmann, 303).
    13 When asked what the flower meant, Wilde answered, ‘Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.’ There are some doubts about the authenticity of this anecdote, however. Wilde claimed to have ‘invented that magnificent flower’, chosen for its artificiality, its improvement on nature (Ellmann, 345). A novel written by Robert Hitchens, an acquaintance of Wilde and also a homosexual, which transparently depicts Wilde’s relationship with Douglas, was entitled
The Green Carnation
. It was published in 1894, but withdrawn at the time of Wilde’s trials a year later.
    14 In 1883 the homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds privately printed
A Problem in Greek Ethics
, where he argued that ‘the Dorians gave the earliest and the most marked encouragement to Greek love. Nowhere else, indeed, except among the Dorians… do we meet with pederastia developed as an institution.’ For him, ‘Greek love took its origins in Doris’ (reproduced in Ellis and Symonds,
Sexual Inversion
, 1897). See Espey, ‘Resources for Wilde Studies at the Clark Library’, in
Oscar Wilde, Two Approaches: Papers Read at a Clark Library