Centre for Comparative and Public History Department of History
Chinese University of Hong Kong In-Service Teacher Training Course
The Making of the Modern World
Lecture 2:6: “Response to Rapid Growth & Change”
Source 11
An Ideal Husband (1895) By Oscar Wilde
LORD CAVERSHAM. Well, sir! What are you doing here? Wasting yourlife as usual! You should be in bed, sir. You keep too late hours! I heard of you the other night at Lady Rufford’s dancing till four o'clock in the morning!
LORD GORING. Only a quarter to four, father.
LORD CAVERSHAM. Can’t make out how you stand London Society. The thing has gone to the dogs, a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
LORD GORING. I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
LORD CAVERSHAM. You seem to me to be living entirely for pleasure.
LORD GORING. What else is there to live for, father? Nothing ages like happiness.
LORD CAVERSHAM. You are heartless, sir, very heartless!
LORD GORING. I hope not, father. Good evening, Lady Basildon!
LADY BASILDON. [Arching two pretty eyebrows.] Are you here? I had no idea you ever came to political parties!
LORD GORING. I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don’t talk politics.
LADY BASILDON. I delight in talking politics. I talk them all day long. But I can’t bear listening to them. I don’t know how the unfortunate men in the House stand these long debates.
LORD GORING. By never listening.
Context:
Dublin born Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) established himself as one of the leading lights of the London stage at the end of the nineteenth century. A poet and prose writer as well, it was in his comedies of manners that Wilde established himself as the leading wit of his time. His private life erupted in scandal and led in 1895 to two years imprisonment for his homosexuality. Wilde’s skewering of upper class British social mores revealed cracks in the facade of Victorian uprightness.
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ihsbn10.txt
Questions:
1. Why did an era of prosperity and scientific progress inspire such a wide and vehement body of criticism?
2. How did Charles Darwin’s assertions in the The Origins of Species affect European social, political, and religious beliefs?
Assignment:
Using the important role women played during the French Revolution as a starting point, illustrate how the status of women changed during the nineteenth century.
Bibliography:
Joyce, Patrick. Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848-1914.
Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Kean, Hilda. “Public History and Popular Memory: Issues in the Commemoration of the British Militant Suffrage Campaign.” Women's History Review [Great Britain] 14: 3-4, (2005): 581-602.
Laqueur, Walter. “Fin-de-Siecle: Once More with Feeling.” Journal of Contemporary History [Great Britain] 31:1 (1996): 5-47.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen.”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:4 (2003): 650-679.
Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.
