The history of Oscar Wilde's plays in performance is closely linked to the larger history of their author's social and cultural reception. During the 1890s Wilde's dramas helped to inaugurate a series of aesthetic and commercial transactions in which up-market viewers found their worlds both celebrated and mocked on West End stages. They also formed part of Wilde's personal campaign to secure a place in 'best circles' Society. Consequently, although he talked with Shaw about founding a 'great Celtic' school of drama (L 339), and promised to aid Ibsen actress Elizabeth Robins in bringing about a 'theatre of the future', Wilde's career as a professional playwright more closely resembled that of commercially minded rivals like Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. Contemptuous of London's avant-garde theatres and makeshift theatre clubs (natural venues for a Shaw or Robins), Wilde turned exclusively to the West End's most fashionable playhouses and flamboyant actor-managers, building upon and responding to the sensibilities of their public. Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first stage success, received its premiere at George Alexander's St James's Theatre in February 1892. Alexander, newly installed at the St James's, believed that a play by Wilde would draw to his theatre the carriage-trade crowd in which Wilde himself was just beginning to move. Wilde, for his part, determined to use the occasion to query the aesthetic and moral values of Alexander's viewers. The result was a production that drew upon the stage conventions of drawing-room melodrama and the goods of an emerging consumer society to challenge the world it seemed to endorse. Wilde's correspondence with Alexander shows how completely the playwright relied upon the textures and commodities of Society life to make his points, as well as the extent to which he intruded himself into every aspect of performance, from minute details of stage business and mise-enscène to the seasonal lines of Alexander's dressmakers, Mesdames Savage and Purdue.