Between March 1885 and May 1890 Oscar Wilde wrote more than seventy unsigned book reviews for W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, between November 1887 and June 1889 he was editor of The Woman's World, and throughout the late 1880s he contributed a number of pieces, some signed, some not, to other newspapers and journals.

It may seem surprising that one of the world's great literary stylists should have produced so much anonymous material. Today we would probably assume that anything written by Wilde would be instantly recognisable, but in the 1880s, when he was making his living as a professional journalist, one among many, not only was anonymity the general rule, the famous style had yet to become a badge of personality. That everyone now knows, or thinks they know, what constitutes the 'Wildean' is partly the result of more than a century's familiarity with his writings and with countless imitators. Once a style can be recognised it can also be copied.

There are signs nevertheless that Wilde saw anonymous journalism as a way of mapping out his personal literary territory, even if the hidden pattern can sometimes look like a maze. He certainly did not confine himself to a limited number of favourite topics. Indeed, it was one of the requirements of the kind of reviewer that Wilde aspired to become that he or she should be able to write on a wide range of subjects. From romantic novels to cookbooks, from every kind of translation to musicology: Wilde took pride in attempting the unlikely. His intellectual curiosity was more wide-ranging than has sometimes been assumed.

Wilde's three Society comedies were produced by different managers: Lady Windermere's Fan by George Alexander at the St James's Theatre (20 February 1892), A Woman of No Importance by Herbert Beerbohm Tree (19 April 1893) and An Ideal Husband (3 January 1895) by Lewis Waller, both at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Had Henry James's Guy Domville not been a failure and left Alexander with a gap in his season, Wilde would have added Charles Wyndham and the Criterion Theatre to his list with The Importance of Being Earnest. In the months before his career collapsed in the witness box of the Queensberry libel trial, he was sketching out a new play of modern life for Alexander, the Gerald Lancing scenario which Frank Harris later fleshed out as Mr and Mrs Daventry; and negotiating with American producers such as Albert Palmer about a play ' “with no real serious interest” - just a comedy', and with Charles Frohman for a 'modern “School for Scandal”' style of play. This flurry of activity indicates both Wilde's perceived marketability on both sides of the Atlantic and his own growing confidence in a genre he had only taken up in 1891, in fact at Alexander's invitation. 'I wonder can I do it in a week, or will it take three?' he reportedly commented to Frank Harris. 'It ought not to take long to beat the Pineros and the Joneses.'

Writing to Alexander in February 1891, Wilde offered a rather different attitude towards his progress on Lady Windermere's Fan: 'I am not satisfied with myself or my work. I can't get a grip of the play yet: I can't get my people real... I am very sorry, but artistic work can't be done unless one is in the mood; certainly my work can't. Sometimes I spend months over a thing, and don't do any good; at other times I write a thing in a fortnight' (L 282).

When the painter William Hogarth visited the novelist Samuel Richardson one day, “he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man.” Yet suddenly the retard began to talk. Such was the power of his eloquence that Hogarth then looked at him with astonishment “and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired” (Life, i, 146-47). This was Samuel Johnson, a great man who looked like an idiot. External appearances may not matter, but there is something symbolic here. For Johnson was indeed a man ever beset by a sense of discrepancy and paradox.

Three days before he died in the Hotel d'Alsace, Oscar Wilde was asked by the proprietor Jean Dupoirier about his life in London. 'Some said my life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple', he replied, echoing Algy Moncrieff, paradoxical as always and never one to lose the opportunity of recycling a well-turned phrase. Biographers ever since have been by turn delighted at the rich pickings and exasperated by the contradictions. The duality of Wilde in all aspects fascinates, confuses: the Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist sympathies; the Protestant with life-long Catholic leanings; the married homosexual; the musician of words and painter of language who confessed to Andre Gide that writing bored him; the artist astride not two but three cultures, an Anglo-Francophile and a Celt at heart. And overlaid on it all is the question of which facets of the Wildean dichotomy were real and involuntary and which were artificial and contrived for effect.

For the biographer it becomes important to find out, but for Wilde, who confessed that he lived in permanent fear of not being misunderstood, it becomes equally important that he should not. What is one to make of Wilde's response to the New York reporter who asked whether he had indeed walked down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand? 'To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph.' Wilde blurs the edges and hides behind a non-alignment with his own utterances:

Good critics clarify the meaning of a work of art by helping us see what its maker intended; they provide historical facts; and they sincerely express their unbiased opinions. To which Oscar Wilde responds that the best critic, rather than explaining the work of art, 'may seek rather to deepen its mystery'; that 'The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it'; and that 'the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational'. According to Wilde, 'the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there'. Such criticism 'treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation'; it 'is itself an art', and of all the arts it is 'the purest form of personal expression'. As pure creation and personal expression, criticism's responsibility 'is to see the object as in itself it really is not'. Inaccurate and insincere, yet perfectly expressing the critic's moods, 'Criticism ... makes culture possible.' Therefore, 'It is to criticism that the future belongs': it 'will annihilate race-prejudices' and 'give us the peace that springs from understanding'.

Such, at least, are the opinions of Wilde's spokesman in his dialogue 'The Critic as Artist', published in Intentions (1891), the book on which Wilde's claims as a critic chiefly lie. Criticism of a more conventional sort - reasonable, factual and often fair - Wilde had done in reviews by the score, from the mid-i88os, when he left the lecture platform, until 1890, when he looked to the West End stage for his earnings. But with Intentions he destabilises the very category 'criticism', obliterating boundaries, for instance between the critic and the thing criticised, which ordinarily define it.

Though Oscar Wilde has usually been regarded as an Aesthete or Decadent whose devotion to art for art's sake was immutable, in fact he never adhered rigidly to such a doctrine. From the beginning of his career, he wrote poems as a conventional Victorian, expressing moral, political and religious attitudes expected in serious art. His concern with the cultural crises of the time found expression in much of his early verse written during and after his Oxford years (1874-8) - that is, before he turned his attention to the nature of art in advancing the Aesthetic Movement. But even while rejecting the Victorian notion of art as moral edification, Wilde could not sustain his aestheticism, for he was driven by the conviction, drawn from such disparate figures as Baudelaire, Ruskin, Pater and Whistler, that life and art were ultimately shaped by one's moral and spiritual nature. Inevitably, the tension between his avowed aestheticism and his Victorian sensibility resulted in contradictions throughout his work, as summed up in the title of Norbert Kohl's study: Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel (1989). Indeed, Wilde expressed his own position in his essay 'The Truth of Masks' in Intentions (1891): 'A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true' (CW 1173).

To talk about Wilde's fiction, is to talk about everything, for Oscar Wilde was his own best work of art.

Born and educated in Ireland, Wilde came from a country which gives a privileged status to fiction. In the words of his predecessor, William Carleton, meditating on 'Paddy's' skill at the alibi: 'Fiction is the basis of society, the bond of commercial prosperity, the channel of communication between nation and nation, and not unfrequently the interpreter between a man and his own conscience.' It follows that, if fiction is the very stuff by which society is made, Wilde could only become a writer - and an Irishman - in England. Only there could he create himself through the fictions which formed 'the channel of communication between nation and nation', the stereotypes by which one understood the other.

A member of the leading class known as Anglo-Irish, Wilde created himself by living on both sides of the hyphen. If in Ireland, his family had been a queer kind of English people - at once upholders of the embattled British regime and, at the same time, more Irish than the Irish themselves - in England, Wilde became a queer kind of Irishman.

Arriving in Oxford from Dublin, Wilde beat the scholars at their own game, scooping a Double First. Although born of the 'gentry' in Ireland, Wilde assumed the status of an English aristocrat, leisured, extravagant, charming and mannered. If these virtues were exaggerated, it was only to give a double edge to the performance, parodying as well the stereotype of the Irish: lazy, improvident, charming and witty. As Matthew Arnold trenchantly observed, the Irish had, by their very nature, more in common with the English upper class than either of them held with the hardworking, thrifty and dour English middle class.

Samuel Johnson's preeminence rests upon the extraordinary intellectual and moral achievements within his prose. That truth universally acknowledged nonetheless admits a complementary truth - Johnson is a great prose writer in part because he is a great poet. Johnson wrote poetry throughout his life. Even after a stroke and, later, upon his deathbed he turned to prayer in Latin verse. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy, translations, adaptations of classical poems, satires, love poems, poems warning of the dangers of love, elegies, epitaphs, comic parodies, serious prayers, odes, sonnets, meditations on his inner psychological and spiritual being, and, in the nature of things, poems that combined several of these genres. Johnson correctly said that at Pembroke College, Oxford his group of student-poets was a “nest of singing birds” (Life, I, 75). However naturally artful, Johnson's poetic production is small in comparison with other great poets, but several of his poems nonetheless are major and minor masterpieces. They include many devices that make his prose memorable, for his prose is memorable in part because it is so poetic. I begin this chapter by exploring some of his characteristic modes of proceeding.

Rasselas was written and published in 1759, and immediately became a popular work, running to several editions in the course of Johnson's lifetime and being frequently reprinted thereafter. It is still the best known of any of Johnson's works, and is probably the best place to start for anyone coming to Johnson for the first time. It is short, for one thing, saying much in relatively few pages. It deals with a self-evidently large and interesting subject - Johnson thought of titling it “The Choice of Life” - and does so without reference to intellectual or historical matters now become obscure. It has the congenial form of a narrative fiction, and although it is unlike what the modern reader would think of as a novel, the narrative form remains essential to its effect: the unwinding line of the story and the contingency of event play against the discursive, intellectualizing impulse in a way that releases some of Johnson's best writing, here as in the Lives of the Poets. And, perhaps more unmistakably than any of his other works, Rasselas impresses with the power of Johnson's intelligence, the “strength of thought” which, as he says in the “Life of Cowley,” is essential to any account of true wit (Lives, 1, 19-2,0).

Wilde died in 1900, the year before Queen Victoria and the same year as Nietzsche. Dating him in such a way evokes the modernity of the Victorian age, with its values of progress, technology, global markets and individualism. It also evokes the postmodernism of Nietzsche, the philosopher with whom Wilde is most often compared, in their transvaluation of values, in the second half of the twentieth century. The Victorians agonised over values - family values, British values, value as use or exchange - while Nietzsche revealed value as a fraud, a tool of domination of some over others, on the one hand, and promoted a radical perspectivism or scepticism, on the other. Wilde, a figure of paradox and contradiction, participated in both modern value critique and postmodern perspectivism.

Modernism in social theory, as distinguished from modernist aesthetics, refers to processes that began to be theorised during the European Enlightenment. First among these were the democratic revolutions - the abolition of race slavery, the enfranchisement of working men and then women, and the struggle for increasing circles of rights - until today one speaks of the rights of many social groups, children, (non-human) animals, even non-animal life, as in radical ecology. Inseparable from the conditions that gave rise to the democratic revolutions was the growth in scientific knowledge and technology that led to the economic and population explosion that we call the industrial revolution: it was in fact the political economists rather than the moralists who first argued against slavery, as an inefficient use of labour. It is important at the outset to note that for the Enlightenment and for the Victorian modernists described here, progress was a moral and political category as much as a technological or economic one.

A poem labelled dubiously as having been 'translated' by Oscar Wilde - from Polish, which he did not speak - is buried deep in an obscure anthology edited by Clement Scott, drama critic of the London Daily Telegraph. The poem, 'Sen Artysty', supposedly written by actress Helena Modjeska and translated by Wilde near the time of her London debut, is as conflicted as many other stories and poems in The Green Room (1880), the anthology of theatre-writing in which it appears. The actress, or rather the persona of the poem that Wilde associated with Helena Modjeska, regrets her choice of an artistic life, is left with 'a restless pain' in her heart, and receives the stigmata of 'red wounds of thorns' on her brow when he tries to take off the laurel-crown. 'Sen Artysty' not only harmonises with other writings in Clement Scott's anthology - all of them stories, essays or poems about the theatre - but asserts the same themes as many other Victorian assessments of women performers. Actresses were commonly thought to pay a terrible price for the public lives they led, including even the fortunate minority, like Modjeska, whose genius or hard work opened the way to riches and international fame. That price was figured in the rhetoric of suffering, illness and death, in lives wrecked by maladies both physical and mental. Victorian praise and even adulation of actresses was thus mingled with representations of them as suffering or wounded, like the speaker in the Helena Modjeska poem, or as monstrous, sick, or dying - victims of their own success in transcending the usual limits of a respectable Victorian woman's life.

“He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. - Johnson is dead. - Let us go to the next best: - there is nobody; - no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.” Thus the words of William Hamilton as reported by James Boswell at the end of his Life of Johnson (1791). In a sense Johnson scholarship has always been concerned with filling up the space left by Johnson's death in 1784; at the same time it has also been aware of the impossibility of that effort. Since Boswell's Life and the review of John Croker's edition of that work by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1831 readers have internalized a certain set of physiological images and style of speech that have come to identify Johnson in the popular and even the academic mind. Perhaps more than any other English writer, including Shakespeare, Johnson's words have been quoted and misquoted in almost every form of public discourse, and his works have been interpreted and misinterpreted, not only by eighteenth-century scholars but by specialists in other areas. Johnson has been fair game for all. The attention he has received is the mark of many things: it is a sign that his personality continues to fascinate, that his works continue to speak to the experience of modern people, and that he and his works represent a complex cultural authority that provide some readers with deep, intelligent instances of moral, social, and literary insight, while symbolizing for others the worst excesses of absolutist and ethnocentric rationalism produced by the Enlightenment.

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.

When Matthew Arnold formulated his ideal of liberal education, he turned not to Coleridge or Hazlitt or De Quincey, or even to Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson, but to Johnson's Lives of the Poets. In his Six Chief Lives from Johnson's “Lives of the Poets” (1878) Arnold designated Johnson's lives of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, and Gray as points de repère - “points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again.” These critical biographies covered the period from the birth of Milton in 1608 to the death of Gray in 1771, a crucial century and a half in English literature; and although there were significant critical disagreements of judgment between Arnold and Johnson, when it came to an education in literary history, biography, and criticism Arnold saw the Lives of the Poets as offering a “compendious story of a whole important age in English literature, told by a great man, and in a performance which is itself a piece of English literature of the first class” (p. 362).

Johnson's first acquaintance with Shakespeare gave him a shock. As a boy in Lichfield, and reading Shakespeare's Hamlet in the basement of his father's shop, he was frightened by the scene with the ghost and rushed upstairs “that he might see people about him.” Later, in the relatively unsuperstitious maturity of early middle age, Johnson published some sample notes for a planned edition of Shakespeare. In these, the Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745), he lights on a passage that arouses but also scares him. Johnson compares the passage from Shakespeare with a famous passage from Dryden's Conquest of Mexico (1667):

What James Clifford and Donald Greene observed in 1970 is still true: “The history of Johnson's reputation since his own lifetime is in fact complex and needs even more study than it has received.” Their introduction to Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (Survey hereafter) is essential reading for anyone interested in Johnson and his reception. I could, in fact, recommend their survey to my readers and end my essay at this point, except for three considerations: their discussion goes only to 1969 (Greene and John Vance's update, A Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1970-1985, does not include a survey); they offer perhaps more detail than the reader who seeks an introduction might desire; and their discussion considers only indirectly the methods used in Johnson's critical reception.

Two other valuable resources should be mentioned at the outset. Edward Tomarken's History of the Commentary on Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson (1994) contains much that is useful and enlightening, but his “interpretive history” aims for “a new kind of literary method,” which he calls “New Humanism.” Thus Tomarken examines the critical record according to his ambitious goal. In addition, James Boulton's Johnson: The Critical Heritage very conveniently collects and excerpts eighty-one documents related to Johnson's reception from the period 1738-1832.

Cicero describes a poet who, undeterred by losing his audience, continues his recitation to the end: “Plato alone is as good as a hundred thousand,” the poet declares. It is no surprise that this tale of merit's endurance in a hostile age should have lodged in Johnson's mind. “The Lecturer was surely in the right, who, though he saw his audience slinking away, refused to quit the Chair, while Plato staid,” he tells John Wesley (6 February 1776; Letters, II, 290 and n.). He later acknowledges a compliment from Hester Thrale with quieter reference to the tale: “There is some comfort in writing, when such praise is to be had. Plato is a multitude” (18 March 1779; III, 157).

To value a lone connoisseur as highly as a mass readership was not only to salvage pride in an overlooked work, nor was it simply to claim kinship with such other addressees of “fit audience . . . though few” as Milton. In the context of his correspondence with Hester Thrale (who elicited from Johnson no fewer than 373 surviving letters, including many of his finest), it was also to suggest that private genres like the letter itself could count for as much as literature printed and bound.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's most famous and - posthumously - most successful play, was first produced by George Alexander at the St James's Theatre on 14 February 1895. London was enduring a prolonged and severe spell of cold weather: several theatres advertised their steam-heating among the attractions of their programme, and the first night of Wilde's comedy had been put off from 12 February because several of the women in the cast had bad colds. In addition to the habitual glamour of a first night at a fashionable theatre, the occasion was especially interesting because Wilde was in vogue. An Ideal Husband had been playing at the Haymarket Theatre since 3 January, and at the same theatre A Woman of No Importance had completed a successful run, having opened on 19 April 1893. On 20 February 1892 Lady Windermere's Fan had been the second play staged by Alexander's new management at the St James's Theatre, running until 26 July of that year.

Wilde's spectacular debut in the early 1880s had been followed by a period of less glamorous work as a reviewer, editor and jobbing author for journals and magazines. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In 1891 he had published four books, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and Intentions. Now, a decade after his appearance on the London literary scene, he was a successful West End dramatist and was beginning to seem a more substantial figure. A book-length lampoon, The Green Carnation, by imitating (perhaps reporting) his style of conversation, contributed to his renewed prominence in the literary and social gossip columns. To some readers it may also have suggested - or confirmed - the impression that there was a less positive side to Wilde's notoriety.