The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People
By Oscar Wilde

Transcription, correction, and markup by Students, Staff, and Faculty at George Mason University, and the University of Virginia, Jen Fehsenfeld, Stephanie Grimm, Tonya Howe, John O'Brien, Christine Ruotolo, Humzah Syed, Alok Yadav

Page Images

Sources

London : Leonard Smithers and Co, 1899

The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed on Valentine's Day, 1895. At this time, Wilde was in a relationship with poet and journalist Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), then 17 years of age, which enraged his father, the Marquess of Queensbury. The Marquess frequently harrassed Wilde in public, naming him a "sodomite," and Wilde--against the advice of friends and legal counsel--sued him for libel. Wilde lost the libel case, and he was then himself sued by Queensbury on charges of "gross indecency" under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which was meant to protect young women under the age of 16 from sexual assault. Same-sex sodomy was only decriminalized in England in 1967. Wilde was found guilty, after several trials, and sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison, which he served from 1895 to 1897. This was the maximum sentence for the charge. Wilde wrote De Profunduswhile in prison; it was published in 1905, after his death. Wilde died in Paris in 1900, shortly after his release, never to return to either Ireland or Great Britain. On the premiere of Earnest, Queensbury had planned to pepper the stage with rotten vegetables, but the plot was avoided and the play opened successfully and secured Wilde's artistic status even as he went to prison. The first edition of the play, which we use for this digital edition, was printed in 1899--Wilde's authorship is not noted on the titlepage, or anywhere else in the text, though another small printing of a signed limited edition bearing the author's name was released later in the same year.

This digital edition was produced during a one-day edit-a-thon with partners at George Mason University and The University of Virginia, held on July 25, 2024. Facsimile page images, courtesy of the Small Special Collections Library at The University of Virginia, show that this book was number 335 of a small printing of 1000. The transcription was created from the facsimile page images fed through OpenAI by Christine Ruotolo.

We have located stage directions associated specifically with a particular speaker inside the speech tag for that speech, and otherwise, outside. Em dashes have been replaced with two hyphens.

Editorial Statements

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

Citation

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, Leonard Smithers and Co, 1899 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/Wilde/wilde-earnest. Accessed: 2024-10-17T12:12:23.836Z

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[Title Page] THE
IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
A TRIVIAL COMEDY FOR
SERIOUS PEOPLE
BY
THE AUTHOR OF
LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN

London
Printed by LEONARD SMITHERS AND CO
5 Old Bond Street W,
MDCCCXCIX.