The class quiz
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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was the son of Dublin surgeon Sir William Wilde and Jane Elgee, a literary hostess who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’. Oscar’s witty epigrams and classic plays – including A Woman of No Importance (1893), from which this quote is taken, and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) – poke fun at the snobbery of the upper classes and their stifling moral conventions. Wilde was jailed in 1895 for homosexual acts (illegal in Britain until 1967). His well-known affair with the aristocratic Lord Alfred Douglas was ignored by the police; he was convicted on evidence of having had sex with a number of working-class ‘rent boys’. Wilde’s essays include The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891) in which he said: ‘Socialism itself will be of value because it will lead to individualism.’ Fox hunting, an upper-class pastime, was abolished in England and Wales in February 2005.
