Victorian Age, The Importance Of Being Earnest.

             In the Victorian Age, which encompassed the last quarter of the nineteenth century, England was at its highest point. The British Empire extended all over the world, prompting the phrase, "The sun never sets in the British Empire." .

             The era saw the flourishing of the English aristocracy, but much like the contemporaneous Gilded Age in America, the rise of the elite created a huge wealth disparity between the very rich and the very poor. This gap became fertile ground for many artists, particularly Charles Dickens, who made a career of examining the social conditions on the lower rungs of English society. The period also played host to a rise of new ideas, most importantly the revolutionary ideas of Darwin, whose work on evolution became extremely influential in the last part of the nineteenth century. The Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy adopted a fatalist philosophy along Darwinian lines, in which now removed from his privileged place at the centre of the world, man was viewed as moving within forces beyond his control. .

             Oscar Wilde, rather than focusing on the lower classes or social conditions, chose to satirize the life of the English aristocracy, a world with which he was personally familiar. His characters are typical Victorian snobs; they are often arrogant, overly proper, formal, and concerned with money. Lady Bracknell in particular embodies the stereotype of the Victorian English aristocrat. Wilde focuses on the easy life of the wealthy, none of whom seem to work at all. Indeed, the main concern of all the characters in the play is something that Wilde viewed as rather trivial: marriage. In basing his work on the problems and trials of marriage, Wilde deliberately adds a Victorian-era interpretation to the age-old English formula of the marriage plot. The works of Jane Austen and George Eliot alone provide multiple examples of the genre.