A Tour of Ernest’s London

by Drew Lichtenberg

“London is at its densest in the 1890s. The Victorians have transformed the infrastructure of the city but failed to divest it of any of its teeming multitudes. Aldgate, Spitalfields, and Whitechapel are crushed by unremitting immigration of the poor and a long tradition of casual employment and there are pockets of grim poverty and overcrowding in the district of Holborn.” —The Book of London: The Evolution of a Great City 

Oscar Wilde sets The Importance of Being Earnest within a narrowly circumscribed milieu—the compact, elite neighborhoods of Mayfair, Piccadilly, Belgravia, and Westminster comprising Victorian London’s West End. From the northern bank of the Thames to the southern edges of Regency and Hyde Parks, Jack and Algy live and play in a world that’s about the size of a college campus. And it often functions like one, an elegant finishing school for the moneyed classes—complete with its own tightly scheduled social season, grassy quadrangles, furnished apartments, and dining clubs. The map of their world forms the backdrop for a play in which courtship rituals and social rounds are inextricable from the intricacies of the British class system.

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