An Ideal Husband

The More Serious Comedy

An Ideal Husband opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 3 January 1895, six weeks before The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James’s. The two plays ran simultaneously in London — a remarkable double achievement — and between them they represent Wilde at the height of his powers: one play that is perfect comedy, and one that uses comedy to examine something more troubling.

Sir Robert Chiltern is a model Victorian public man: upright, respected, successful. His success rests on a secret he has carried for twenty years — early in his career he sold a state secret to a financier, and the resulting investment made him wealthy enough to enter politics and build his reputation. Mrs Cheveley, a woman with no scruples and considerable intelligence, has the evidence, and she wants a favour: Robert must support a fraudulent Argentine canal scheme in Parliament. She has come to London specifically to lever that support from him.

Mrs Cheveley and the Politics of Blackmail

Mrs Cheveley is the finest of Wilde’s comic villains — funnier and more dangerous than any character in Earnest because the stakes around her are genuinely serious. She is witty in the Wildean mode, deploying epigrams with the same casual brilliance as Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, but where Lord Henry corrupts through philosophy, Mrs Cheveley corrupts through leverage. Her amorality is not pose or philosophy but practical conviction: she believes that everyone has a price, that morality is a form of cowardice, and that she is simply more honest than the people she manipulates.

The blackmail plot gives Wilde the structure he needs for a different kind of comedy — one in which the laughter does not displace the seriousness but coexists with it. The play asks what it actually means to be “ideal”: whether Lady Chiltern’s rigid idealization of her husband is a form of love or a form of demand, whether the twenty-year-old crime that made Robert’s career was a betrayal of public trust or a young man’s understandable error, and whether a wife who has constructed an idol is able to accept the man when the idol falls.

Lord Goring and the Art of Being Useful

Lord Goring — Wilde’s self-portrait, the dandy who professes to care about nothing but is always in the right place with the right information — manages the comedy while the other characters do the serious work. He is the play’s machinery: he uncovers Mrs Cheveley’s past, he saves the situation, and he delivers the play’s moral argument most directly, telling Lady Chiltern that “a man’s life is worth more than a woman’s ideal.” The line sounds like a Wildean paradox. In context, it is a genuine ethical position.

The resolution — Robert saved, Lady Chiltern’s idealism converted to something more realistic, Mrs Cheveley foiled — is perhaps too neat for the darkness the play has stirred. But Wilde earns the comedy’s ending because he has spent three acts taking the question seriously: what would it actually cost to be an ideal husband, and who is paying?

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Wilde’s most politically serious play: a comedy that genuinely examines public virtue and private corruption rather than merely glittering over the surface of them.