An Ideal Husband

Sir Robert Chiltern is a rising statesman with a spotless name and a wife, Gertrude, who worships him for it. At his party in Grosvenor Square, Mrs Cheveley arrives from Vienna holding a letter that proves he sold a Cabinet secret to Baron Arnheim as a young secretary and built his fortune on the proceeds. She demands that he support a fraudulent Argentine Canal scheme in the House of Commons, or she will give the story to the newspapers.

Robert gives in, then withdraws his promise when his wife insists. Mrs Cheveley takes her revenge by telling Gertrude the truth, and the marriage breaks apart. Robert turns to his friend Lord Goring, an idle dandy who proves the sharpest mind in the play. Goring recognises a brooch Mrs Cheveley has lost as one she stole years ago, and uses it to force her to hand over the letter, which he burns. She slips away with a note Gertrude wrote to Goring, meaning to wreck the marriage with it.

The note misfires: Robert reads it as written to himself. Having denounced the canal scheme in the House, he is offered a seat in the Cabinet, and turns it down because Gertrude wants him out of public life. Goring persuades her that love means forgiving rather than punishing, and she lets Robert accept. Goring wins Robert's quick-witted sister Mabel, and the Chilterns begin again with the truth told.

Key themes

• The past that returns
• Ideals and forgiveness
• Wealth, power and ambition
• Public virtue, private secrets
• The dandy as moralist
• Men, women and marriage

An Ideal Husband was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London, on 3 January 1895. It is a play of its own moment: the persons page sets it in London at "The Present", and its plot runs through Parliament, the Foreign Office and the Stock Exchange. Robert's crime is tied to the British Government's real purchase of Suez Canal shares in 1875, and he dismisses the Argentine scheme as "a second Panama", recalling the failed French attempt to cut a canal at Panama, which had ended in financial scandal.

The play was still running when Wilde was arrested in April 1895, and his name was taken off the playbills. A play about a public man threatened with ruin went on playing while its author's name came off the bills. Mrs Cheveley's warning that "Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing" reads differently in that light.

The play was published in 1899 by Leonard Smithers, credited to "the Author of Lady Windermere's Fan". For readers, Wilde added long descriptive stage directions, and they give the printed text much of its flavour. Lady Chiltern has "grave Greek beauty", Mrs Cheveley is "A work of art, on the whole, but showing the influence of too many schools", and Phipps is "a mask with a manner". Painters serve as reference points throughout, from Watteau and Boucher to Lawrence and van Dyck.

First performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London, on 3 January 1895; published 1899.

About this edition

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• Audiobook: a full-cast reading by volunteers for LibriVox, in the public domain.
• Every quotation and glossary word in these notes is checked against the text.