Although his father had been a scholarly administrator and his mother the model Victorian matron, Prince Edward was anything but an earnest-minded intellectual. Entering his fifties as the nineties began, the Prince of Wales embodied the easy-going, pleasure-seeking young men of the decade. His affairs were a favourite topic of newspaper columnists, who delighted in criticizing the royal father of five who "openly maintained scandalous relations with ballet dancers and chorus singers."
At the end of the century young men often cultivated a fin-de-siècle pose, complete with a studied languor, a weary sophistication, and a search for fresh titillation. In a sense, like Samuel Butler in the novel The Way of All Flesh, these young men were deliberately rebelling against the serious striving and morality of their fathers. Dickens' David Copperfield in 1850 described himself as "always thoroughly earnest." Forty-five years later Oscar Wilde turned this typically mid-Victorian virtue into a pun, setting the word's meaning upside down by associating it with the duplicitous, vain, and pleasure-seeking Jack Worthing and his foppish companion, Algernon Moncrieff. As novelist (and former Aesthete) Richard Le Galliene remarked in The Romantic Nineties (1926), "Wilde made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may be said to have died of laughter."
Last modified 16 October 2003