Wilde, The Science of Heredity, and The Picture of Dorian Gray

Abstract

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) entered Magdalen College in 1874, where his interest in hereditary theories—particularly those of Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and August Weismann—profited from the instantiation of the Report of the Royal Commission on Oxford University (1852) obligated by the related Parliamentary Act of 1854. Prompted by Thomas Carlyle’s “Germanizing” (46) mission, this academic reorientation encouraged a positive reevaluation of continental literature and science, promoted nonsectarian education, and connected, as Gisela Argyle states, “the scientific enterprise with notions of German rigour, industry, and professionalism” (106). Disciplines emergent in English academia, therefore, received unprecedented support at Oxford: modern history, philology, physiology, and biology enjoyed positive recognition; scientific research benefited from strong ties with foreign institutions; and important European treatises in natural science were translated into English for intercollegiate dissemination. These “liberal” efforts “toward reforming Oxford … helped indirectly to establish” not only “Darwinian supporters there” (13), as M. J. S. Hodge avers, but also followers of Haeckel and Weismann.¹