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and public executions. Reforms in hospitals and orphanages, prisons and workhouses, schools and factories can all be traced to debates initiated or fueled by writers. The earnestness of all these reformers—artistic, intellectual, religious, and political—improved the quality of the life in Victorian Britain.
F Earnestness did not characterize only those who addressed social evils, however, but also those whose activities created social problems in the first place. The farmers, investors, and manufacturers whose actions dislocated rural populations and resulted in the squalor of factory towns like Manchester, were also “earnest” about their actions. They believed they were improving the quality of peoples’ lives and, in some ways, they were.
G Overall, the country produced more abundant, cheaper food and better quality, affordable mass produced goods like clothing. Indeed, historian Asa Briggs termed the middle of the nineteenth century “The Age of Improvement” (a phrase he employed as the title of his book on the subject), because of the rising living conditions but also because of the concern to improve the quality of life, to ensure that each generation lived better than the last.
H Like British fanners and industrialists, British colonial administrators also justified the nation’s imperial ambitions because they “improved” the lives of “uncivilized” peoples, giving them Christianity, British cultural values, and higher living standards. This attitude came to be known as, in author Rudyard Kipling’s words, “the white man’s burden.”
I Many of those enriching themselves in this way would acknowledge that their actions caused suffering as well as benefits. They justified their actions based on the utilitarianism of thinkers like John Stewart Mill. Utilitarians determine the rightness of an action by asking if certain actions produce the most good for the most people. If people in general benefited, the suffering of a few specific people could be tolerated as the price paid for progress. While this approach may seem callous and self-serving, these thinkers and tycoons were also “earnest” in their actions.
Yet the characters in Wilde’s play are not earnest in this sense. Their actions satirize popular notions of the idle rich but also poke fun at Utilitarianism as well. When Jack admits to Lady Bracknell that he smokes, she replies that “a man should have an occupation.” Later, Algernon admits that he doesn’t “mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.” Jack and Algernon have no real occupations or professions; their purposelessness critiques the “earnest” nature of Utilitarian activities.
Now we can see that Wilde’s use of “earnestness” is more complex than it may first appear to modern audiences. Indeed, his play offers rather biting, if understated, criticism of the institutions and values that had, by the end of the nineteenth century, made Britain the world’s greatest colonial power. Ironically, it is exactly the earnestness exhibited by Britain’s exploitative class, industrial, and colonial systems that enables the life of leisure enjoyed by the play’s main characters.