The Importance of Being Earnest/Victorian Research

The Victorian Era research we did before the book, seemed at first, completely useless and irrelevant to English. However, as we began to read the book and analyze the play's social institutions, it really helped me to have some background information on the Victorian Era. Especially on the subject of marriage, I know I probably would have been lost with all the puns or satire if I hadn't caught up with the Victorian Era facts. Such as on pg. 17 when Lady Bracknell gossips about a widow, "I hadn't been there since her poor husband's death. She looks quite twenty years younger." It clicked in my mind that Wilde was using black humor on marriage for a women, because the looking 'twenty years younger' when your husband dies, obviously means your happy not to be married to him anymore. This shows that marriage was unpleasant, and rarely ever out of love in the Victorian Era, which I already knew from the research I did.

While researching education in the Victorian Era, I found that children's education wasn't even a priority because the Industrial Revolution caused a need for child labor. Therefore, not many people were educated. I saw a reference to this in the book when Lady Bracknell says on pg. 24, "The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." Without the research, I would probably pass this off as being a bad pun, but because I have researched it, I know that it was satire on education, showing the severity of how little education there was in the Victorian Era.