This article has been published in Victoriographies, by Edinburgh University Press. Marland, R. (2026) Colin Cavendish-Jones, Oscar Wilde and Nihilism, Victoriographies, 16, 189–91, doi:10.3366/vic.2026.0608
Oscar Wilde’s fascination with the figure of the Russian Nihilist – ‘that strange martyr who has no faith, […] and dies for what he does not believe in’ – can be traced from his early political poetry, through his first play Vera; or, The Nihilists, to his journalism, essays, and short-fiction. But Wilde always privileged surface over substance: was nihilism, for him, a paradox merely, or was his engagement with the philosophy more profound? In Oscar Wilde and Nihilism, Colin Cavendish-Jones suggests the latter. His book’s lucid introduction lays out a taxonomy of nihilism’s many forms – philosophical, political, cosmic, moral – and identifies a commonality: the proposition that ‘the world is absurd and unintelligible, without rules, values, certainty, or any ruler to provide a definitive point of view’ (12). Cavendish-Jones sees this idea running through Wilde’s works, and it is an idea that is remarkably prescient. Before Wilde, he argues, canonical nineteenth-century authors had nothing to say about nihilism; after Wilde, almost every serious writer does. Wilde, who can often seem more modern than his contemporaries, emerges as a pioneer of this new way of grappling with life’s purpose.
Cavendish-Jones reads the revolutionaries in Vera as ‘active destroyers’ in the mould of Yevgeny Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), figures bent on annihilating the social order without a vision of what might replace it (46). His construal of a czar who declares war against his own people as a nihilist in all but name is innovative (47–8). So too is his identification of Prince Paul with Nietzsche’s Übermensch, though it requires that the character be judged brave (for me, Prince Paul exhibits placidity and savoir faire but not bravery). Cavendish-Jones sees the illogical arguments and inconsistent behaviour of Wilde’s Nihilists as intentional on the part of the author – Wilde’s way of portraying a confusing and conflicted philosophy. But Vera is a slapdash piece and there is a sense, unacknowledged here, that the confusion may be Wilde’s own.
For Cavendish-Jones, all of Wilde’s work – especially the fairy stories, Salomé, and De Profundis – unfolds ‘against a backdrop of cosmic nihilism’ (171), in a universe indifferent to beauty and suffering. This reading, which resonates for stories such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’, is unconvincing when applied to De Profundis, where Wilde envisions a future in which a hospitable Nature will provide ‘clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and […] hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling’. More compelling is Cavendish-Jones’s argument that Wilde seeks in De Profundis to present Christ as a Wildean moral nihilist – a man for whom there were no laws.
Turning to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Cavendish-Jones asserts that Wilde depicts Lord Henry Wotton as a sterile and passive aesthete, an appreciator rather than a creator, in contrast to the artist Basil Hallward, whose work offers solace for the terrifying bleakness of existence (103–4). He denies that Wotton is Wilde’s mouthpiece, but undermines his case by quoting Wotton on the philistinism of the English public and the superiority of an idle over an active life – views Wilde also held (105–6, 108–9). Cavendish-Jones’s eminently sensible conclusion that Wotton is best read as a moral nihilist, placed in conflict with Hallward over Gray’s soul to dramatise Wilde’s belief in art as the great counterforce to nihilism, is not dependent on Wilde disagreeing with Wotton.
While scholars have long characterised the political programme laid out by Wilde in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ as unworkable, Cavendish-Jones finds that the negative points ‘are invariably shrewd’ (122): Wilde can identify society’s ills even if he cannot conceive of solutions to them. The sketch of the Nihilists in this essay suggests that Wilde considered them political nihilists (equivalent to anarchists) but not moral nihilists, since he saw their rejection of authority as based on ethics. ‘This’, writes Cavendish-Jones, ‘is also Wilde’s position throughout “The Soul of Man”: his political nihilism derives from his moral conviction that compulsion is always wrong and his aesthetic conviction that only untrammelled individualism can produce great art’ (124).
The book concludes with an instructive discussion of the nihilistic resonances of Wilde’s works in those of P.G. Wodehouse, André Gide, and Marcel Proust. Cavendish-Jones notes that Wodehouse’s fiction shares elements with Wilde’s comedies – both are populated with vapid male aristocrats who collide with formidable aunts, whip-smart servants, and assertive New Women – but that Wodehouse presents a world that is always cheerful and ordered. Gide and Proust, however, consistently engage with nihilism. The exact nature of the relationship between Wilde and Gide is disputed, though Cavendish-Jones sees Gide’s nihilism as a product of that relationship, which appears to have had a dynamic similar to the relationship between Wotton and Gray. Finally, Cavendish-Jones offers Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) as a counterpart to Dorian Gray: Wilde’s novel is about the dangers of putting life before art; Proust’s is ‘about the redemptive consequences of putting art before life’ (205).
As with other grand unified theories of Wilde (whether based on nationality, sexuality, or radical politics), Cavendish-Jones’s fits some works better than others. Even if interpretations occasionally seem strained, however, Cavendish-Jones admits evidence both for and against seeing Wilde as a nihilist. His iconoclastic treatment of Wilde is also refreshing. But a focus on the work to the exclusion of the life means that the book lacks an aetiology of Wilde’s nihilism, which surely did not emerge ex nihilo. Neither is there any examination of Wilde’s ambivalent ideas about anarchy. Although Wilde repudiated rules in an anarchic spirit, his poetry (unexamined here) and Vera suggest that he regarded Russian Nihilists as heirs to the Montagnards of France. Still, Oscar Wilde and Nihilism is a stimulating, often perceptive contribution, and a comprehensive examination of a previously understudied facet of Wilde’s thought.
Colin Cavendish-Jones, Oscar Wilde and Nihilism (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2025), 248 pp., $190, ISBN 9781032900636