Bunbury Pure and Simple

Bunbury Pure and Simple W. CRAVEN MACKIE Sometime in late July 1894 Oscar Wilde wrote to George Alexander requesting an advance of £150 so that he might go away to write a comedy. In that letter he outlines a scenario of the play that within a month and a half would become a rough draft of The Importance ofBeing Earnest. In this early untitled version the names of Jack Worthing, Algernon, Cecily, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell have yet to be invented. There is yet no play upon the word earnest and no Bunbury.1 By early August, only a few days after writing to Alexander, Wilde had traveled with his family from London to the seaside resort of Worthing in Sussex , where he continued to work on the new play. In notes that quickly followed and expanded upon the first scenario, Wilde had come up with a working title, The Guardian. Further, he had settled on the names Worthing and Gwendolen, had introduced dialogue expressing Gwendolen's passion for the name Ernest and had noted "Mr Bunbury ~ always ill -.'" Since 1960 there has been much speculation about the source for Bunbury. The earliest inquiry and assumption on the subject appeared that year in the London Sunday Times. It came from an antiquarian in Cheshire, Reverend Ridgway: "As vicar of Bunbury I have always been puzzled as to why Oscar Wilde decided to pick on this remote village (if he did) to coin his phrase 'bunburying' in The Importance ofBeing Earnest. Can any reader throw light on the link?" William Green includes the letter among the endnotes to his article "Oscar Wilde and the Bunburys" and explains, "Although [Ridgway] did receive some interesting replies to his letter, his investigation came to naught."3 Thirty years later Kerry Powell would echo Reverend Ridgway's disappointment: "Bunbury's name, like so many in Wilde's plays, is difficult to pin down in terms of its source."4 Green himself rejects the possibility of place names as a source, arguing instead for names of actual people. He concludes that Bunbury was "a composite" of two contemporary figures, classical Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 327 328 W, CRAVEN MACKIE scholar Edward Herbert Bunbury and an acquaintance of the Wilde family in Dublin during Wilde's youth, Henry Shirley Bunbury. Among the replies to Ridgway's inquiry, Green discovered a letter from Henry's son Walter recalling , "My father gave me to understand that it was he whom Wilde had in mind" at the time the play was written. Walter further recalls that his father "was in rather poor health," convincing Green that Henry Shirley Bunbury was indeed "the primary model."5 Without crediting Green, Richard Ellmann adopts the family friend thesis: "Many of [Wilde's] relations lived in England, and so did friends like Henry S. Bunbury ... who would give his name to the errant behaviour of Algernon in The Importance ofBeing Earnest.,,6 Kerry Powell argues that "the concept of Bunburying - and its name - could have been suggested to Wilde by the recent success of Godpapa,"7 an unpublished farce that had enjoyed a modest run in 1891 and in which an aspiring drunk named Bunbury unwittingly facilitates a kind of Bunburying by the hero. Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggren reason that "Wilde appears to be following his habit of deriving surnames from place names,'" citing the village in Cheshire, and Peter Raby dutifully reports that the name can be found in the Army Lists of 1894." Do any of these speCUlations, however, provide a logical explanation for what prompted the hastily scribbled note "Mr. Bunbury - always ill"? Wilde had not seen or heard from the family acquaintance for sixteen years. He never met or acknowledged the classical scholar. That he would have had any desire to recall a nearly forgotten play by a rival playwright seems doubtful. And there is no proof that he had any knowledge of the village in Cheshire or of the Bunbury tucked away in the 1500 pages of the Army Lists. "All the evidence ," Peter Raby explains, "points to Wilde constructing The Importance of Being Earnest with great rapidity and zest, incorporating material which lay conveniently at hand,"'o...