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L U C Y M c D I A R M I D Since the wealth elite was also the power elite, high society was an essential adjunct to political life, where dinner parties might be as important as cabinet meetings. —David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990) [D]oors were open to the successful Victorian intellectual as much on account of the social standing of the roles he and his peers characteristically occupied as for his individual achievement in some department of “serious work.”Some of these doors opened on to dinners and receptions at the houses of the wealthy and the powerful. —Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (1991) “Aman who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world”: Lord Illingworth’s epigram from Oscar Wilde’s third society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (1893), is a bit ambiguous (CW, 4:109). Does it mean that the London dinner table is a stepping-stone to “the world,” a rung on a career ladder? Or does it simply mean that skills in dominating the one and the other are comparable? In any case, the word dominate suggests that one 46 1 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. should perhaps be uneasy about the idea. Or is the statement merely glib, selfreferential praise of table-talk? All of these suggestions are present. Underlying them are the notions that dominating a London dinner table is an art or power that everyone would recognize immediately and that the dinner table is an important site, worldly and political in its nature, as the quotations from David Cannadine and Stefan Collini indicate.₁ Without analyzing closely the precise nature and kind of comments uttered over dinner, both Cannadine and Collini acknowledge that such comments may constitute high politics in another form. Lord Illingworth’s epigram is witty, sinister—and true. Table-talk was both practiced and described by Oscar Wilde and by Lady Gregory.Anglo-Irish Protestants living in London during the 1880s,these writers were coevals who were also acquaintances. Wilde and Gregory dined with many of the same people: the overlap in their circles, according to letters, journals, and other records, includes such politicians and diplomats as W. E. Gladstone, Willie Grenfell,and James Russell Lowell,U.S.ambassador to England; aristocrats such as Lord Curzon and Wilfrid Blunt; writers such as W.B.Yeats,Bernard Shaw, and Henry James; and artsy Society types such as Marc-André Raffalovich, John Gray, and Aubrey Beardsley.² John Gray, frequently said to be the original of Wilde’s protagonist Dorian Gray, was a close friend of Lady Gregory’s and gave her copies of his privately circulated devotional poems (Diaries, 46).³ Gregory and Wilde were admirers of one another’s work. They most likely met sometime in 1888 or 1889, probably at a dinner or salon at the Gregorys’ London home, though Sir William Gregory may have met Wilde at one of the gentleman’s clubs somewhat earlier.⁴ In a letter dated September 1887, Wilde asked Gregory to contribute to the journal Woman’s World, which he began editing for the publishing house of Cassell that year. In a journal entry from 1928, Gregory remarks that she believes Wilde’s last major poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898),“will outlive all Wilde’s other work and a great deal of the work of his contemporaries.”₅ In an entry for July 1930, Gregory at the age of seventy-eight describes herself “resting on the sofa”and reading“again the Ballad of Reading Gaol”(Journals, 2:535). (Although not relevant to the topic of table-talk,it is worth mentioning—if merely to indicate their generational alignment—that both Wilde and Gregory had sons who were killed in World War I.) As a field of scholarly inquiry, table-talk exists in the overlap of cultural anthropology , cultural history, and sociolinguistics. The meal as a cultural phenomenon has been theorized by Mary Douglas in “Deciphering a Meal,” which Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, and Late-Victorian Table-Talk 47 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. looks at “the message encoded by food,” considering...

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