The contradictory and problematic nature of Wilde's work was not the function of some psychological aberration on his part, as most previous critics have claimed. Instead, his complex handling of social and aesthetic issues was emblematic of the complexities of Victorian social relations. In fact, difficulties of understanding his work--or dismissals of it, for that matter--may be attributable to a failure to appreciate his subtle relations with, and to some extent within, four quite distinct Victorian audiences: the artistic and social communities of Oxford, the middle-class public nurtured by journalists and writers of books of fashion and manners, playgoing Society, and the homosexual underground. Wilde emerges not only as an Irish, homosexual, socialist artist who desired high social success in British imperial, patriarchal, industrial society, but also as a pivotal artistic figure at the beginning of the age of commercial advertising. The status of the artist developed in the nineteenth century to that of a public figure whose social, economic and, to some extent, artistic life depended on his facility in the arena of public relations.