An Ideal Husband

by Oscar Wilde

Skeletons in the Cupboard

Politicians with a past - what an outdated and obsolete concept! In Victorian days, of course, but it couldn't happen these days, could it?

In An Ideal Husband, an ambitious young English politician of apparently impeccable reputation, Sir Robert Chiltern, encounters an unexpected visitation from his past. As a young assistant to a member of the British Cabinet, Chiltern had sold a state secret to a foreign investor and thus become a rich man, which helped his rise as a Member of Parliament.

That investor, Chiltern is convinced, has taken the secret to the grave with him. Yet, on his deathbed, he had passed on the incriminating evidence to a Mrs Cheveley. This woman has invested heavily in an Argentinian canal project. Chiltern, by now in the position of under-secretary in the British Cabinet, with a remit to investigate that very canal project, knows it is nothing but a stock swindle. Of course, if the British government would back the scheme, the stock value of the Canal project would rise, and Mrs. Cheveley could profitably sell her shares before the swindle was revealed.

In Wilde's time, canals were all the rage: Suez was opened in 1869, and the Panama Treaty would be signed in 1903. And a lot of money was at stake in projects like these. London, towards the end of the nineteenth century, had "probably the greatest concentration of wealth in the world, either then or in any previous age." (FrancFrancis Sheppard)   Social hierarchy and order and the "paramountcy of respectability (or at any rate of outward respectability), the privacy of the home, and the dominance of men" (Ibid., p.303.) were widely taken for granted.

At a party, Mrs. Cheveley ("a genius in the daytime, and a beauty at night") turns up at Chiltern's house and offers him the incriminating evidence if his report to Parliament showed support for the Argentinian scheme. Should Chiltern not comply, she threatens to make the evidence public - he will be disgraced; his political career will be finished.

Despite the blackmail, Chiltern courageously exposes the canal swindle in Parliament, fully believing that he is committing political suicide. Yet, an unexpected twist of the plot saves his position, his reputation and his career. And although he shows no moral qualms or regrets, Chiltern seems to be rehabilitated and off the censorial hook because he has now proven his moral character and forsworn corrupt actions.

(Fatally, Oscar Wilde himself, when the skeletons in his cupboard were revealed, was not to experience the same kind of benevolent and happy ending. Prison and hard labour was to break him. And his short exile in France would end in premature death on 30 November 1900).