In one interview about the play, a journalist commented on “the monstrous injustice of the social code.” Wilde agreed, “it is indeed a burning shame that there should be one law for men and another law for women.”

However, against the demands of the purity crusaders and a certain sort of feminist, who argued that marriage should bind man as well as woman— one law for both—Wilde offered this alternative: “I think that there should be no law for anybody.”

This is a much-needed book: I’ve not come across a book prior that’s handled Wilde’s anarchistic sides, and one’s probably not been published since George Woodcock’s The Paradox of Oscar Wilde, which was in 1950.

Alan Moore makes a typically boisterous entry in his introduction:

Here is cognitive dissonance, with the faintest redolence of absinthe: Oscar Wilde and anarchy. How are we to reconcile the privileged aesthete—who reputedly turned everything into an epigram and for whom seriousness was apparently anathema—with the mutable, demanding, and entirely straightfaced doctrines of Bakunin, Proudhon, Godwin, or Kropotkin? Where can we forge a connection between the ideal of each human being as their own sole leader, and the decadent icon whose experience was far removed from that of the working-class youngsters that he favoured, although patently not far enough? Surely, other than in some unlikely parlour-game, there is no reason why the champion of artificiality should share even a sentence with the planet’s oldest and perhaps most castigated form of politics.

In this essay Oscar Wilde makes many striking pronouncements, among them: “the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all”; “there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad”; and “all modes of government are failures.”

In the poem Libertatis Sacra Fames published in 1880, Wilde had written: Better the rule of One, whom all obey, Than to let clamourous demagogues betray Our freedom with the kiss of anarchy.

This book isn’t a biography. It delves into Wilde’s work, his conversation, speeches, letters, and other sources to provide ammunition for people who want to discover how Wilde evolved in an anarchic sense, and how he was both a complex, wondrous, and disturbing person.

Wilde was on friendly terms with anarchists like John Barlas, Peter Kropotkin, and Stepniak (Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinskii), and was, at least at times, snobbish, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and racist.

Though Wilde was in many respects a man ahead of his time, he was also very much a man of his time, and to accuse a nineteenth-century British gentleman of being elitist, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic is practically redundant. Of course, recognizing that such faults were general does nothing to excuse them in the particular case, but it may mean that individual indictments are less meaningful than they first seem. As Wilde wrote in “The Rise of Historical Criticism,” “On est de son siecle même quant on y proteste.” (“A man belongs to his age even when he struggles against it.”)

What was important to Wilde was the notion that people—including whole groups of people—have the right to determine their own affairs without being ruled by others. His mother was a famous poet who did affect Wilde a lot, but his being Irish may have had more to do with his initial idea of politics. Then, as with most youths, at the start of his life he was prone to agree more with the aesthetic than the consistent.

Richard Le Gallienne recalled an incident in which he and Wilde were out for a walk, and a beggar approached. “He had, he said, no work to do and no bread to eat.” Wilde cried out, “Work! . . . Why should you want work? And bread! Why should you eat bread?” He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and confided, “Now, if you had come to me and said that you had work to do, but you couldn’t dream of working, and that you had bread to eat, but couldn’t think of eating bread—I would have given you half-acrown. . . . As it is, I give you two shillings.”

One of those who appreciated Wilde’s blending of socialism and individualism was that most prominent representative of anarcho-communism, Peter Kropotkin. Indeed, Kropotkin seems to have adopted the central ideas of “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (which he described as “that article that O. Wilde wrote on Anarchism—in which there are sentences worth being engraved, like verses from the Koran are engraved in Moslem lands.”)

In the conclusion to his book Mutual Aid, after examining the role of cooperation in both animal and human societies and positing it as “a factor of evolution,” often decisive in the survival of a species, Kropotkin offers this important caveat: “There is, and always has been, the other current—the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.”

Wilde made great progress with age. I mean, just how he changed in regard to women:

For most of two years, from November 1887 to September 1889, Wilde’s attention was concentrated on these issues at least two mornings a week at his job editing the Woman’s World. Before he took charge, the Lady’s World was a failing fashion and gossip magazine. Changing the name and recruiting an impressive collection of contributors, Wilde set out to make it “the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art, and modern life” and to “deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.”

However, against the demands of the purity crusaders and a certain sort of feminist, who argued that marriage should bind man as well as woman— one law for both—Wilde offered this alternative: “I think that there should be no law for anybody.”

Williams writes marvellously both of Wilde’s personal politics, how he managed life, love, and politics when getting swept up with Bosie—one of the major loves of his life—and Bosie’s father who led to Wilde’s ruin.

Williams’s ruminations on Wilde’s writing, perhaps, in particular, The Importance of Being Earnest and De Profundis, are illuminating and breathtaking.

This is a powerful and inspiring book. I recommend it to all for reading. ( )