This seems to mirror the situation when Gladstone attempts to enforce Homerule in Ireland. Wilde was an Irishman who feared change.
Lady Bracknell - I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone' (Act 1, page 19) - the re-evaluation of social values (relationship between servant and master, the educated and the ignorant. Its humour masks its social satire.
There is much verbal wit in The Importance of Being Earnest - Algernon to servant, Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility' (Act 1, page 2).
In the final act of The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack Worthing says of Miss Prism (who he mistakenly believes to be his long-lost and unmarried mother) "Who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot repentance wipe out an act or folly? Why should there be one law for men, another for women?- (Act 3, Page 80). For all their epigrammatic wit and paradoxical attitudes towards life, Oscar Wilde's other 1890's society comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan and An Ideal Husband are serious dramas about the intractability of sexual double-standards and the personal costs of respectability. Issues that Wilde appears, possibly, to be satirising in the Importance of Being Earnest.
Fundamental to Wilde's wit is his use of epigrams "short, witty sayings "to shed light on a given situation. These epigrams express ironic views contrary to what we would expect characters to believe. We see this type of humour at work, for instance in Algernon's pontifications on marriage, Jack announces he has come to ask Gwendolyn to marry him; Algernon responds, "I thought you had come up for pleasure? I call that business-, (Act 1, Page 3). He goes on to say, "I really don't see anything romantic to be in love.
