The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Importance of Being Earnest
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Act I — the morning-room in Half-Moon Street
Scene: Morning-room in Algernon’s flat in Half-Moon Street. The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished. The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room.
The paragraph above is the opening of Act I. The epub on this page carries the whole play, from Lane’s tea tray to Jack’s closing line about the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
Download Full EPUB1895
~21,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 1.2 hours
Standalone
London and Hertfordshire, 1895
Three acts
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.40 MB (EPUB) · 0.39 MB (AZW3) · 0.31 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #844
Two young men about town keep imaginary relatives in order to escape their social duties. Jack Worthing tells his household in Hertfordshire that he has a dissolute brother called Ernest in London, and uses the same name for himself in town; Algernon Moncrieff has invented a permanent invalid called Bunbury, whose ill health excuses him from dinner tables. Both men fall in love with women who have decided that the name Ernest is a guarantor of character. What follows is a comedy of cucumber sandwiches, a christening booked like a dinner reservation, a governess with a past, a clergyman with a sermon, and one black leather handbag left in the cloakroom at Victoria Station.
The play opened at the St James’s Theatre on 14 February 1895 and gave Wilde a second West End hit that season alongside An Ideal Husband. Its subtitle calls it a trivial comedy for serious people, and the description holds: the plot is farce, the sentences are epigrams, and the target is the Victorian habit of treating marriage, money and morals as questions of form. The text here is the version staged at the St James’s, in three acts with Wilde’s stage directions intact. The text is available via Project Gutenberg (eBook #844), and the play has stayed in the repertory ever since.
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of The Importance of Being Earnest, the three-act comedy Oscar Wilde wrote in 1894 and saw staged in London the following February. The play is short, about 21,000 words, and almost entirely dialogue: one set per act, no subplot that does not feed the main one, and very little stage business that is not eating. Two bachelors, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, each keep an imaginary relative in order to escape their obligations. Jack’s invented brother is called Ernest, which is also the name he uses in town, and the joke is that the two women they court, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, have both decided that the name Ernest is a character reference. Everything else follows from that decision, including the handbag.
Wilde was forty when the play opened, already known as a poet, novelist, essayist and talker rather than a dramatist. By February 1895 he had two plays running in the West End at once, this one at the St James’s and An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket, and the producer George Alexander had asked for a four-act comedy and trimmed it to three before the first night. The dialogue shows the pull of the French well-made play and of Wilde’s own habit of turning conversation into performance: characters listen to each other mainly in order to answer better. The plot also inherits the Victorian stage’s appetite for coincidence, and Wilde uses it deliberately, stacking improbabilities until the last act collapses them all into one identity.
Act I is a single afternoon in Algernon’s flat in Half-Moon Street. Jack arrives to propose to Gwendolen, Algernon eats the cucumber sandwiches intended for Lady Bracknell, and a cigarette case inscribed from little Cecily exposes Jack’s double life. Gwendolen accepts him, provided his name is Ernest, and Lady Bracknell then interviews him and rejects him because he was found in a handbag. Act II moves to Jack’s garden at Woolton, where Algernon arrives pretending to be Ernest, Cecily falls for the pretence, and the two women compare diaries and discover that neither Ernest exists. Act III brings everyone into the morning-room, where Lady Bracknell’s questions about Cecily’s fortune, Miss Prism’s memory of a perambulator and Jack’s black leather handbag settle the plot: he is Algernon’s elder brother, and his name really is Ernest.
The play’s method is to let characters talk past the point where a sincere answer would be required. When Lady Bracknell asks Jack whether he smokes, the answer is a number; when she asks about his parents, the answer is a handbag. The funniest lines are those in which a character converts a moral question into a matter of form, as Gwendolen does when she says that in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing. Wilde’s epigrams work because they are not decoration: each one states a rule by which the speaker actually lives. The pun on Ernest and earnest is the machine that turns that habit into a plot, since the women’s insistence on a name is an insistence on form over substance, and the ending rewards them with a man who is, at last, both.
The play has been in print continuously since 1899 and is the most revived of Wilde’s works, partly because it needs one set and nine actors and partly because its jokes have worn better than its targets. Its reputation rests on the impression that nothing in it is serious and everything in it is true, an impression Wilde encouraged by calling the play trivial. Readers who want the Wilde of the darker manner can turn to The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel he published in 1890, or to The Secret Adversary, a 1922 thriller whose young detectives also talk their way out of trouble. For Wilde, the first night was the last good evening of his career. The text is also on Project Gutenberg.
Historical Context
In 1895 the London stage was run by actor-managers who chose plays for their own casts, and a comedy’s success depended on a run long enough to repay the production. The Lord Chamberlain’s office licensed every script, which is why Wilde’s plays contain no politics that could be read as dangerous and a great deal of wit that could. Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest for George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre, and Alexander, who was to play Jack, cut the original four acts to three during rehearsal. The play opened on 14 February 1895 to enthusiastic notices, before an audience that had come to see whether the famous talker could also write a play.
The run did not last. In the spring of 1895 Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel, lost, and was himself prosecuted for gross indecency. The play was withdrawn in May after eighty-six performances, and Wilde’s name was taken off the playbills of both his West End shows. He was sentenced that month to two years’ hard labour and wrote nothing for the stage afterwards. The comedy survived its author’s disgrace: published in book form in 1899, revived in London in 1909, it became a school and repertory staple, and the wit that had seemed merely clever in February 1895 was later read as a whole philosophy.
The world of the play is small and expensive: Mayfair flats, country houses within an hour of town, and servants who announce, overhear and answer back. Marriage is a transaction supervised by mothers and solicitors, incomes are quoted in thousands a year, and a man’s respectability is established by his address, his tailor and his relations. Wilde takes that world at face value and lets it condemn itself. The same Lady Bracknell who finds a handbag unacceptable finds a hundred and thirty thousand pounds entirely satisfactory, and the happy ending depends on a fortune and a birth certificate rather than on love. The servants are the only characters who see the machinery clearly.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- John (Jack) Worthing: Jack Worthing, J.P.: a Hertfordshire landowner who has invented a brother called Ernest so that he can leave the country without explanation. He is earnest in the ordinary sense, well meaning and a little dull, which is why his inventions cause such trouble. Adopted by Thomas Cardew and named after a railway ticket, he spends the play trying to become respectable enough for Lady Bracknell, and ends by discovering that his name, and his brother, were true.
- Algernon Moncrieff: Algernon Moncrieff: Jack’s friend, a dandy with no visible income and no intention of acquiring one. He invents Bunbury, an invalid who justifies his absences, and then invents an Ernest of his own when he wants to meet Cecily. He eats what is not his, talks faster than anyone else in the play, and treats morality as a branch of etiquette. His reward is a christening, a girl and an elder brother.
- Lady Bracknell: Lady Bracknell: Algernon’s aunt and Gwendolen’s mother, the play’s chief examiner. She conducts interviews with a notebook, values income above character, and delivers judgments in the tone of a committee. She is not a fool: her objection to a handbag is a coherent objection to a man without family, and her later enthusiasm for Cecily’s fortune is equally coherent. Her last line, about signs of triviality, is the play’s last word on its own seriousness.
- Gwendolen Fairfax: Gwendolen Fairfax: Lady Bracknell’s daughter, who has decided that the name Ernest is the one thing she cannot do without. She is confident, decisive and entirely superficial in a way the play admires, since her superficiality is at least consistent. She keeps a diary, carries a lorgnette, wins the tea-table duel with Cecily and forgives Jack the moment he explains himself. Her readiness to believe whatever is convenient makes her the most successful character in the play.
- Cecily Cardew: Cecily Cardew: Jack’s ward, eighteen years old, bored by German grammar and in love with the idea of a wicked brother. She has conducted an entire engagement in her diary before meeting the man, breaking it off and keeping the letters. Her imagination is precise and businesslike, and she turns out to have an excellent head for certificates and settlements. She defeats Gwendolen at the tea table and then befriends her, which is the play’s model of how the plot resolves.
- Miss Prism: Miss Prism: Cecily’s governess, a woman with a past and a three-volume novel in it. She is prim, romantic and secretly sentimental about Dr. Chasuble, whom she corrects when he calls her Egeria. Twenty-eight years earlier she put a manuscript in a perambulator and a baby in a handbag, an error that turns out to be the hinge of the plot. Her confession is delivered with the same fussy precision she brings to grammar exercises, which is what makes it funny.
Core Literary Themes
- Earnestness and the name: The comedy turns on a homophone. Ernest is a name, earnest is a virtue, and the women who insist on the first believe they are insisting on the second. Wilde keeps both meanings in play at once: when Gwendolen concludes that the only really safe name is Ernest, she is being absurd and accurate at the same time, since in her world a name is the only reliable evidence of character. The ending, in which the name turns out to be legally true, completes the joke rather than cheating it: the man who invented an identity discovers he had one all along.
- Bunburying: Both heroes live double lives, and the play is careful to make the double life a technique rather than a vice. Bunbury and Ernest are alibis: they exist so that their inventors can be somewhere else. Wilde treats this as the ordinary grammar of social life, not as sin; nobody is punished for lying, and the lies are eventually converted into facts. The satire is aimed less at the liars than at a society that requires a sick friend as a passport out of a dinner party. Bunburying also gives the play its structure, since every act depends on a fiction arriving in person.
- The marriage market: Lady Bracknell runs marriage like a personnel department, with an interview, a checklist and a salary expectation. Income, address, politics, health and family are all entered in her notebook, and her objections to Jack are financial and genealogical rather than personal. Cecily’s hundred and thirty thousand pounds changes her profile from inadequate to acceptable in a single speech, which is the play’s bluntest joke about the market. Wilde lets the older generation speak its own language so completely that the audience supplies the judgment, while the young people, who are equally mercenary, escape notice by being charming.
- Style over sincerity: Few characters in the play say what they mean, and the ones who do are generally servants. Wilde’s epigrams are not ornament but a theory of behaviour: they describe people who would rather be witty than truthful, and who treat conversation as a game with winners. Gwendolen’s remark that in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing could stand as the play’s epigraph, and the plot obeys it, since every crisis is settled by a form, a christening or a certificate. The comedy’s odd effect is that its frivolity feels more honest than the earnestness it mocks.
- Documents and origins: The plot runs on paper: a cigarette case inscription, a diary entry, a will, a birth certificate, a handbag with initials on the lock, the Army Lists. Wilde builds a farce in which identity is not felt but proven, and the recognition scene is a paperwork exercise conducted in front of witnesses. That is also the play’s quiet comment on Victorian respectability, which depended on registers, references and genealogies. Jack’s foundling status is a scandal not because he suffered but because he cannot produce the documents, and his happiness arrives exactly when the documents do.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest?
The text here comes from the Standard Ebooks edition, which was set from the 2006 Project Gutenberg transcription by David Price and checked against scans of the printed play. Spelling and punctuation follow the copy text, including Wilde’s contractions and his stage directions, which are easy to lose in digital editions and easy to garble when a text is retyped. The three acts are unbroken, so the play reads as it was staged rather than as a set of excerpts, and no scene is summarised on your behalf.
The page and the epub use a clean XHTML structure with proper heading levels, so act breaks land where a reader expects them and the dialogue keeps its speaker labels without turning into a table of contents. The AZW3 and KEPUB files are generated from the same source, which means paragraphing, italics and dashes are consistent across Kindles, Kobos and phone apps. No page numbers are hard-coded, so the text reflows correctly when you change the font size or rotate a tablet.
There is no account, no payment and no digital lock. The files are served directly from this site, they open in any reader that handles standard EPUB, and nothing in them phones home or expires. The play is in the public domain in the United States, so you can copy it, print it or give it to a student without asking anyone’s permission, though local copyright terms may differ elsewhere. If you want to compare editions, the links below lead to the source text and to two other free plays in the same repertory.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #844. The Standard Ebooks text is built on that transcription, with corrections checked against scans of the 1895 printed play.
- Three acts, dialogue keeping its speakers: Every speech keeps its speaker label and every stage direction stays where Wilde put it, including the ones that are jokes in themselves.
- One source, three formats: EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB are generated from the same text, so the play reflows the same way on a Kindle, a Kobo and a phone.
- No DRM, no account, no paywall: The files download directly and open anywhere; there is no registration, licence server or expiry date attached to the text.
- A Doll’s House — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Pygmalion — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The play runs continuously within each act, so the twelve beats below follow it from scene to scene without inventing divisions it does not have. Act I is one afternoon in Half-Moon Street, Act II one July afternoon at Woolton, and Act III the gathering that settles everything.
- Act I — tea, piano and eight bottles of champagne: Lane sets out afternoon tea while Algernon plays the piano badly and defends it: sentiment is his forte and he keeps science for Life. Looking over the butler’s book, Algernon finds eight bottles of champagne entered for Thursday night, and Lane confirms eight bottles and a pint. Algernon observes that if the lower orders do not set a good example there is no use for them, then eats the cucumber sandwiches ordered for his aunt while assuring Jack that they are for her.
- Act I — the cigarette case inscribed to Uncle Jack: Jack Worthing arrives from the country and is called Ernest. Algernon has the cigarette case brought up, the one Jack left in the smoking-room on his last visit, and reads the inscription aloud: from little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack. He refuses to return it until Jack explains himself. Jack explains: he is guardian to Cecily Cardew, granddaughter of the Thomas Cardew who adopted him, and Ernest is the reprobate brother he invented so that he can come up to town. Algernon is delighted rather than shocked.
- Act I — Bunbury explained: Algernon offers his own fiction in exchange: an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, whose health is so bad that it gets Algernon out of the country whenever he chooses. The two men agree that the truth is rarely pure and never simple, and that modern life would be tedious if it were either. Their inventions run in opposite directions: Jack comes to London to be Ernest, Algernon leaves London to be someone else entirely. Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen are announced, and Algernon observes that only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.
- Act I — the only really safe name: Lady Bracknell takes her tea and holds forth on the music programme, which will need expurgating: French songs she cannot possibly allow, though German sounds a thoroughly respectable language. Algernon reports that Lady Harbury’s hair has turned quite gold from grief. Left alone with Jack, Gwendolen tells him that his Christian name has an irresistible fascination, that the name Jack has very little music in it, and that the only really safe name is Ernest. Jack proposes and is accepted. Lady Bracknell returns, orders him off his knees as most indecorous, and begins the interview.
- Act I — the handbag interview: Lady Bracknell works through her questions: does Jack smoke, what is his income, where is his house, what are his politics. The answers satisfy her until she asks about his parents, and Jack describes being found in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, on the Brighton line. She advises him to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and leaves. Jack resolves to kill off Ernest, then compromises on a severe chill, since apoplexy is hereditary. Algernon copies the Hertfordshire address from his shirt-cuff.
- Act II — German grammar and a three-volume novel: Miss Prism supervises Cecily’s German lesson in the Manor House garden, and defends the three-volume novel she once wrote, in which the good ended happily and the bad unhappily. Cecily’s diary records her opinions and her impatience with Political Economy and Geography. Dr. Chasuble walks up through the garden and calls Miss Prism Egeria, a compliment she corrects, since her name is Laetitia. The two of them walk off together, leaving Cecily to announce an unexpected visitor.
- Act II — Ernest arrives, and Australia: Algernon arrives as Ernest, in mourning and with a pink rose for a buttonhole. Cecily is thrilled, since she has never met a really wicked person and is afraid he will look just like everyone else, and he does not disappoint her. Their flirtation turns on emigration: Uncle Jack is sending Ernest to Australia, and Cecily reports that he would have to choose between this world, the next world and Australia. Algernon protests that he would sooner die, then proposes, and then stays for lunch.
- Act II — a death in Paris and a christening: Jack arrives in black and announces that Ernest died in Paris of a severe chill, with a telegram from the manager of the Grand Hotel as proof. Chasuble offers to allude to the tragedy in his sermon on the manna in the wilderness, and Jack, reminded of the christenings the rector performs, asks to be christened himself that afternoon at half-past five. When Cecily mentions that Ernest is at that moment in the dining-room, the two men are forced into an embrace of brotherly grief in front of everyone, and the mourning collapses.
- Act II — diaries, sugar and a spade: Algernon discovers that he has been engaged to Cecily since 14 February and that she broke it off on 22 March; she has kept his letters, a ring and a bangle, and thinks an engagement hardly serious unless it has been broken off at least once. Gwendolen arrives by train and the two women take tea, disagreeing about sugar, cake and the fact that Gwendolen has never seen a spade. Their diaries reveal that each is engaged to a man called Ernest, and that neither Ernest exists.
- Act III — muffins and a christening: Act III opens with the two women comparing notes and the two men arriving with muffins as a peace offering. Gwendolen observes that in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing, and the couples agree that the christenings will settle everything, since both men will be renamed Ernest that afternoon. The arrangement is interrupted by Lady Bracknell, who arrives from London by the luggage train, and by Algernon’s confession that Bunbury has been found out and has died.
- Act III — Lady Bracknell examines Cecily: Lady Bracknell turns to Cecily and gets a full inventory: a grandfather with three addresses, solicitors of the highest position in their profession, and certificates of birth, baptism, whooping cough and measles in both the German and the English variety. The deciding figure is about a hundred and thirty thousand pounds in the Funds, after which she finds distinct social possibilities in her profile. Jack refuses his consent, and points out that under her grandfather’s will Cecily does not come legally of age until she is thirty-five.
- Act III — the handbag, and the Army Lists: Lady Bracknell recognises Miss Prism as the nurse who left number 104 Upper Grosvenor Street with a baby in a perambulator. Miss Prism admits that she put the manuscript in the basinette and the baby in the handbag. She then identifies the bag itself by its Gower Street omnibus injury and the Leamington stain on the lining, and Jack identifies himself as the baby. The Army Lists show a General Moncrieff, Christian names Ernest John. Jack is Algernon’s elder brother, and the play ends on the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
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