The Importance of Being Earnest

Dear Cast of The Importance of Being Earnest , I hope you're proud of yourselves. I really do, because I TOTALLY AM! It's like you've solved the mystery of the pyramids! Only not, since this is only a 120-year-old play, and those have been around for millennia. But you did DISCOVER a mystery that no one else seems to have noticed in over a century! Although I guess it's not really that mysterious. BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME AND YOU BROKE MY BRAIN. (But I'm fine now.) So the first question I got from y'all was about that weird little timeline issue in the first act where Lady Bracknell gets all up in Jack's bid'ness (does anybody still say that anymore? No? OK then) and then storms out with a frosty 'Good morning!' even though it's actually somewhere between 5:30 and 'nearly seven' in the evening. I was pretty excited - these nit-picky little research questions are MY bread and butter (bless you, Gwe...

Lady Bracknell suffers the supreme indignity of having to catch a luggage train in order to follow Gwendolyn following Jack. What's that all about?    According to the Oxford University Press, a 'luggage train' is just that: 'A train for transporting goods, not travellers.' Apparently no one saw fit to take pictures of the interior of compartments on luggage trains, or at least not post them online. (Grrr.)  To ride a luggage train, options would probably include sitting on trunks or wooden crates in one of the compartments, or riding with the driver up in the engine car. (Probably illegal, but if anyone is going to bully their way into it it would be Lady B. The downside with the engine car is that it would be smoky, dirty, & loud - riding with the trunks is likelier.) Trains in the 1890's traveled around 30 miles an hour, so the luggage train would still have been relatively safe. And Hertfordshire is only about 20 miles north of London, so even at 30 mi...

There are a few references to money in The Importance of Being Earnest , usually regarding whether or not one has some, generally followed by a clever quip. (Are 'food' and 'money' the 'death' and 'taxes' of Earnest /Oscar Wilde? Hmm.) Let's see if we can bring in a little clarity. Cecily Cardew's fortune is valued at '130,000 pounds in the funds.' The Funds were another name for the British national debt. When investors put their money 'in the funds' (or invested it in government stocks which paid against the national debt) they were guaranteed an annual return from the government of 3-5% (which led to the nicknames 'the three-percenters' and 'the five-percenters'). It was an extremely stable investment, and therefore very popular. People could have made more putting their money in other stocks, investment schemes, or even banks, but nothing else was as secure on the return as the funds. This means that Ceci...