IS THERE A VICTORIAN WRITER who has won as much attention in the last few years, critical or popular, as Oscar Wilde? One or two decades ago, Hardy, Dickens, and the Brontës were the Victorians that large numbers of people wanted to read, discuss, and see on film and stage. It seems like another era that saw Nicholas Nickelby ruling on the Great White Way. The decline of Dickens’s mass appeal was probably signaled some time ago with an episode of the TV series Law and Order in which a murder case resulted from a business feud over a disastrous Broadway production of Bleak House. The Brontës have fared no better; the musical Jane Eyre, after some of the worst reviews ever to have greeted a musical, recently closed on Broadway, its producers in its last weeks having resorted to advertising on milk cartons. Although Hardy reportedly continues to top the sales of nineteenth-century British classics, Michael Winterbottom’s 2001 film adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, set during the California Gold Rush, played to mixed reviews and nearly empty theaters, its gloomy fealty to the spirit of Hardy’s fiction, not unlike Winterbottom’s brooding version of Jude the Obscure, an evident obstacle for most audiences.