In 1874, the young Oscar Wilde had been one of the undergraduates who had taken part in John Ruskin's road-building scheme in North Hinksey, a project which was an important element of his political and social activism following his appointment to Oxford (Eagles 2011: 103–14). But if Wilde was interested in Ruskin the social thinker, he was also interested in Ruskin the aesthetician. In ‘The Critic as Artist’, Gilbert exclaims, ‘Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not?’ His ‘mighty and majestic prose […], so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music’ is itself a ‘work of art’, speaking to the reader’s ‘soul […] with lofty passion and with loftier thought’ (CR 156). This exaltation of Modern Painters is immediately followed by a similar passage extolling Pater's Renaissance, the proximity of the two thinkers’ names speaking of their respective influence upon Wilde.

Reading Wilde through Ruskin's distinction between theoria and aesthesis allows us to gain another kind of appreciation of the former’s writing of space. As we have seen, the significance of Wilde’s literary treatment of metropolitan space can be easily underestimated as ‘psychic’ context or ‘stock’ imagery. Certainly, Wilde was not a fan of realism, and while he read Dickens, he had no appetite for the novelist's romanticism, famously quipping that one needed ‘a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing’ (Ellmann 1988: 441). Likewise, Wilde was less than enamoured of the grubbiness and ‘bourgeois’ mentality – the ‘dreary vices’ and ‘drearier virtues’ (CR 79) – of the naturalism of Zola and Eliot: for Wilde, art should not be judged by ‘any external standard of resemblance’ (CR 89). But this distaste notwithstanding, is it really true to claim that Wilde gives us nothing more than ‘stock’ images of London? Offering close readings of The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’ (1887), this chapter reads Wilde's aesthetics of space as engaged, socially and politically. Like Pater in Marius the Epicurean, Wilde holds that the aesthetic effects of space are always already rooted in the real social and political histories of these spaces.