By the final decade of the nineteenth century, no stone of the Christian faith had been left unturned by writers of the religious novel, and pious protests against imaginary versions of the Gospels were increasingly few and far between. Yet despite the loosening of ethical constraints bringing greater freedom to the creative writer, the quantity of religious fiction continued to far outweigh its quality. One writer who was particularly exercised by the genre's literary shortcomings was Oscar Wilde. Whether it be the populist prose of Marie Corelli, or the earnest theorizing of Mrs Humphry Ward, Wilde, a self-declared ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, found it quite unpalatable. In Men and Memories, William Rothenstein recalls Wilde telling him of how, on being asked his opinion of Corelli while in jail, he retorted that ‘from the way she writes she ought to be here’; and his low opinion of Ward's Robert Elsmere is set down in ‘The Decay of Lying’, where Vivian hails it with comic bathos as ‘a masterpiece of the “genre ennuyeux”, the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy’. Working as a critic for the influential Pall Mall Gazette between 1885 and 1890, Wilde encountered abundant examples of well-meaning religious fiction and verse, the majority of which he dismissed as trite, ugly and anachronistic. Yet, however caustic Wilde's criticisms of his contemporaries might appear, he was generally more disposed to hate the sin than the sinner. In 1888, reviewing an especially unhappy attempt at versifying the Gospel narratives, he remarked on how ‘the worst work is always done with the best intentions’, an aperçu he would endorse almost a decade later in De Profundis. In spite of – or perhaps even thanks to – encountering so many lamentable examples of religious fiction and verse in the 1880s, Wilde would develop his own ambitions in the genre. There is ample evidence in early biographical studies of Wilde, and in his own non-fiction writings, that, from the late 1880s onwards, he was preoccupied with the idea of composing his own evangel.