Core to Wilde’s interest in socialism was his belief that Socialism Supports Aestheticism. As an artistic movement, aestheticism was committed to the idea that art should exist to be beautiful or to provide pleasure, including the enjoyment of the artist themself. Its origins are debated; in England, the mid-19th-century pre-Raphaelites—a group of artists and writers of whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti was perhaps the most emblematic—are sometimes viewed as precursors due to their emphasis on feeling rather than convention. Victorian art critic and novelist Walter Pater was a more direct influence. His 1873 collection of essays Studies in the History of the Renaissance laid out the principle that art’s only “purpose” is to be artistic, while his 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean explored the idea of living an “aesthetic life.”

Mainstream Victorian culture held that art should serve an ethical purpose or be educational, and Pater’s ideas attracted significant criticism and accusations of amorality. Nevertheless, they formed the backbone of the English aesthetic movement, which was at its height in the 1880s—the same time that Wilde was reaching the pinnacle of his fame. Wilde was an outspoken defender of aestheticism in art and in life.