SOURCE: Guy, Josephine M. “An Allusion in Oscar Wilde's ‘The Canterville Ghost’.” Notes and Queries 243 (N.S. 45), no. 2 (June 1998): 224-26.

In the following essay, Guy investigates Wilde's allusion to the obscure late nineteenth-century materialist philosophy known as Hylo-Idealism in his story “The Canterville Ghost.”

In Notes and Queries in 1978, Philip E. Smith drew attention to an obscure late nineteenth-century materialist philosophy called Hylo-Idealism. Its main proponents were the slightly less obscure poet, Constance Naden (who coined the term), and her friend and mentor, Dr. Robert Lewins.¹ In attempting to argue for the importance of Hylo-Idealism for the Victorians, Smith cited a contemporary reference to it by a much better known writer—Oscar Wilde. Thus Smith noted that ‘Oscar Wilde found the name of [the] philosophy significant enough to use in the subtitle of his often reprinted first short story, “The Canterville Ghost, A Hylo-Idealistic Romance” (1889)’. At the same...