SOURCE: Cohen, Philip K. “Marriages and Murders: ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost.’” In The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde, pp. 53-70. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Cohen maintains that “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” and “The Canterville Ghost” are stories that anticipate Wilde's fairy tales and “embody, if only in embryonic form, some of the ideas he would develop fully in his most important essays.”

Wilde temporarily abandoned the drama in favor of the short story. His first productions in this mode were “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” (1887) and “The Canterville Ghost” (1887). Both anticipate the fairy tales and embody, if only in embryonic form, some of the ideas he would develop fully in his most important essays, “The Decay of Lying,” (1889) “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” Like almost all of Wilde's works, these first stories...