The Importance of Being Earnest

By doing the research on the victorian era, it helped to enhance my understanding of the time period, which in turn helped and is still helping me to understand the play more than I dwould have had I not had some back round information about the time period. I found out things about the time period from information on the social classes to facts about the period and the things that were occuring during the time.
I learned from doing the research how it was determined what social a class a person would be in. I had learned that you were born into a certain class depending on how much money you had and what social class your parents fell into. Women could move up and down in classes by marriage, and men by becoming more wealthy or becoming friends with people in higher classes. this relates to the play because maraige is something that is greatly satirized but something that is also taken seriously. Especially by Lady Bracknell who is determined her daughter marry into a higher standing social class, and Gwendolen makes fun of it stating that she may marry often and many times. This is both funny and serious because that would mean her husbands had died, and it's serious because who she married meant everything, who she would be, how she would live, if she would live in comfort. There were many other examples of things that I had researched in my victorian research that were also brought into the play; Including the education of the time. I had learned from doing my researh prior to reading the play that to go to school you had to have money. The more money you had the better education you had. If you had alot of money then you could go to a private school or have a tutor. This relates to the play, because Cecily has a tutor or a governess who educated her. Cecily is the ward of Mr. Worthing, who is a wealthy man, but Cecily herself is also very wealthy, because she had alot of money she was able to pay for a tutor to educate her which was one of the best educations that you could get at the time. Both of these are examples that show that what I learned from doing the victorian era research helped me in understanding the book better.