ABSTRACT
Lord Goring is third in the line of Wilde's society play dandies, following Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan and Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance. Working from the outside in – a direction of travel which, incidentally, is well suited to the posturing dandy – the increasing sympathy between the later stage detectives and their dandy successors becomes clear. The detectives’ disciplined rejection of the emotional turmoil that threatens to consume them, and indeed does consume others, signals a certain detachment from the drama. This indicates not only an attitudinal accord but also a structural or functional accord between the stage detective and the stage dandy so famously realized in Oscar Wilde's dramas. If there is one figure who brings together the conventions of the stage detective and stage dandy in one person it is the consummate dandy-detective, Sherlock Holmes.
