Oscar Wilde plays a semi-prominent role in both Gilbert and Sullivan history and fop history (indeed, the former because of the latter) and so it was more or less inevitable that he should find himself drawn into all of this. G & S, after writing their grand fopera, Patience, hired Wilde to go around America and introduce that continent to the advanced aesthetic notions of the time.

The real question is, what sort of Dandy Wilde was. He was in the third or so wave of English dandyism, which had had time to learn from the philosophical dandyism of Baudelaire and the Grey Men of Dickens, but apparently decided that it was time to get back to the Brummell basics of Looking Fabulous and Talking Smack.

- Count Dolby von Luckner