The Irony of Wealth and Poverty in Oscar Wilde’s “The Model Millionaire” (1887)

Abstract

Victorian literature frequently engaged with questions of wealth, class, and moral worth, re-flecting the anxieties of an era marked by unprecedented economic inequality and social trans-formation. The present paper deals with the problem of understanding how Oscar Wilde employs irony to critique Victorian assumptions about wealth and poverty in his 1887 short story “The Model Millionaire.” The purpose of this study is to analyze how Wilde’s ironic reversals—a millionaire disguised as a beggar, a poor man’s generosity rewarded with fortune—expose the unreliability of appearances and the limitations of materialist values. The research paper employs the research method of close textual analysis informed by scholarship on Wilde’s aestheticism, Victorian cultural history, and theories of irony. The research paper concludes that Wilde constructs a multi-layered ironic structure that inverts conventional expectations about wealth and virtue, ultimately suggesting that true worth lies in generosity and character rather than financial accumulation. The future perspective of research is to situate this story within Wilde’s broader exploration of wealth, art, and moral value across his fiction.

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