The Emperor’s Children are closely associated with Romanticism, a counter movement which took hold in Western Europe in the early 19th century in response to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion, nature and subjective experience. It rejected the commodification and dehumanization of mankind as cogs in the machine of society, and focused instead on what emotionally moved people, what was beautiful and made them feel human. Romanticism forms the philosophical basis for their rebellion against the Emperor and his Imperial Truth.

By the late 19th century, Romanticism had engendered successor schools of thought such as aestheticism and the Decadent movement. Aestheticism argued that art could be pursued for its own sake, without the need to be tethered by ethical concerns such as what was moral or grounded in concrete reality. The Decadents followed an ideology of excess and artificiality, with thoughts that this might free people from cultural, moral, or political norms.

One of the foremost spokespersons for these movements in the United Kingdom was Oscar Wilde, a flamboyant and wildly popular poet and playwright. Wilde was concerned about the effect of moralising on art; he believed in art’s redemptive, developmental powers: “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.” In his only political text, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde argued political conditions should establish this primacy – private property should be abolished, and cooperation should be substituted for competition. At the same time, he stressed that the government most amenable to artists was no government at all. Wilde envisioned a society where mechanisation has freed human effort from the burden of necessity, effort which can instead be expended on artistic creation. George Orwell summarised, “In effect, the world will be populated by artists, each striving after perfection in the way that seems best to him .”

The novel Fulgrim is a barely disguised homage to Wilde’s novel A Picture of Dorian Gray. The plot of the book is as follows: Dorian Gray is the subject of a full length oil portrait by Basil Hallward, an artist impressed and infatuated by Dorian’s beauty. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, and he soon is enthralled by the aristocrat’s hedonistic world view that beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life.

Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and records every sin he perpetrates.

This is of course very similar to the plotline in Fulgrim in which the soul of the Primarch is imprisoned (at least temporarily) within a painting by a daemon of the warp. In both cases, the man and the portrait display two aspects of the same person, one obstensibly pure and the other corrupt.

Wilde himself had a tragic end. Accused of being a homosexual (which was criminal at the time) by the father of his male lover, Wilde attempted in 1895 to prosecute his accuser for criminal libel. The libel trial unearthed evidence that led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Once released Wilde was a broken man. He ultimately died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.

In 2017, Wilde was among an estimated 50,000 men who were pardoned for homosexual acts that were no longer considered offences under the Policing and Crime Act 2017. The Act is known informally as the Alan Turing law.