On January 8, 1882, Henry James, visiting Washington from his home in London, wrote this in a letter to a friend in Britain:

I believe that Washington is the place in the world where money—or the absence of it, matters least. It is very queer and yet extremely pleasant: informal, familiar, heterogeneous, good-natured, essentially social and conversational, enormously big and yet extremely provincial, indefinably ridiculous and yet eminently agreeable…. The sky is blue, the sun is warm, the women are charming, and at dinners the talk is always general.

James’s opinion of that talk changed when the subject turned to the imminent arrival of Oscar Wilde, who was then years away from writing The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or any of the great works for which we honor him today. In 1882, Wilde was touring America, where he had arrived on January 3. The “Aesthetic Apostle,” as he liked to call himself, was presenting lectures on interior decorating, singing hosannas to wainscoting and red-brick floor tiles, while wearing satin breeches, silk stockings, patent-leather pumps, and a velvet coat with lavender lace trim. Most Americans had never heard of him.

James, an American by birth but an Englishman by temperament—he’d been living in Britain since 1876—had arrived in Washington several days before Wilde. His hosts in the capital were two of the city’s leading social figures: the historian Henry Adams (a descendant of two American presidents) and his wife, Marion, known to virtually everyone as Clover.1 James and Wilde hadn’t met in London, but they were aware of each other. James, 48, was the author of Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, novels acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Wilde, 27, a recent Oxford graduate, was an unproduced playwright and an amusing dandy on London’s party circuit. He had yet to produce anything of authentic literary value, but what he had generated in America, after a parade of party appearances and press interviews in New York and Philadelphia, was star quality. This was something James envied.

The novelist found Wilde’s antics distasteful—James avoided the press—but he saw that Washington society was abuzz at the prospect of mingling with the lily-worshiping aesthete at a party hosted by Judge Edward Loring and his wife, to be held on January 22. This eagerness wasn’t too surprising; the Washington Post had reported that a character in the popular operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan then playing in the capital—the vainglorious poet Bunthorne in Patience—was based on Wilde. In fact, Wilde’s lecture tour of America was sponsored by Richard D’Oyly Carte, the producer of Gilbert & Sullivan’s works, as a means of promoting that operetta. James, who rarely turned down a dinner invite, had accepted an invitation to the Lorings’ party.

One of the only well-connected Washingtonians immune to Wilde’s star power was Clover Adams. “I have asked Henry James not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde [to my home] when he comes,” she wrote in a letter to her father. “I must keep out thieves and noodles.” It seems clear that “noodle” was Mrs. Adams’s way of impugning Wilde’s masculinity, a conclusion supported by this line from another of her letters: “the sexes of my nouns are as undecided as that of Oscar Wilde.” As has been pointed out by several of James’s biographers, the novelist’s sexuality was the source of considerable psychic agitation for him, so it’s probable he was not thrilled by Mrs. Adams’s remarks, least of all by her assumption that he and Wilde, whose brazen efforts at self-promotion James found so vulgar, were friends.