Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Wilde’s short story, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” is divided into six chapters and told from the third-person limited point of view. It follows the exploits of the title character who, after having his palm read at a society party, becomes convinced that he must murder one of his distant relatives before marrying his fiancée, the beautiful Sybil Merton. After first attempting to murder his elderly second cousin, Lady Clementina Beauchamp, with a poison pill (Lady Clementina instead dies of natural causes before she can the pill), Lord Arthur then targets his uncle, the Dean of Chichester, with an explosive clock (that does not produce a big enough explosion to kill his uncle). Faced with having once again to postpone his marriage to Sybil, Lord Arthur happens upon Mr. Podgers, the palm-reader who had initially predicted the murder, and Lord Arthur tosses Mr. Podgers into the Thames River. Mr. Podgers’s death is thus attributed to suicide and Lord Arthur is relieved of the burden of his fate and free to marry Sybil.

The story playfully satirizes the aristocratic high society of late-19th-century London. The tale of a charming young man driven to commit murder through a misplaced sense of “duty” and a too-credulous belief in his own destiny pokes fun at pseudosciences like cheiromancy, or palm reading; at the same time, it also takes an ironic approach to questions of fate and free will, appearance and reality, and even morality itself.