Having endured and survived eight film and television versions, an opera and a ballet, The Canterville Ghost, Wilde’s very first published short story, might therefore be considered one of his most successful. Only The Picture of Dorian Gray has been adapted more often. Certainly, to this day it remains as popular as anything he ever wrote in prose.
The story is a youthful jeu d’esprit that parodies gothic ghost stories and pokes fun at both brash American practical materialism and stuffy high-stickling British tradition. Its scenes of inspired silliness, the rallies of wit and insult traded between the principal characters and the neatly plotted structure go some way to explaining its lasting popularity with screen writers and readers alike.
At the time of the story’s writing Wilde knew more about America than most Europeans, having visited in 1882 as part of a publicity tour for Gilbert and Sullivan. In their operetta Patience they had guyed the aesthetic cult as embodied by the character Bunthorne, who was specifically modelled on Oscar himself. The piece was a great success in London, but the difficulty, so far as a US production went, was that no one in America had the faintest idea who or what Wilde or aestheticism might be. So Richard D’Oyly Carte, who produced Gilbert and Sullivan on both sides of the Atlantic, offered Wilde a prodigious amount of money to sail to New York and work his way across America, lecturing and spreading the gospel according to Oscar. He returned a year or so later with an abiding affection for Americans and their sense, good-nature and faith in progress, but with a mocking disdain for the more commercial, vulgar and crass aspects of a post-bellum culture of profit, practicality and Puritanism. All these qualities come together in Hiram B. Otis and his family, the worst in Hiram himself, the best in his daughter Virginia, who turns out to be the bridge across the Atlantic that sets free the title character Sir Simon and brings the happy tale to a successful conclusion.