This cowardly yet magnificent and desirable social outcast brings together in a single major figures of 19th century fiction: as the man who doesn't age and whose double is destined to condemn and kill him, he will equally familiar to readers of Poe, James Hogg and Stevenson.
The Decay of Lying, written in 1889, is Wilde's most famous essay: "Life", he writes, "imitates art far more than art imitates life."