A society palmist reads Lord Arthur's hand and finds murder in it; being a conscientious man, Lord Arthur decides he must get the crime over with before the wedding. Five stories from the years when Wilde was perfecting the manner that would make and destroy him — the Canterville ghost defeated by American common sense, and a Shakespeare theory that ruins everyone who believes it. Fifty-nine plates, from Whistler to Millais, catch the gaslit city and its interiors in the years Wilde was writing.
