Duchess of Bolton]

Among the several instances of the place­name "Bolton" in Britain (in Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmoreland, the East Riding in Yorkshire, the West Riding, and South Lancashire), the reference here may most likely be to the large manufacturing town of Bolton in South Lancashire, famous for its cotton mills and in fact for Richard Arkwright’s invention there of the "water­frame" for spinning (1769) and also for Samuel Crompton’s "spinning mule," which together revolutionized the cotton industry. "From that time forward," the Comprehensive Gazetteer of England and Wales (1894?) explains, "the town has rapidly increased in extent of population and prosperity, as the cotton trade steadily rose to the position of the greatest of British manufacturing industries" (1: 198). The amusing or even outrageous incongruity in the idea of a "Duchess of Bolton" would scarcely have been lost on Wilde’s audience. Earlier he had tried out a longer version of the title in "The Canterville Ghost" (1887), in which Lord Canterville’s grand-aunt is called "the Dowager Duchess of Bolton" (CSF 59). Alternatively, Wilde may have had in mind the fashionable Bolton Street in London, running north from Piccadilly at the corner of Green Park (see Plate 67). An additional possible reference is to the sensational trial in 1871 of the transvestites Ernest Boulton and his companion Frederic William Park; see the note under "earnest looking person" above.