I’m currently reading Oscar: A Life, by Matthew Sturgis and one thing I’m curious about is how someone like Wilde, living alone or with a roommate after graduating Oxford, got food.
As a broke bachelor myself, I have to go grocery shopping a couple times a week, then cook and do the dishes every day. That takes a considerable portion of my time. I cannot imagine Wilde doing the same and still having time for attending a litany of social/cultural events, reading, writing poetry, theatre plays, updating his wardrobe, etc. I know most of those soirées served food but surely that wasn’t happening every single day.
So how did people like him do it? Were they just eating out at restaurants and allowing their debt to grow?
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Not so much restaurants as private dinners. Wilde was known as a proficient wit and unmarried men were always more in-demand than women at dinner parties, as the table had to have an even number of men and women. In that biography I believe there is a brief mention of Wilde being invited purely for his conversational ability. Of course, Wilde presumably dined at places like Willis’ and the Savoy often, and makes a number of jokes about the two in his plays; in the original draft of Earnest, Jack (in the guise of Ernest) owes the Savoy over one thousand pounds!
As for funding one’s lifestyle in that period, it is very important to remember that servants cost considerably less than they do today. Wilde could have paid around £30 for a cook-housekeeper. If a bachelor lived in a flat (in Albany, say) they could order meals from the kitchens and pay by meal, and then keep either a maid to clean his flat or a valet to do the same for an increased fee. For specific prices I recommend The Complete Bachelor or Manners for Men, both of which are available on Gutenberg and are really the best primary sources on how bachelors lived in the late Victorian period.
To sum up, bachelor ‘layabouts’ often were, in Algernon’s words, ‘very hard up’ a lot of the time. An eligible man had no trouble receiving invitations so long as his character wasn’t infamously vacillating, but even then only major scandals would make one a complete outcast. Domestic staff were very very cheap in the period, especially when living in a flat where the building may employ staff who serve multiple flats as was the case in Albany at the time.