Book excerpt: This, the first publication of Oscar Wilde's Commonplace Book and Notebook, which he kept during his middle twenties at the end of his studies at Oxford, will forever alter critical perceptions of Wilde's achievement in the larger tradition of English critical and aesthetic thought. Containing the records of his education and reading--quotations and paraphrases of other writers, and Wilde's own analytical and descriptive jottings, comments, and fragmentary drafts--these documents reveal how Wilde developed the synthesis of Hegelian idealism and Spencerian evolutionary theory that was to be a mainstay of his major critical and creative works. Not merely the dandy and aesthete of modernist myth, Wilde was also a precocious and widely-read Victorian humanist. In addition, the editors provide an introduction and commentary.