Worthing

 As Jack Worthing helpfully explains to Lady Bracknell, 'Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort.'
I was there over the weekend – on family business, which meant I had little time to explore, but what I saw of the place I mostly liked. There are certainly some very attractive buildings, from elegant balconied terraces to picturesque flint-faced or colourwashed cottages, and the beach and promenade are no doubt very agreeable when not lashed with icy gale-force winds. The hotel we stayed in boasted that among its previous guests were Charles Dickens (is there a Victorian seaside hotel in which he did not stay?) and Oscar Wilde. 
  Wilde certainly knew Worthing, and he spent a long holiday there in the summer of 1894 – the last summer before his fall from grace. He was staying in a rented house (long since demolished), with his wife Constance and their two sons, and, intermittently, the troublemaking Lord Alfred Douglas ('Bosie'). In the course of this seaside sojourn, he had a sexual relationship with at least one local boy; the unhappy Constance fell in love with another man, a bookseller friend of the Wildes called Arthur Humphreys; and Oscar, in dire need of money, wrote his finest and funniest work, The Importance of Being Earnest. Bosie, typically, claimed that much of the play was written while he was sitting in the room with Oscar, and that some of its best lines were taken from his, Bosie's, sparkling repartee. 
  Worthing obviously gave Jack Worthing his surname, and an entry in the Worthing Gazette seems to have given the fictitious Bunbury his. There is more about all this in Antony Edmonds's book Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and Its Aftermath. Edmonds also wrote a book about Worthing's other major literary connection, Jane Austen's Worthing: The Real Sanditon. Austen visited the then embryonic resort in 1805, and no doubt behaved very much more decorously than Oscar.