Fearing the ruin of both career and marriage, Sir Robert submits to her demands. Arnheim's payoff was the basis of Sir Robert's fortune, and Mrs Cheveley has Robert's letter to Arnheim as proof of his crime. Her late mentor and lover, Baron Arnheim, induced the young Chiltern to sell him a Cabinet secret – which enabled Arnheim to buy shares in the Suez Canal Company three days before the British government announced its purchase of the company. During the party, Mrs Cheveley, an enemy of Lady Chiltern from their schooldays, attempts to blackmail Sir Robert into supporting a fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina.

Sir Robert – a member of the House of Commons and junior government minister – and his wife, Lady Chiltern, are hosting a gathering that includes his friend Lord Goring, a dandified bachelor, Chiltern's sister Mabel and other guests. Lord Caversham, Mabel Chiltern and Lord Goring, 1895 premiere Wilde was a leader in the effort to make plays accessible to the reading public. Prominent additions included written stage directions and character descriptions.

The published version differs slightly from the performed play, as Wilde added many passages and cut others. It is dedicated to Frank Harris, 'A slight tribute to his power and distinction as an artist, his chivalry and nobility as a friend'. The play was published in 1899 in an edition of 1000 copies Wilde's name was not printed: the work was published as 'By the author of Lady Windermere's Fan'. The play could have run longer at the Criterion, but the theatre was required by its proprietor, Charles Wyndham, for a new production. In April, on the last day of the Haymarket run, Wilde was arrested for gross indecency his name was removed from the playbills and programmes when the production transferred to the Criterion Theatre, where it ran for a further 13 performances, from 13 to 27 April.

It ran at the Haymarket for 111 performances, regarded as a good run at the time. The play was put into rehearsal in December 1894 and opened on 3 January 1895, billed as 'A new and original play of modern life'. Hare rejected the play, finding the last act unsatisfactory Wilde then successfully offered the play to Lewis Waller, who was about to take temporary charge of the Haymarket in the absence in America of its usual manager, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Between September 1893 and January 1894 he wrote the remaining three acts. He completed the first act while staying at a house he had taken at Goring-on-Thames, after which he named a leading character in the play. In June 1893, with his second drawing room play, A Woman of No Importance, running successfully at the Haymarket Theatre, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband for the actor-manager John Hare.

An ideal husband book