In 1941, on the occasion of the eighty-fifth birthday of Bernard Shaw, the playwright Denis Johnston published a profile of the celebrated man in The Irish Times. Johnston's affectionate discussion of Shaw's quirky and lively qualities and of a memorable lunch meeting led him to make a comparison between the living man, now at the height of his fame, and his disgraced compatriot, the long-dead Oscar Wilde: ‘One is Westland Row dressed up as Merrion Square. The other is a poor relation of the Royal Bank living in Portobello. One is Trinity and Oxford. The other is a clerk's stool in Molesworth Street’. At the end of the profile, Johnston remarked on the beginnings of a change in popular attitudes towards the infamous Wilde and made a shrewd prediction:

Johnston was prophetic. Wilde's literary reputation gradually revived after the disaster of his public disgrace and imprisonment, particularly in terms of Irish cultural perceptions of his life and of his writings from the late 1940s onwards. Wilde eventually regained popularity and visibility in Ireland, particularly in the years after Shaw's death, while Shaw himself slowly fell from favour in terms of popular taste and scholarly interest. Wilde was gradually reclaimed, first as Irish and then as sexual dissident, while Shaw's presence in Irish literary culture diminished. This rebalancing of the public perceptions of the clever genius and the foolish genius has become more pronounced now in the twenty-first century.