Curiously enough, in light of literary modernists' demonization of the Webbs for the latters' presumed indifference to the arts, Beatrice Potter Webb keeps perfect company with the likes of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf in observing the silence about Oscar Wilde advocated by the Echo in 1895 – and preserving it for twenty-odd years. In one sense, Webb's failure to mention Wilde even once in any of her writings is entirely in keeping with her complete silence on contemporary socialist writings about art, as noted in Chapter 1. Still, it is hard to imagine now how and why a woman with her commitment to diary- and letter-writing could have failed to register any response whatsoever to one of the key events of her time. Webb's silence roars.

Of course, silence, as Foucault has taught us to understand, is “less the absolute limit of discourse” than “an element which functions alongside the things said.”