the ramshackle LC&D Railway, on the west the up-market LB&SCR – the Brighton Line, which went to Worthing, the fashionable, expensive town the gentleman who found baby Jack was travelling to at the time (and after which Jack was named). Suggested homosexual subtext Queer scholars have argued that the play's themes of duplicity and ambivalence are inextricably bound up with Wilde's homosexuality and that the play exhibits a "flickering presence-absence of... homosexual desire". On re-reading the play after his release from prison, Wilde said: "It was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that Tiger Life." It has been said that the use of the name Earnest may have been a homosexual in-joke. In 1892, three years before Wilde wrote the play, John Gambril Nicholson had published the book of pederastic poetry Love in Earnest. The sonnet Of Boys' Names included the verse: "Though Frank may ring like silver bell / And Cecil softer music claim / They cannot work the miracle / –'Tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame." The word "earnest" may also have been a code-word for homosexual, as in: "Is he earnest?" in the same way that "Is he so?" and "Is he musical?" were employed. Sir Donald Sinden, an actor who had met two of the play's original cast (Irene Vanbrugh and Allan Aynesworth) and Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote to The Times to dispute suggestions that "Earnest" held any sexual connotations: Although they had ample opportunity, at no time did any of them even hint that "Earnest" was a synonym for homosexual or that "bunburying" may have implied homosexual sex. The first time I heard it mentioned was in the 1980s, and I immediately consulted Sir John Gielgud, whose own performance of Jack Worthing in the same play was legendary and whose knowledge of theatrical lore was encyclopaedic. He replied in his ringing tones: "No-No! Nonsense, absolute nonsense: I would have known". Several theories have also been put forward to explain the derivation of Bunbury, and Bunburying, which is used in the play to imply a secretive double life. It may have derived from Henry Shirley Bunbury, a hypochondriacal acquaintance of Wilde's youth. Another suggestion, put forward in 1913 by Aleister Crowley, who knew Wilde, was that Bunbury was a combination word: that Wilde had once taken a train to Banbury, met a schoolboy there, and arranged a second secret meeting with