(1) Also see Josephine Guy's "Introduction" to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol 4, where she notes that "the showy if sometimes superficial displays of erudition in pieces such as 'The Critic As Artist' and 'The Decay of Lying,' coupled with an apparently casual attitude to textual authority, might best be understood as Wilde's attempt to negotiate these contradictions, to write in a manner which would impress his cultural superiority upon a body of readers which was in constant flux" ("Introduction" lxxxiv).
It should be noticed that Costa, (11) in his Tratado Completo de Chirurgia Obstreticia, in the early nineteenth century, chapter LXXXIV ("Of the diet that must be followed by parturients"), takes into account the parturient's tastes, to the point of admitting that they dictate the diet that should be given to her.
Fernald explains that her choice of copy-text, the first British edition, is constrained by the Cambridge University Press's "general editorial policy" in the Woolf edition (lxxxiv), but she makes a persuasive case for this edition as the optimal copy-text in any case, especially for its handling of the typographical spacing used to indicate the breaks between the novel's twelve sections.