“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.

The quote is part of a letter to Marie Prescott, an American actress (d. 1923), who had read Vera and agreed to play the leading part in it. This letter appeared in the New York Herald of 12 August 1883 as a puff for the play. Wilde paid his second and last visit to America to see the production. He sailed from Liverpool on 2 August 1883 in the Britannic and reached New York on 11 August. Vera opened at the Union Square Theatre on 20 August but ran for only a week. It was described as “a foolish, highly-peppered story of love, intrigue and politics” (New York Tribune), “unreal, long-winded and wearisome” (New York Times) and “long-drawn dramatic rot” (New York Herald). Wilde sailed for home in Arizona on 11 September.