In The Pall Mall Gazette, H. G. Wells wrote of the play:
It is not excellent; indeed, after Lady Windermere's Fan and The Woman of No Importance, it is decidedly disappointing. But worse have succeeded, and it was at least excellently received. ... But, taking it seriously, and disregarding any possibly imaginary tendency towards a new width of treatment, the play is unquestionably very poor.[14]
William Archer wrote, "An Ideal Husband is a very able and entertaining piece of work, charmingly written, wherever Mr. Wilde can find it in his heart to sufflaminate his wit. There are several scenes in which the dialogue is heavily overburdened with witticisms, not always of the best alloy. ... An Ideal Husband, however, does not positively lack good things, but simply suffers from a disproportionate profusion of inferior chatter."[15] A. B. Walkley called the play "a strepitous, polychromatic, scintillant affair, dexterous as a conjurer's trick of legerdemain, clever with a cleverness so excessive as to be almost monstrous and uncanny". He found the plot unbelievable, and thought that although the play, "by sheer cleverness, keeps one continually amused and interested", Wilde's work was "not only poor and sterile, but essentially vulgar".[16] George Bernard Shaw praised the play: "In a certain sense Mr Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre. Such a feat scandalizes the Englishman...".[17]
In 1996 the critic Bindon Russell wrote that An Ideal Husband is "the most autobiographical of Wilde's plays, mirroring, as it does, his own situation of a double life and an incipient scandal with the emergence of terrible secrets. Whilst Lord Goring is a character with much of Wilde's own wit, insight and compassion, Gertrude Chiltern can be seen as a portrait of Constance [Wilde]".[18]
