[7] It is believed that Wilde and some of his supporters wore the flower to the first night of his play Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892, most probably to gain attention – a gesture similar to the decision to omit the author's name from Hichens's subsequent novel.

[8] In the opening scene, Lord Reggie Hastings slips a green carnation into his evening coat before attending a dinner party at Mrs Windsor's house in Belgrave Square.

He converses there with Esmé Amarinth, a married playwright; and Lady Locke (cousin to Mrs Windsor), a young widow who has only recently returned to England after a ten-year absence.

At the village fete on Monday, held in Mrs Windsor's garden, Mr Amarinth assembles the local schoolchildren and addresses them incomprehensibly in a lecture on "The art of folly", to the outrage of their National school teachers.

Lady Locke then decides to take Tommy to the seaside, while Mr Amarinth and the disgruntled Lord Reggie cut short their week in the country and return together by train to London.

[10] The Literary World's reviewer thought that "A more telling satire on 'modernity' and the decadent could not easily be written", but in the eyes of the Glasgow Herald that might be a disadvantage: "This book is so terribly actual and up to date that in six months it will be old-fashioned.

"[13] A poem titled "Morbidezza" in the October 1894 number of Punch saw in the novel's device more artificiality than perversion: Caught in Sham's sepulchral mesh Art now raves of Green carnations.

[14] In the new century, Noël Coward wrote his operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) as a parody of the dandy's life style and drives the 1890s allusion home with the song "We all wear a green carnation", performed by a quartet of artistic types.