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Wilde’s story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” blurs literary genres, asserts the importance of the false and plays with reader expectations. It has generated a substantial exegesis, perhaps lacking in interest in the multi-faceted debates on belief running through the 1870s-1880s. Wilde takes part in that debate through a text of uncertain status and complex editorial history, contrasting Newmanian assent with W.K. Clifford’s ethics of belief (1877), before asserting the supremacy of desire, thus ruining all assent and epistemically justified belief. To the demanding philosophical-religious theories of Clifford and Newman, Wilde responds with an ambiguous, subversive narrative, intended to complexify theses that he no doubt considers too simple for the common man, i.e. the subjects of desire that are his readers.