The impasse is broken by the return of Miss Prism , whom Lady Bracknell recognise as the person who , twenty @-@ eight years earlier , as a family nursemaided , had taken a baby boy for a walk in a perambulator ( baby carriage ) and never returned . Challenged , Miss Prism explain that she had absentmindedly put the manuscript of a novel she was writing in the perambulator , and the baby in a handbag , which she had left at Victoria Station . Jack produce the very same handbag , showing that he is the lost baby , the elder son of Lady Bracknell 's late sister , and thus indeed Algernon 's elder brother . Having acquired such respectable relations , he is acceptable as a suitor for Gwendolen after all .