Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

by Franny Moyle

  In 1880 Miles and Wilde were installed in Keats House, where their indulgence of things beautiful continued. Ironically Oscar’s sets of rooms included items he bought from the sale of the bankrupt Whistler’s effects, notably a painting of Sarah Bernhardt.

  But more was going on in Chelsea than tea, painting and poetry. Canon Miles’s concern over Oscar’s verse may well have been heightened by wider worries over the moral well-being of his son. With a reputation for being both a ladies’ man, and also for keeping the company of known homosexuals, Miles was living a sexually liberal life. Within a decade he would be dead from syphilis. Although Miles’s father did not accuse Oscar of similar misdemeanours, he warned him that his poetry might suggest otherwise. It was an early lesson in the power of appearances that Oscar would have done well to remember.

  ‘If we seem to advise a separation for a time it is not because we do not believe you in character to be very different to what you suggest in your poetry,’ Canon Miles explained, ‘but it is because you do not see the risk we see in a published poem which makes all who read it say to themselves, “this is outside the pale of poetry”, it is licentious and may do great harm to any soul who reads it.’6 Oscar duly packed his bags and left Keats House, moving temporarily into rooms close to his mother and Willie, in Charles Street in Mayfair.

  The moral laxity that those such as Canon Miles saw as part and parcel of the Aesthetic proposition was either of no concern to Constance or, far more likely, beyond her sightline. Leading a sheltered life in Lancaster Gate, Constance saw only the creative, artistic aspect of the bohemian set. She had not yet had the opportunity to comprehend that what went with this was a set of lifestyles that were just as challenging to the social protocols of the day. Although Constance understood adultery and violence, she had no direct experience of the new sexual liberties that were being explored by many of those whose art fascinated her.

  On 18 November 1881 a letter from her stepfather, Mr Swinburne-King, arrived, and in it Constance discovered a poem teasing her about her infatuation with Oscar. Swinburne-King had penned what he termed a ‘sonnet’ entitled ‘The Lily to the Sunflower’ for his stepdaughter’s amusement:

  One hour with thee, O Wilde,

  Would joy this longing Childe

  But she, tho’ twenty-four

  To hear thy lips out-pour

  From depths of heart-born lore –

  What ecstasy she’d score: –

  To dream, Ah me,

  E’en I might be

  For age & evermore

  O Wilde with Thee!

  2.

  Nor cease thy madding dream

  My Soul, until I scream –

  Not longer meek & milde: –

  By hopes deferement riled,

  By throbbing love beguiled

  And torturing passions piled

  I dream, ah me

  So this to be

  For age and ever Wilde

  O Wilde with Thee!

  Constance, highly amused, penned her own poem by way of reply:

  Lyrics from the Childe to her Kinge

  Oh, do though gently singe

  To me, oh! Swinburne Kinge

  Of him I love

  With a passion Wilde;

  Until the very welin singe

  And all the bare-armed trees above

  Do sigh as at an utter thinge

  Moved by the sorrows of thy weary childe

  Oh, could I be beguiled

  With Terra-Cotta tiled

  Or sunflowers gold

  Or a lily white

  The smell of verdant cabbage liked

  Or sight of peacock feathers bold

  And yet the thoughts of something wilde

  Sootheth my aching spirit always quite.7

  A week after receiving her sonnet from Mr Swinburne-King, Constance and her mother were yet again at home with Lady Wilde. Willie Wilde had finally secured a staff job on the Daily Telegraph, and so he and Speranza had moved from Ovington Square to a house in Park Street in Mayfair. A better address for a salon, perhaps, but a more expensive one. Lady Wilde’s stretched finances could only accommodate the smallest house in the area, with the tiniest rooms, a fact not lost on Constance.

  ‘We had such a joke yesterday,’ Constance told Otho.

  I went out with Mama to call on Lady Wilde having quite forgotten her address and in the pouring rain. I made Mama go down in a hansom to Number 70 … to find out then that it was shut up, so we went into all the shops on both sides of the way until at last at a bakers I reluctantly found the number and we went in and found Lady W all alone in her glory in such wee rooms that Mama and I puzzled internally how she’d got into them. No one had appeared though L.W. made us stay in to see Willie whom she was expecting. I heard all about Oscar. He is bringing out a drama which I see is advertised today in the Observer. Vera or The Nihilists, which is to be acted at the Adelphi on the afternoon of the 17th of December and Lady Wilde has said I must go because Oscar would expect me to go. I suppose she is trying to carouse audience. However I tried to make Mr King and Mama promise to go and Mama is quite willing.8

  Vera, or The Nihilists was Oscar’s first foray into drama. It tells the tale of a Russian female assassin who falls in love with one of her fellow nihilists, Alexis, only to discover he is in fact the heir to the Russian throne. When Alexis does in fact become Tsar, Vera is sent to kill him. But she cannot kill the man she loves, a man who is determined to use his birthright to bring democratic change to Russia. With her fellow assassins ready to follow in her steps and assassinate Alexis themselves unless Vera throws a bloodied dagger out of a window as a sign of the success of her mission, Vera chooses to sacrifice herself and throw a knife covered in her own blood to her colleagues.

  The performance to which Constance was invited never took place. It was cancelled. A real-life Tsar had been assassinated in March and diplomatic pressures were afoot, possibly from the Russian Embassy. Meanwhile, preparations for Oscar’s American lecture tour suddenly became all-consuming. Oscar had engaged George Lewis to act as his solicitor and negotiate his contract for the tour, and had been writing to important figures who might provide letters of introduction to opinion-formers on the other side of the Atlantic. On Christmas Eve, Oscar boarded the Arizona and set off on his adventure.

  In Oscar’s absence Constance continued to embrace the attributes of Aestheticism. It has often been suggested that she was a person whose adoption of Aestheticism was purely part of her enthralment to Oscar. But Constance was quite her own person. Oscar’s appeal to her reflected her own predispositions.

  Although an invitation to lunch at the club most associated with London’s bohemian crowd, the particularly female-friendly Albemarle, felt like a step too far for Constance (‘Mademoiselle Arbau and I went to the Temple Church on Sunday and did not get home to lunch until 2.30. Mr Short took us into the Hall and into his rooms. He was most anxious to take us to the Albemarle Club to lunch, but we were afraid to go’9), nevertheless Constance was making inroads elsewhere.

  She began a collection of blue and white china, which was de rigueur for anyone pretending to Aesthetic credentials. She also continued to explore her own artistic talents, and now it was to ceramics that she turned.

  If not before, certainly by, early 1882 Constance was taking pottery classes, probably either at the pottery studio at the South Kensington Museum or at the Minton art pottery studio in Kensington Gore. Both locations were close to the Royal Albert Hall, a place that Constance found herself passing regularly as she trudged from Lancaster Gate, across Hyde Park and into South Kensington. Her correspondence mentions her tendency to bump into friends there, including on one occasion Oscar, whom she saw there ‘for about a second’ one day.10

  ‘Had two lessons in terracotta painting and I’m at present in a hopeless state of despair over it,’ Constance reported in March 1882, ‘but I’m going to have a private lesson on Friday. There’s no use in joining a class unless y
ou know something about it first, and I of course have been working all wrong.’11

  In the late 1870s female amateur potters working in these South Kensington studios made their contribution to what became known as the Arts and Crafts movement, a revival of craft skills that went hand in hand with the so-called Aesthetic movement. By 1878 these potteries had established a commercial outlet via Howell & James, in Regent Street, and that year they staged an exhibition that ‘contained upwards of one thousand original works, mostly by ladies, and was frequented during its two months duration by nearly 10,000 visitors’.12

  A year after the first mention of ceramics in her letters, Constance was working towards a contribution for another similar show and had high ambitions. ‘I want to paint two plates for the Amateur Exhibition on the 21st in Regent Street and to sell them, if possible for 30 shillings a piece,’ she revealed in a letter. ‘They cost me 10 shillings without paint, but I’m afraid I cannot do them well enough and then they will not accept them.’13

  Constance’s plates were essays in ‘barboline’ painting, a technique, as she herself explained, of ‘painting under glaze on pottery with a thin kind of clay called slip mixed with the colours to make them opaque like oil. Consequently it can be painted boldly, unlike the ordinary enamel china painting, and is fired and glazed afterwards. You paint it on the bisque ware.’14

  It is also evident that Constance was working away at her fine art skills. She had enrolled in the St John’s Wood School of Art, based in Elm Tree Road, not far from Lord’s cricket ground. Founded in 1878, this was an art school where women could study those drawing skills and take the life classes that would, among other things, prepare them for entry into the Royal Academy Schools – an institution that had admitted its first female student in 1860.

  Art classes were becoming increasingly popular in the 1880s. For those young women like Constance who instinctively felt the need to do something with their lives, periodicals such as The Girl’s Own Paper explained the potential appeal of what might lead to a career, if not as an artist, then most certainly as a tutor.

  Between true artistic geniuses and those destined to be viewers of works of art rather than creators of art was ‘a powerful and energetic middle class’, explained the paper, ‘who … are yet gifted with a vein of talent, more or less generous, which would well repay cultivation, and which would fill the lives of those who possess it with healthy interests and sufficiently lucrative employment’.15

  The St John’s Wood School, under the tutelage of a Mr Calderon, cost its pupils 15 guineas a year or 10 guineas for two terms. Girls had to buy their own equipment, but models were supplied. Apart from full-time tuition, the school offered part-time and evening classes, and it’s likely that Constance, with all her other activities, opted for the latter. One convention of the school was the expectation that students should join the St John’s Wood Sketch Club and enter their work for regular viewings where invited practitioners and celebrities came to judge the pupils’ work.

  In August 1882, while Oscar was introducing residents of the state of New York to the joys of the artistic movement in England, Constance was planning her contributions for the sketch club exhibition. She was on holiday at Delgaty Castle in Aberdeenshire. The imposing sixteenth-century castle, with its white-harled five-storey tower, had come into the ownership of the local Ainslie family, who were resident there that summer in their latest incarnation as Mr and Mrs Grant-Duff-Ainslie. Amid the magnificent setting of the imposing castle and its sumptuous grounds, the house party comprised a Mr Huxley, a Miss Michelle, Mrs Ainslie’s cousin Mr Morgan and his family, a Colonel Forbes and the main Ainslie clan, which included sixteen-year-old Douglas.

  On arrival Constance realized that Delgaty provided plenty of opportunity for sketching and immediately dispatched instructions to Otho in Lancaster Gate to send her ‘my spectacles which are lying somewhere in my room in a case … Next is a small sketch book, thickish paper about 10 inches by 6 which I shall be awfully obliged if you can get to me … Also a medium sized, rather large camel’s hair brush, a good one. I am very anxious to try and take some sketches here, though I expect not to succeed.’16

  Constance quickly discovered that any ambition to make a series of sketches for the St John’s Sketch Club would be hard to realize. She was having far too much fun. There were billiards, tennis and chess tournaments, punctuated by picnics and outings. She was even being taught how to shoot. And of course, there were those mystical activities in the evenings that she so adored. She was mesmerized one night by one member of the group and ‘upset Mrs Ainslie dreadfully. She thought I was awfully ill!’ In fact, Constance revealed that she had ‘never enjoyed myself so much anywhere’ as during that wonderful summer in Scotland.

  But something else happened during that holiday. The happy radiance that Constance exuded proved irresistible to the male members of the party and quickly ignited the jealousies of women in the group. If the growing number of admirers to date gives a picture of Constance as clearly attractive, this account shows that she was something far more than commonly attractive. She was, frankly, sexy and unconventionally precocious. In short, whether she was conscious of it or not, she was a magnet and a flirt.

  At first it was Mr Huxley who fell under Constance’s spell, much to the annoyance of Miss Michelle, who became

  jealous of me because for 3 days before I came, Mr Huxley devoted himself to her. I think she is about 45, of Italian descent, the daughter of a diplomat, and consequently has been all over Europe and is very amusing, but she’s terribly superstitious and too fond of chat. She never knows when to stop and riles everyone. I have offended her mortally and she will not forgive me, which is rather a nuisance.17

  But it was not just Mr Huxley who found Constance Lloyd so compelling. Once Huxley had left the party, the teenage Douglas Ainslie confided that he too was utterly smitten with Constance, despite the fact she was a good eight years his senior. ‘Douglas says that he was so jealous of Mr Huxley that he didn’t know what to do,’ Constance told Otho, ‘and used to go and bemoan himself to Miss Michelle, and ask her what he should do to make himself agreeable.’18

  Constance’s and Douglas’s flirtations were quickly noticed by the wider group, and a series of unfortunate incidents led to Constance being deemed a bad influence on the young man. In terms of his crush on her, ‘I never saw anything to equal Douglas,’ Constance admitted,

  and the worst of this is that Mrs Ainslie has discovered this and I simply don’t know what to do. Unfortunately tonight he began telling me of this scrape he had got into at school and I was advising him to the best of my ability, lecturing him he called it, and Miss Michelle who is perpetually interfering about everything, went and told Mrs Ainslie we were in his room together and so I have been told I am not to go there. I like Douglas a great deal, too much to snub him and I like Mrs Ainslie a great deal, too much to want to offend her but it strikes me that I shall be lucky if I am asked here again and I have never been so happy in all my life.19

  Things went from embarrassing to farcical. Douglas, unable to conceal his massive crush, and with all the awkwardness one would expect from a boy of his age, began behaving strangely whenever Constance was near him, which left Constance ‘awfully done up’:

  Mrs Ainslie’s simply furious with me about Douglas and I am quite certain now that I shall never be asked here again. Everybody … is … laughing at us … What makes it so awfully difficult for me is … this, which you must not tell a soul. Douglas has got into the most fearful habit of betting and has actually bet £60 on the … race, … that comes off on September the 13th … Now for a lad of 16 it seems to me perfectly dreadful and my one great aim is to induce him to give up betting, and he says that I am the only person who could make him do it if I want to induce him to give me a promise not to bet anymore, the more so as he never loses … You could not understand unless you were here how awfully disagreeable it is. Everyone in the house is making fun of it, and
they say that Mr Grant Duff and Mr Huxley were just the same, and there is a Colonel Forbes here too, about 50 I should think or more, evidently an awful flirt, who has gone cracked too, and of course everything is noticed and talked about here, and I know they all think I flirt. Mrs Ainslie tells me that I have turned Douglas’s head … I must go to bed or I shall think my head off. Certainly I’m unlucky. For goodness sake write to me. I think I shall offer to go back to London next week and that will settle matters satisfactorily.20

  But matters did not settle. In fact, they became even more comical. Douglas wrote Constance a note inviting her to his room after everyone was in bed. Clearly losing his nerve at the last minute, he never delivered his highly risqué proposal. Instead he left it in the blotter, to be found the next day by the disapproving Miss Michelle. The latter informed Mrs Ainslie, and Constance found herself returned to London.

  Although Delgaty proved unfruitful from a sketching point of view, over the course of the next few months Constance did complete something that she felt was worthy of submission to the St John’s Wood School. The following March she was in Torquay staying with relations, the Harveys, and was able to send a picture back to London by the night train. Otho was put on standby to collect it and get it to the school before eleven.21