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

by Franny Moyle

  Constance’s craft and artistic endeavours, along with her university exams, show her as a young woman searching for a role for herself. Some two years earlier, at the time when her cousin Stanhope so inappropriately proposed to her, she had attempted to put into words this deep-seated desire to achieve something in life: ‘I have no special objection to being married, excepting that I don’t care for anyone and that I think I am rather afraid of marrying,’ Constance had told Otho.

  At the same time I cannot say that I prefer the life I am leading at present. If I eventually do not marry, I will not live with Auntie all my life, I shall do something. I feel as though I am stagnating and it won’t be so bad however if you are in London and I am thinking of going in for an examination. I shan’t work my head off for I don’t care much about the result, I just want something specific to do to prevent my continually dreaming ’til I get perfectly morbid.22

  With her desire to achieve something in life, Constance was aligning herself with a group of women who since the middle part of the century had been fighting for social equality for women, as well as for their political enfranchisement. It would be a cause that in the fullness of time Constance would espouse more fully and formally.

  Throughout the 1880s the voice of feminism was getting louder. The suffrage movement got under way with high-profile and aristocratic campaigners such as Viscountess Harberton leading national demonstrations for the right for women householders and rate-payers to vote. The question of the parliamentary vote aside, the dominance of men in other aspects of life was being chiselled away in tiny chunks. Women had already won the right to practise medicine, and in 1880 Eliza Orme became the first woman to obtain a degree in law. Then in 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act marked a genuine shift in women’s legal rights, since for the first time it allowed the notion that a married woman could in fact, legally speaking, be her own person.

  Until 1882 all married women were defined as subordinate to their husbands, and any property and rights they might have held as single women were surrendered to his ownership. Horror stories in the press pointing out the injustice of this system cited men’s ability to squander their wives’ private fortunes should they wish, with the former having no recourse. But after the Act married women were suddenly redefined legally. They were given the right to their own wealth, as well as to buy and sell property in their own right. They could hold bank accounts and stocks. They could sue as individuals rather than rely on the offices of their spouse. The flip side was that they were now liable for their own debts and could be declared bankrupt, but few were complaining. Constance was living in an era when she could enjoy both liberty and responsibility above and beyond her mother’s and her grandmother’s generations.

  Speranza Wilde may not have fully grasped the implications of this Act of Parliament. In her time Speranza had expressed views that diverged from that Victorian expectation that the sole purpose of a woman and a wife was to accommodate the wishes of her spouse. In her essay ‘The Bondage of Women’ she condemned an education system for women which solely prepared girls for ‘husband worship’. Nevertheless, in spite of her published views, Speranza was also a pragmatist, and when it came to her own sons she was more than prepared to consider how wealthy girls might provide automatic financial security for them.

  Money, or the lack of it, was a constant preoccupation for Speranza. Amid the letters that survive between her and Oscar there are few without mention of money or debt. While he was in America, Speranza bombarded Oscar with letters in which she reminded him constantly of her own precarious financial situation. She complained she was living ‘in a fever of nerves’ and remained perpetually on the brink of having to give up her house. She was, she told Oscar, scouring the papers to look for opportunities where the output of her own pen might bring in a few pennies.

  Part of the problem was Oscar’s brother Willie, who, far from providing comfort and security for his mother, was simply adding to her worries. Willie was a talented journalist and likeable raconteur who had secured work with Punch, Vanity Fair and the Daily Telegraph and had acquired quite a profile when he moved to London in the late 1870s. But despite what his peers recognized as a not inconsiderable talent and charm, he lived up to his surname. He was irresponsible and unreliable and drank like a fish. He had a reputation for partying hard and was a member of the notorious Fielding Club in London, which would open its doors at eight o’clock in the evening and then stay open throughout the night.

  Far from contributing to the Wilde coffers, Willie was, if anything, a drain on them. He had run up debts of around £2,000 by the early 1880s. The relationship between Willie and Oscar was consequently strained. Oscar was angry with his brother for his professional failures and while he was away wrote to him in no uncertain terms. Speranza opened the letter.

  yr last from N York dated the 9th has arrived addressed to Willie. But he was away with a friend at Windlesham for a couple of days so I read it, but it was so severe & I did not give it to him, I burned it – he … feels at last how foolish he has been & he is really trying for work … I would rather you write a few kind words to him appealing to his good sense for something good.23

  But it was not just Willie who was to blame for the Wildes’ generally impecunious situation. While Oscar was away, Speranza found herself bombarded with bills from Oscar’s creditors too. With his exploits in America racking up column inches, the impression at home was that Oscar was making a fortune. Some newspaper reports suggested he would make as much as £5,000. And so those he owed began to call in their debts.

  On 10 July Speranza informed her son, ‘Levers bill came here for you. I will send you the list next time I write – do pey [sic] them before you spend all the money.’ A couple of weeks later it was ‘North (of Dublin)’ who was writing inquiring after Oscar’s address, along with ‘several people [who] have sent me your bills’. Then in August another ‘bill came for you … you seem to have lived luxuriously at Tite Street – I never saw the rooms & can only judge from the items’.24

  The actual profit Oscar made after close to a full year of lecturing was $5,605.31, a half-share of profits after costs of a tour that brought in $18,215.69. This would have amounted to just over £1,000. But with his debts to settle it’s unclear how much of this money would actually end up in Oscar’s own pockets, not least because, clearly despairing at his mother’s situation, he also began to bail her out, sending cheques with almost every letter home.

  ‘My dear child,’ she wrote on 18 September 1882,

  Your letter and cheque £80 of Sept 6th has this moment arrived & my first impulse was a flood of tears over it … I feel deeply at taking your money; the product of hard work and … fierce strivings against a bitter world – Willie was expected home to night, but not come … I still trust he will … awake to the full meaning of his life and what has become of it … I will hold on to the house, at least over the winter … You are the talk of London – the cab men ask if I am anything to Oscar Wilde, the milk man has bought your picture! … I think you will be mobbed when you come back.25

  For Speranza, a good marriage for Oscar was vital, and the sooner the better. ‘What will you do on your return?’ she wrote to Oscar while he was away, suggesting that ‘you must bring home the American bride’.26 Speranza was keen that Oscar set the bar high. Surely he could find an heiress with a ‘1/4 of a million’, then he could ‘take a home in Park Lane – & go into Parliament’.27

  His natural flirtatiousness heightened by Speranza’s encouragement, Oscar became identified as quite the ladies’ man while he was in America. And so it is perhaps hardly surprising that his name quickly became linked with that of Maud Howe when he stayed as the guest of her mother in Newport. But the newspaper reports were unfounded. Oscar and Maud may have been seen together, but there was no spark. It was Oscar’s growing celebrity and the press’s desire for a new story about him that generated news about an engagement. For once, Oscar was quick to quash the rumo
urs, and he told his mother to do the same. ‘I gave a decided contradiction to the report that you were to be married to the beautiful Miss Maud Howe,’28 Speranza informed Oscar on 6 August, sounding perhaps just a bit disappointed.

  Oscar arrived home in January 1883, and although he came without the wife that the gossip columns had been predicting, he nevertheless stepped off the ocean liner Bothnia with the smell of success in his nostrils and a determination to build on his American experience. If not Parliament, then at the very least professional recognition was something he now craved. Sick of ridicule, he was intent on acquiring a new level of respect from those at home. He had cut the long locks that had been so mercilessly parodied before he left. Now, looking altogether a more robust proposition, he clearly considered that, after a haircut, marriage might also help.

  While in America, Oscar had renewed his ambitions to become a playwright. He had befriended one of America’s leading theatrical impresarios, Steele Mackaye, and together they had hatched plans to stage not only Vera in the USA but also a new play that Oscar would write: The Duchess of Padua. By the time Oscar returned home Mackaye had already brought one of America’s leading ladies, Marie Prescott, to the table to produce and take the lead in Vera. And for The Duchess he had put Oscar in touch with another actress, Mary Anderson. By February financial terms for Vera had been agreed and Oscar had benefited from a lump-sum down payment. Meanwhile he was due to complete the Duchess by the end of March. To this end, just a few weeks after returning home he left for Paris, where he intended to write. With what was left of his American earnings and £200 in his pocket from the down payment for Vera, Oscar was for the first time in his life quite comfortably off.

  By May 1883 both Oscar and Constance had returned to London for the season, Oscar from France and Constance from a brief stay in Torquay with the Harveys. Oscar, whose new, short hairstyle was now curled, stayed with his family in Park Street. The capital was once again in the grip of its annual social whirlwind, and he became intoxicated. Unable to focus on work amid the festivities, where ‘the splendid whirl and swirl of life in London sweeps me from my Sphinx. I am hard at work being idle,’ he explained to his friend Robert Sherard, ‘late midnights and famishing morrows follow one another … However society must be amazed and my Neronian coiffure has amazed it.’29

  To Oscar’s distress, amid all this gaiety he found himself once again impoverished. He had managed to spend his recent earnings and discovered that he was still pursued by bills that had remained unpaid from his college days.30 The disappointment of this financial position, in spite of a year’s hard graft, prompted Speranza into action once again. She quickly reprised those visits in which marriageable young women were invited over for the benefit of her sons. On 16 May Constance and Otho found themselves in her tiny Mayfair rooms. And it seems that the relationship between Constance and Oscar took up where it had left off.

  The very next day Constance and Otho returned to Tite Street to another of Lady Wilde’s receptions. On 19 May Oscar was at Lancaster Gate. Constance was invited to visit Lady Wilde on 24 May. Unable to attend, she asked the Wildes to come to them on the 28th, when the Hope family were also expected.

  Lady Wilde lost no time in responding. Sensing her son’s renewed interest in Constance, she did not want to let the opportunity slip as it had done two years previously. ‘Dear Constance (I trust I might call you Constance), We were desolated not seeing you yesterday,’ Speranza wrote on 25 May. ‘Oscar talked like Plato on Divinity … I shall go and see Miss Hope & Jenny, with great pleasure, on the 28th but hope meanwhile you will call on Saturday 26th. I like my rooms to be decorated.’31

  Even if Speranza imagined that Constance would provide some adornment in her living room in Park Street, it’s likely that few people would have noticed. Lady Wilde’s salons were notorious for being held in such low-lit conditions that attendees quite often disappeared into the shadows. Speranza kept the curtains drawn in Park Street and, with candles muted by shades, luminaries from the artistic and literary world would be spared a clear sight not only of their fellow guests but also of their hostess’s increasingly meagre means. Speranza herself and her household were becoming unkempt and second-hand, often wearing clothes that clearly belonged in a long-gone past. With only a single Irish domestic to polish and scrub her furniture, the artistic lighting was pragmatic.

  If attending Lady Wilde’s salon provided some candle-lit old-world flavour to Constance’s season, elsewhere the wonders of modern technology were to be marvelled at. One of the spectacles of the season of ’83 was the ‘Great International Fisheries’ exhibition held in South Kensington. With contributions from fishing nations from China to North America, it was a show designed to illustrate aspects of that industry all over the world. It quickly became the most popular haunt that summer. And thanks to the power of the new electric lighting, it was an event that could be visited at night as well as during the day.

  One of the most popular attractions was the aquarium. Here live species of sea fish and crustaceans were on view in ten huge water tanks measuring fifteen feet long and over four feet deep. Some 70,000 gallons of seawater were kept in reserve to feed these tanks, with the water pumped through vulcanized India-rubber pipes. In addition there were a further nine tanks of freshwater fish! There was even a beautiful fishing pagoda and a waterfall in the Chinese court and an ‘unrivalled collection of Indian fish preserved in labelled bottles’ in the Asian pavilion.

  Despite all these diversions, when Otho and Constance joined Oscar in a visit to this extraordinary spectacle on 7 June, Oscar talked away throughout the whole adventure, barely noticing the fish. Perhaps this was why he found it necessary to return to the show at a later date, on which occasion he bumped into the Swinburne-Kings and raised a few eyebrows among their party by referring to Constance by her first name. Writing from another house party out of town, Constance related the event to Otho, revealing that she had had a ‘cheeky epistle two days ago from Mr King. I suppose you heard about their meeting OW at the Fisheries and his calling me Constance.’32

  This style of address, which did away with traditional formalities, may have been as much an Aesthetic mannerism on Oscar’s part as an indication of growing intimacy. But both implications were clearly welcomed by Constance, who in the same note revealed more of herself. She was continuing her habit of bringing up Oscar as a topic of conversation wherever she could. Every glowing account of the man with whom she was now head over heels in love simply served to enhance her devotion to him.

  ‘There was a man dining here last night who was rather interesting,’ she told Otho. ‘He is a vicar and I should imagine very unsuited for clerical work … he … got out a couch and flopped on to it with his legs up in the air … flopped out of it onto the floor and asked me if I called that acting. He abused Oscar Wilde but acknowledged that he was awfully clever, said that his poems were very clever and very wicked.’33

  As June progressed, Constance and Oscar continued to see one another as much as possible. According to Otho, they attended a reception held as a piece of advocacy for the women’s rights movement. And then, on 10 July, Constance and Otho went to hear Oscar lecture on his ‘Impressions of America’ at Prince’s Hall in Piccadilly. Shortly afterwards Oscar and his mother attended a large ‘at home’ in Lancaster Gate, where, according to Otho, despite sixty-odd guests Oscar spoke to no one but Constance.

  It was hard to interpret Oscar’s behaviour as anything other than romantic infatuation, but Otho did his best. At some profound level Otho was against the blossoming romance. In spite of Oscar’s attentions to Constance, Otho wrote to his own sweetheart, Nellie Hutchinson: ‘I don’t believe that he means anything; that is his way with all girls whom he finds interesting.’ Otho considered all this attention to Constance nothing more than another of Oscar’s poses: ‘If the man were anyone else but Oscar Wilde one might conclude that he was in love.’34

  But if Constance hoped that their socializing
might lead to a proposal, America once more proved the obstacle to their romance. Rehearsals for Vera were due to start in New York in August, and so after a brief lecture tour that took Oscar to Margate, Ramsgate, Southampton, Brighton and Southport, on 2 August he boarded the Britannia in Liverpool, bound for America.

  Constance headed to the Continent with her grandfather while Oscar was away. John Horatio was in the habit of making a European excursion around August time. She returned to British shores towards the end of September and was at once keen to find out what Oscar had been up to in her absence. Writing to Otho from Folkestone, Constance noted:

  I’ve just got a Western Morning News … with an account of Oscar Wilde’s lecture on America, at Exeter. It is the same that we heard apparently … they give a description of him, he is a handsome well-built man above medium height and wore his hair cut rather short, … he has a musical voice and good elocution and … easy self-possessed manner … when the lecture had been … delivered and Oscar had quitted the stage and the curtain had been dropped, no one showed any disposition to leave the auditorium. Loud applause called out the Lecturer who gracefully bowing, thanked the audience for their attention and courtesy and again retired.35

  Constance’s feet barely touched London soil. When she and her grandfather returned to Lancaster Gate, John Horatio fell gravely ill. Constance saw Oscar briefly in mid-October at Lady Wilde’s Saturday salon but was then dispatched to Dublin to stay with ‘Mama Mary’, her maternal grandmother, where she arrived around 8 November. This time, however, distance did not get between Oscar and Constance. They wrote to each other avidly.

  Before she left for Ireland, Oscar had given Constance a copy of Vera to read. The play had not gone well in America and had closed after just a week. Writing from her grandmother’s house in Dublin’s Ely Place on 11 November, Constance comforted Oscar as best she could over the play’s lack of success. ‘I cannot understand why you should have been so unfortunate in its reception unless either the acting was very inferior or the audience was unsympathetic to the political opinion expressed in it,’ she offered. ‘The world surely is unjust and bitter to most of us; I think we must either renounce our opinions & run with the general stream or else totally ignore the world and go on our own way regardless of all, there is not the slightest use in fighting against existing prejudices for we are only worsted in the struggle.’36