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

by Franny Moyle

  Although Menpes, living close by in Fulham, probably proved to be a far more exciting and accessible godfather than Ruskin could ever have been, nevertheless things generally felt far less satisfactory than they had done a year earlier. The ideal frame within which Constance and Oscar had both envisaged their marriage and family life was changing.

  When he grew up, Vyvyan acknowledged the fact that he was something of a disappointment. He adored Constance, he said, but noted that

  I was always conscious of the fact that both my father and my mother really preferred my brother to myself; it seems to be an instinct in parents to prefer their first born … I was not as strong as my brother, and I had more than my fair share of childish complaints, which probably offended my father’s aesthetic sense … And most of all, both my parents had hoped for a girl.17

  But it was not just the fact that their second child was a boy rather than a girl that was beginning to undermine the Wilde marriage. Vyvyan’s arrival came at a time when, quite apart from everything else, Oscar had begun to feel a level of frustration with artistic marriage. While he had been on the road lecturing, the appeal of home and hearth was great. But once he was based in London, returning nightly to Tite Street, the novelty of domestic bliss quickly waned. He sensed that the venture he and Constance had so wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embarked on might not in fact be one that could fulfil him as he had originally hoped. He loved the company and companionship of his wife. But he also loved the attentions of young men. At a time when anything Greek was à la mode, Oscar was all too aware that Greek love, the attraction between men endorsed in Ancient Greek culture, was profoundly intriguing.

  Ada Leverson told a tale about Oscar. According to Leverson, Wilde was an attentive, courteous and dedicated husband who, not long after he was married, took Constance shopping.

  He waited for her outside Swan and Edgar’s while she made some long and tedious purchases. As he stood there full of careless good spirits, on a cold sunny May morning, a curious, very young, but hard-eyed creature appeared, looked at him, gave a sort of laugh, and passed on. He felt he said ‘as if an icy hand had clutched his heart’. He had a sudden presentiment. He saw a vision of folly, misery and ruin.18

  Swan and Edgar’s was a famous department store that faced Piccadilly Circus. Elegant and suave, it nevertheless looked out on to one of the most notorious pick-up spots in the whole of the capital. Oscar, who so loved observing all walks of life, and with his particular fascination for vice, must have enjoyed watching the ‘renters’, or male prostitutes, who notoriously hung around this thoroughfare. That one of them could spot his predilection for young men almost before he himself had identified this sexual trait came as a shock.

  That Oscar openly enjoyed the friendship of younger men was no secret, and this was an aspect of her husband that Constance was in fact proud of. Years later, in 1892, she wrote to Georgina Mount-Temple full of pride at the fact that

  Oscar had yesterday such a beautiful letter from the brother of a young man who has died lately in Australia. Beautiful to me I mean because it is so full of this boy’s love for Oscar. I will write a copy of it and send it to you, I should like you to see how good O’s influence is on young men, and the brother speaks of this young man as the purest soul he had ever known.19

  In the early days of their marriage Constance was even party to Oscar’s cultivation of young men, just as she was very much a part of almost everything in Oscar’s life. One of the first visitors to the newly decorated Tite Street was none other than Constance’s friend Douglas Ainslie. The love-struck teenager who had got Constance into such trouble was now entering his twenties. Just days after they had moved into their new home he came to see it. To her delight Douglas Ainslie was showing decidedly Aesthetic tendencies.20

  ‘Douglas thinks our house the most charming he has ever been in,’ Constance informed Otho, ‘and could hardly tear himself away last night.’21 Not so long after Douglas Ainslie had been entertained in Tite Street, it was Oscar who was asking Harry Marillier, the Cambridge student who had contacted him about his performance of Eumenides, to join him and Constance in town. Marillier’s visit invigorated Oscar. ‘I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself,’ he declared, ‘and you are infinitely young.’22

  In November 1885 Constance and Oscar both went to Cambridge to visit the young Harry as well as other established friends they had there, including the poet Oscar Browning. On their return both the Wildes wrote thank-you notes to their hosts. Constance’s notes to both were plain, polite and to the point: she returned a letter from their mutual friend Walter Harris to Browning, and in her note to Marillier she reminded him to come and see them again in London. Oscar, by contrast, found himself deeply moved by the youthful idealism he saw among Marillier and his student friends. For him, being in the company of young people was like being in a dream full of ‘bright young faces, and grey misty quadrangles’. He found himself intoxicated by the enthusiasm of these young men.

  Constance Lloyd by Louis Desanges, 1882.

  The artist had painted the Prince of Wales just a few years earlier.

  John Horatio Lloyd, Constance’s grandfather who lived in Lancaster Gate. Wealthy and well connected, he invented the Lloyd’s Bond: a type of investment bond on which the development of the railway system became particularly dependent.

  Horace Lloyd, Constance’s father. Part of the Prince of Wales’s social set, he could ‘have taken on any expert in one of the three games, chess and billiards and whist, and beaten him in two out of three’.

  Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde. Oscar’s mother was an Irish poet whose pen name was ‘Speranza’.

  Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, was an esteemed eye and ear surgeon. He had a colourful private life and a brood of illegitimate children in addition to Oscar and Willie, his legitimate sons with Speranza.

  Otho Holland Lloyd, Constance’s brother, taken in about 1884 when he would have been twenty-eight.

  Constance aged twenty-four, on holiday at Delgaty Castle, Aberdeenshire, August 1882. According to a note on the back, the picture was taken by ‘Mr Burton, Son of the Scottish Historian’.

  Oscar the bachelor, wearing his hair long. According to Constance, her relatives in London disapproved of his appearance ‘because they don’t choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic. I like him awfully much but I suppose it is very bad taste.’

  Constance in an ‘aesthetic’ dress in the period before her marriage to Oscar. Otho considered her loose dresses with wide sleeves ugly.

  A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 by William Powell Frith. Oscar is featured in the foreground to the right, with a lily in his buttonhole. To the left, a young woman, dressed very much as Constance did at this time, wears a green puffed-sleeved dress, on which she has pinned the badge of Aestheticism: a sunflower.

  Oscar the married man, photographed in 1885, with his hair curled in what he described as his ‘Neronian coiffure’.

  Consistent with the Lady’s Pictorial descriptions of her honeymoon wardrobe, Mrs Oscar Wilde is seen here in one of her’large white plumed hats’ and ‘somewhat quaintly-made gowns of white muslin, usually relieved by touches of golden ribbon’.

  Suddenly in the spotlight after her marriage to Oscar, Constance featured in the press when she manned a charity flower stall at the ‘Healtheries’ in 1884. She is seen wearing one of the latest ‘rational’ outfits: a divided skirt.

  As Constance and Oscar’s home in Tite Street soon became acknowledged as a hub of cultural and social activity, the Wildes’ ‘artistic’ marriage became the source of caricature in the press.

  Oscar photographed in 1889. While his private life took on new sexual dimensions, Oscar’s public profile was essentially conventional in the mid to late 1880s. His dress was no longer bohemian, but traditional with just a dandyish twist.

  Robbie Ross, c.1887, when he was the Wildes’ lodger inTite Street.
At around this time he and Oscar embarked on an affair.

  No. 16 Tite Street (right), which Oscar and Constance leased in 1884. In conjunction with architect Edward Godwin they converted the conventional new build into a‘House Beautiful’. The walls were painted white and polished; the floor covering kept pale and plain; internal dividing doors were replaced by curtains; and slim, sparse furniture contributed to a sense of space and calm.

  Vyvyan Wilde in a Cossack costume aged about three.

  Constance and Cyril photographed in 1889 when Cyril would have been about four. Cyril was the Wildes’ favourite son, the mutual adoration between mother and child quite clear in this picture.

  In December 1885, when he was lonely in a Glasgow hotel room, having delivered another lecture, Oscar wrote and made a terrible confession to Harry Marillier. In a letter written almost exactly a year after the one he wrote under comparable circumstances to Constance, one where he had imagined their lips kissing, now Oscar confessed to a Cambridge undergraduate that for him there was no longer ‘such thing as a romantic experience’.

  Oscar revealed that for him

  there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance – that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are mere shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or what we long someday to feel. So at least it feels to me. And strangely enough, what comes of this is a curious mixture of ardour and indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last! Only one thing remains fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am sorry that it is so.

  And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.23

  It is a letter, perhaps in response to a question about romance and marriage, that admits that the infatuation he once held for his wife is passed, that in its place is a loyalty or affection that amounts to a ‘curious mixture of ardour and indifference’. The freedom and idealism of young single men reminded him of the compromise that marriage entails, and what pleasure might lie outside it.

  There is unquestionably the possibility of interpreting Oscar’s allusion to the land of strange flowers as homosexual code. To an extent the effusiveness of Wilde’s language in his romantic letters to Marillier has to be mediated by context. Oscar was one of a number of Aesthetes who adopted excessively intimate language and gestures as part of the affectation of the time.

  Nevertheless, the flirtation is palpable in the correspondence between Oscar and Marillier. Oscar was falling in love with the young man. Six months later another note to Harry seems to confirm both this and the fact that this love remained both tempting and unconsummated. ‘I had been thinking a great deal about you,’ Oscar wrote to him. ‘There is at least this beautiful mystery in life, that at the moment it feels most complete it finds some secret sacred niche in its shrine empty and waiting. Then comes a time of exquisite expectancy.’24

  Constance, accustomed to Oscar’s affectations, saw nothing more in his liking of Harry Marillier than just that. She continued to encourage Oscar’s young male friends, and he did not seek to conceal them from her. In fact, he continued to involve her in his socializing with them. The evangelistic enthusiasm her husband displayed in the recruiting of these apostles was, from her point of view, a positive thing. Within a month she was introducing these apostles to one another. In January she dropped Marillier a line inviting him to dine with her and Oscar at 7.30, noting ‘I have asked Douglas Ainslie also.’25 The boys were, after all, exactly the same age. It was perhaps on this occasion that Constance, Oscar and their young friends all drank ‘yellow wine from green glasses in Keats’s honour’. It was certainly at this dinner that Constance showed off a set of moonstone jewels that the couple were particularly proud of.

  The Wildes’ generosity towards young men culminated in them taking in a seventeen-year-old boy, Robert Baldwin Ross, at around this time. Robbie Ross was a young Canadian who, since the death of his eminent father, had been brought up by his mother in Europe. On his mother’s side there were distant Irish connections which may have been the source of his introduction to Oscar and Constance. But Robbie’s elder brother Alec, a founder and secretary of the Society of Authors, was also moving in London’s literary circles and may have been the point of introduction. Whatever the connection, they were sufficiently friendly for Mrs Ross to ask if Robbie could lodge at Tite Street while she took a two-month sojourn on the Continent.

  The stay must have proved a revelation for the young man, who had strong artistic leanings. Robbie was charming, intelligent and erudite. Both Constance and Oscar adored him, and in the fullness of time he would become one of Constance’s closest male friends. One can imagine the Wildes indulging him with trips to galleries, talks and the theatre.

  Robbie also proved a revelation to Oscar. Despite his young age, he was a practising homosexual. If Marillier had revealed to Oscar that there was an empty niche in his life, Robbie was the young man who actually filled it for Oscar. The two began a physical relationship.

  Robbie shared Oscar’s fascination with the underground world of vice and deviancy. Despite his youthfulness, he seemed to have been bold in his exploration of the opportunities there were for homosexual experiences in London at this time. During the day Robbie attended a crammer in Covent Garden that was intended to prepare him for entry to Cambridge. But at least some of his leisure time was, it seems, spent in cruising the public conveniences and alleys around Piccadilly in search of sexual encounters. Robbie was well known to the police. And this does add just a touch of credibility to a story told by Frank Harris that Oscar and Robbie had actually encountered one another in a public lavatory, where Robbie had importuned the older man.26

  Robbie’s introduction of Oscar to full homosexual sex could not have been worse timed. Although it was perhaps inevitable that Oscar would eventually explore this facet of his character, by doing so after 1885 he was committing a crime. In 1885 acts of gross indecency between males, even in private, were deemed criminal thanks to a new clause in the Criminal Law Amendment Act passed in that year.

  At some level Constance sensed Oscar’s infidelity, although she misattributed the object of his affection. Before they married, Constance had sworn that she would never be jealous, but just two years into the marriage she had begun to have doubts and was becoming resentful. In his capacity now as a drama critic Oscar was often away from home. Constance suspected Oscar of having developed an infatuation for an actress whose performances she considered he was following with rather too much interest. There is an anecdote of a dinner party at which Constance made a cutting reference to Oscar’s current infatuation. When asked what he had done over the last week, Oscar, who had in fact been reviewing the actress in question, offered a typically obfuscating response. He ‘had seen an exquisite Elizabethan country house, with emerald lawns, stately yew hedges, scented rose gardens cool lily ponds … and strutting peacocks’. Constance rather bitingly added: ‘And did she act well, Oscar?’, her suspicion being that ‘The nearest he had got to a Tudor mansion that week was the Blank Hotel in Birmingchester, whither he had pursued the fair but frail leading lady.’27

  Another event almost certainly contributed to Constance’s insecurity around the time of Vyvyan’s birth. Her brother became involved in another personal scandal that both alarmed and frightened Constance. Until this point in their lives Otho had pursued a series of choices that had closely mirrored Constance’s own. He had married within days of his sister, and she thought that he had, like her, married
for love. Now, just like Constance and Oscar, Otho and Nellie had had two sons. Otho Junior and Fabian Lloyd were born within months of their cousins Cyril and Vyvyan. But in 1887 Constance received an extraordinary piece of news regarding Otho. He was leaving his wife for another woman.

  Otho’s second child, Fabian, was born in May 1887. Within just two months of what should have been this happy occasion, Otho deserted Nellie and moved in with someone else. To make matters worse, this woman, Mary Winter, was a close friend of Nellie’s whom she had befriended while at finishing school in Lausanne.28And it was in this Swiss city that Otho and Mary were now temporarily living together.

  ‘What fatality has overtaken you? Will you not write and tell me how this all is,’ Constance wrote desperately to her brother in July.

  If you care to write privately I will show your letter to no one, not even Oscar. I cannot think that you realise in counting the cost, what a burden you have thrown on poor little Nellie. She writes so very sweetly and kindly but she is such a child quite unfit to take charge of two children, two boys, entirely by herself with no father’s care. I imagined that you had such an intensely strong feeling of the duties of parents that you would not have so deserted the little ones. Is it forever, or is there no chance that you will some day return to her? Do tell me. You have always been so dear to me that I cannot bear to think that you will not write to me now.29