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

by Franny Moyle

  Constance provides a highly visual, painterly and idealized description of the Japan to which the stork flies. There was plenty of reference material in her own home in Tite Street and other neighbouring Aesthetic homes that she could have drawn on. Not only had the Japanese fanatic Mortimer Menpes given Vyvyan some of his etchings of that country as a christening present, but his own nearby Chelsea home was an hommage to the East. Interestingly, the little girl in Constance’s story shares the same name as Menpes’ own child: Dorothy. If this was not enough inspiration, in August 1886 Otho had given Oscar a book on Japanese art, which Oscar described in his thank-you note as ‘by far the best book on Japanese Art that I know’, and one can imagine Constance studying this ardently before putting her own pen to paper.

  Constance describes vistas of ‘grey-tiled houses’ that ‘nestle in and out of the hill-side, each with its almond trees and its tiny rockery garden’, a ‘little stream with gold fish in it’ and ‘merry little girls clad in the richest rainbow hues, with eyes bright as stars, and smooth black hair dressed in butterfly fashion’.

  The painted stork flies from one artefact into another. In the Japanese workshop in which he himself was painted he finds another fan depicting ‘a mother-stork and all her little ones’, and this, he concludes, is his wife and family. For ‘many hours’ the stork talks to his family, and when the evening comes he realizes that he does not want now to return back to the ‘fog and the cold’ of England. However, a little Japanese girl who can conveniently see him and understands the magic of the moment begs him to return to England to the children there, and then bring them back to Japan with him so she might play with them.

  And so, because ‘the child looked at him so piteously and her smile was so winsome’, the stork cannot ‘bear to refuse her’. But when he re-enters the nursery in London, the magic spell is broken. The angel’s feather becomes dislodged from the stork’s head, his power to weave between real and imagined worlds is suddenly gone and the stork simply adopts his former place, back in the fan, finding himself once more flying across ‘the blue sky with pink almond blossoms round him’.

  Constance was delighted with the story and sent it to Otho. Typically for a woman who had a tendency to clumsiness, she managed to send her own copy of the book by mistake, one in which she had written an inscription, perhaps to Oscar or the boys. ‘I found that I’ve sent you my copy,’ she wrote to Otho. ‘Will you either send it back when you have read it, and I will send you the other, or if you like better, cut the inscription out and send it. Tell me what you think of the story.’12

  Constance’s first foray into fiction proved successful. The publicity her involvement in The Bairn’s Annual solicited was quickly recognized. ‘I have today got an offer for another story and if it appears I shall send it to you,’ she informed her brother. Quite what this subsequent tale was is unclear. If it was another single story, this author has not tracked one published in 1887 or ‘88. But what is certain is that within a year of ‘Was It a Dream?’ Constance wrote an entire children’s book, There Was Once.

  This was for a different publisher, Ernest Nister. Nister came from Nuremberg, at that time the centre of the toy and colour printing industries, and he had built a considerable reputation as a publisher and printer of highly coloured children’s pop-up books. He ventured into the British market in 1888, with an approach to the children’s publishing that was different from that of the more ‘artistic’ and refined Leadenhall Press. In contrast to the grey, understated jacket of The Bairn’s Annual, books from the Nister stable had brightly coloured sentimental images of plump girls and boys holding fat little puppy dogs or playing together. It was an altogether more commercial and mass-market proposition.

  Constance must have been one of the first authors Nister signed in the UK. She was in good company, alongside writers such as Edith Nesbit and the then very popular and prolific Mrs Molesworth.

  There Was Once saw Constance re-tell a series of traditional nursery favourites that included the tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer and The Three Bears – in which, incidentally, Constance wrote about ‘Silver Locks’ not the ‘Goldilocks’ we are more familiar with today.

  ‘There was once, my children, a little girl who loved to coax her grandmother to tell her stories. She was not a fairy grandmother, but she could tell beautiful fairy stories,’ Constance explained to her readers. ‘The little girl is grown up now, and the dear grandmother is gone, but there are still children who love the old fairy stories, so the little girl has written them out for you just as they were told to her.’

  Although the thrilling short stories that Oscar published in 1887, with their intrigues reflecting the fashion for spiritualism, could have offered little inspiration for the whimsical tales of magic and dreaming that his wife wrote for children, there is undoubtedly a sensibility in Constance’s choice of imagery and poignant tone that resonates with a set of fairy stories that Oscar would publish the following May, The Happy Prince and Other Tales.

  While he did not publish them until 1888, Oscar had been telling fairy stories for years. He had been rehearsing ‘The Happy Prince’ as far back as 1885, when he had related the tale to a group of Cambridge undergraduates when he and Constance went to visit Harry Marillier.13 Apparently this was one of the first instances in which he tried out his tale of a statue of a Happy Prince standing high in an old town who sees nothing but unhappiness around him. Recruiting the services of a little swallow, the Prince asks the bird to pluck the jewels embedded in him and deliver them to the needy around him. The little swallow does so, but in carrying out this service to the Happy Prince he is delayed in his return to Egypt to such an extent that he misses his chance for migration. The swallow, now in love with the Prince, pays the ultimate price for his sacrifice. At the end of the story, when the statue is stripped of its former glory, the pair kiss each other once on the lips before the little bird falls down dead at the statue’s feet.

  Oscar’s verbal storytelling could be almost mesmerizing. According to a friend of Harry Marillier, Mrs Claude Beddington, on the night Constance showed her moonstones to Harry and Douglas Ainslie, Oscar went on to invent a tale about the fairies and sprites that lived in the heart of the stones. Oscar ‘wove fantastic legends of the mystical life within the cloudy shimmer’, related Mrs Beddington, ‘and when the youth went to bed that night he had a dream of the moonstone people which was all verse and which seemed to him the loveliest music he had ever heard’.14 Instances such as this could not have failed both to inspire and to inform Constance’s own endeavours.

  Constance may well have been inspired by Oscar, but he was certainly reliant on her assistance when it came to his literary endeavours, at the very least at a practical level. At the outset of their marriage Speranza had suggested that Constance could be the sort of wife who might work alongside her husband, correcting his proofs. Certainly Constance did provide some assistance in Oscar’s career. She often visited his publishers on his behalf when he was away, and would provide useful translation services for him. Oscar put into practice Constance’s skills as a linguist a few years later, when he asked her to translate some Dutch reviews for him.15 But there is compelling evidence that she also worked with him in an even closer capacity.

  Only in 2008 did a manuscript come to light that suggests just how closely the Wildes may have worked on certain projects. In that year Lucia Moreira Salles, a collector, gave the Morgan Library in New York a beautiful red leather-bound volume of letters and manuscripts. The whereabouts of this bound collection had been a mystery to Wilde experts for over half a century, and on examining it they realized that it contained a draft of Oscar’s story ‘The Selfish Giant’, published as part of Oscar’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which, although signed by Oscar, is written entirely in Constance’s hand. The manuscript, written in ink, has some pencil corrections by Oscar that also differ from the final published version in certain details of
grammar and expression.16

  The question, of course, is whether Constance, at a time when she was writing children’s stories herself, was in fact the author of the story and subsequently gave it to Oscar. Is the manuscript evidence of a genuine collaboration? Or is it simply an instance of Constance providing some secretarial support, writing up a fair copy from Oscar’s initial draft for his publishers?

  Tantalizingly, there are several aspects of the text that suggest that the manuscript may reflect collaboration. Even if the general plot of the story is not Constance’s own, some of the telling of it may be. Oscar’s storytelling in The Happy Prince and Other Tales is intricate and embellished. It incorporates images that feel surprising and unique, and are combined with brilliantly detailed observation. His characters, even with the minimal amount of dialogue, have crisp, characterful voices. He provides moments of vividly imaged back-story that give his fantasy realm terrific depth, but above all his narrative is woven with witticisms and comments intended to raise a smile with adult readers just as much as children. Oscar would later say that his stories were intended as ‘studies in prose, put for Romance’s sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy’.17 All in all, his narrative techniques add up to something very vivid, rich and sharp but also very witty.

  This deftness and knowingness in the storytelling are missing in ‘The Selfish Giant’. This story, by contrast, relies on a much more traditional narrative voice apparently directed more fully at children. The imagery employed, although very similar to that in ‘The Happy Prince’, tends to be blunter and less embroidered. In fact, the narrative voice and broad-brush imagery in ‘The Selfish Giant’ are arguably closer to Constance’s style in ‘Was it a Dream?’

  So could it be that Oscar told the story to Constance and that she then rewrote it from memory for him? The final, published version of the story shows amendments to this manuscript that Oscar must have made, some of them rather significant in the way they alter the story’s meaning.

  If this seems like a possible explanation for the Morgan Library manuscript, then one other conundrum remains. The story of ‘The Selfish Giant’ divides into two portions, the final section of the tale being overtly Christian and featuring a Christ-like child, bearing the stigmata, which revisits the giant at the moment of his death.

  This Christianization is uncharacteristic of Oscar. It seems to contrast with the tale of self-sacrifice in ‘The Happy Prince’, which is more secular in tone, suggesting a personal, sensual love between the statue and the bird. And the clear Christian message seems at odds with a man who would go on to write that, far from being moral, art is ‘useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way … A work of Art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it.’18

  And so, one wonders, was this last portion of the story of ‘The Selfish Giant’ of Constance’s invention? One of the more significant changes between the manuscript version of the story, in Constance’s hand, and the final published version seems to be an attempt to tone down an overtly Christian message. In Constance’s handwritten manuscript the child with the stigmata explains to the giant that his wounds were ‘done many years ago that all men might be saved’. By the time this line was published it had been rewritten, as ‘these are the wounds of love’.19

  When Oscar’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales and Constance’s There Was Once were published in the same year, their reputation was cemented not only as a celebrated literary couple but as a uniquely suited one. Oscar and Constance had apparently successfully embraced the inclusion of children into the concept of artistic marriage.

  ‘Novels are, comparatively speaking, easy work,’ explained The Weekly Irish Times.

  But to be in sympathy with children, to know what will please them, and be capable of putting yourself sufficiently in their place … demands students of juvenile nature for the work. Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde possess charming children of their own, and they have utilised their acquaintance with the infant world in giving to it some delightful fairy tales, which even the elders must appreciate. The Happy Prince and Other Tales … is one of the happiest works which Mr Oscar Wilde has ever produced; while Mrs Wilde’s fairy tales, also published recently … are a charming reproduction of the old stories, familiar to our childish days.20

  Constance went on working with Nister until 1895. After There Was Once she contributed versions of Jack and the Beanstalk to Favourite Nursery Stories, and A Long Time Ago. In Nister’s A Dandy Chair she wrote a story called ‘The Little Swallow’. Cosy Corner Stories was a serial publication to which Constance contributed at least two stories across two different editions, one of which was called ‘Far Japan’.

  This last is heavily reminiscent of ‘Was It a Dream?’ and it is tempting to consider that it may well have been written at around the same time, even if it was published considerably later, in 1895. The story, beautifully illustrated, tells of a little girl called Isola, who on her birthday is given two gifts ‘that have come all the way from that beautiful land of flowers, Japan’. One gift is a doll with ‘almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair, dressed just like the real Japanese children in soft stuffs and gay colours. She has been told its name is Ai.’ The other gift is ‘a Japanese fan – with a garden painted on it – such quaint trees with a river running through them, and over the river an arched rustic bridge’. As Isola falls asleep, she thinks how delightful it would be ‘to be a little Japanese girl and see Japan’, and sure enough she dreams that she is dressed in a kimono like Ai and in a garden just like that painted on the fan.

  Isola wants to see more of Japan than the garden surrounding her, and so she sets off and crosses one of the bridges leading out of the garden. But when Isola reaches the end of the bridge, ‘there was nothing there, for she had got to the end of the fan! So down she fell with a bump, and woke to find herself safe in bed with Ai in her arms.’21

  If Constance’s and Oscar’s careers were taking somewhat similar paths, with them both writing reviews and children’s stories, the overlap in their professional activity would continue. It was not long before Constance would become a contributor to her husband’s magazine.

  In November 1887 Oscar launched The Woman’s World. He had altered the proposed name of the publication from ‘The Lady’s World’, a title both he and his feminist contributors considered far too vulgar for a magazine that ‘aims at being the organ of women of intellect, culture and position’.22

  The magazine was a careful mixture of conventional and adventurous elements. Like other magazines, it offered its readers a mix of features, a serial story and travel articles. The inaugural issue opened with a piece about pastoral theatre from a theatre producer and friend of Whistler, Janey Sevilla Campbell. Annie Thackeray, daughter of William Makepeace, wrote a historical item about an influential lady of the past, ‘Madame de Sévigné’s Grandmother’. The serial, ‘The Truth about Clement Ker’, is a mirage of assumed identities, purported to be written by one Geoffrey Ker. When this was bound and sold as a novel a year later Ker was revealed to be none other than the popular author George Fleming (the pen name of Julia Constance Fletcher). An anonymous piece on ‘The Oxford Ladies’ Colleges’ was offered by ‘a member of one of them’. And Oscar himself offered ‘Literary and Other Notes’, in which he reviewed the month’s notable publications by women.

  But filleted in between these perhaps more traditional items there were indeed more pioneering pieces that positioned the magazine as liberal, if not mildly campaigning. Eveline Portsmouth offered a piece on ‘The Position of Women’. In an article that carefully navigated a path between the most advanced feminist thinking and more conventional beliefs on the role of the sexes, Countess Portsmouth noted

  Marriage … is ceasing to be the only goal for girlhood. New resources are at hand and ea
gerly sought. Fresh possibilities are born, and in a widening horizon a wholesome and hopeful spirit is awakened. The workwomen of our large towns are those on whom all burdens fall most heavily … but they are also stirred by the movement that is passing over other women, and may soon give it great impetus. The higher class of women … are eager to use their faculties. With an increasing number a life of pleasure is losing is importance … but it is in the middle class that the greatest change has taken place: there, not only the excellent education attainable by them, but the consideration of health and enjoyment put into the scale weighs heavily … the present type of girl [is described] as altogether different to that [of] … forty years ago, owing to her finer physical and mental qualities.23

  Constance’s first article for the magazine appeared in the July issue. Here she did her bit for rational dress by looking at ‘Children’s Dress in this Century’. Condemning the over-fussy, cumbersome and uncomfortable outfits that she saw children being squeezed into in the 1880s, she pointed out that the simple, loose clothes worn at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been far more ‘rational’ in terms of comfort.

  Compared with the ornate and convoluted writing styles of many of the other contributors, by July 1888 Constance’s journalism had attained a clear, succinct and personal aspect. Her scholarly inclination is also evident in an article that she has clearly thoroughly researched.

  ‘At the beginning of this century the dress of English women possessed at least one merit, that of simplicity – simplicity of material, simplicity of form, simplicity of colouring,’ she wrote. ‘All these three things combined to render it a most charming costume … and the children’s dress was equally simple, giving us the pretty costumes of which Kate Greenaway has made such a charming study … There is no doubt that the costume is at once light and graceful, the only drawback being that it is quite unsuited for our winter.’