The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Yet while the Victorians made the crude moral mistake of treating Wilde like a criminal, our generation has made the almost more mysterious mistake of seeing him as part martyr for sexual liberation, part great thinker.

  What cannot be doubted is that Wilde’s trial and conviction made a profound impact on his times. It did not necessarily change the way Victorians thought about homosexuals, or the Irish, or prisons, or prostitutes, or relations between the propertied and unpropertied classes. All these ideas have been put forward to attach significance to the Wilde trials, but this is to impose rational shape on something which at the time was upsetting in different ways. On the one hand it upset those, including Wilde’s closest friends (and one can assume his wife), who had supposed him innocent of the charges. And on the other, it caused (and still causes, if one reads the transcripts of the trials) that generalized pain felt if one has been the unwilling witness of human beings behaving badly – a row in a restaurant, a brawl on the street corner outside one’s window. Certainly, very few emerge well from the episode.

  On 18 February 1895, the 8th Marquess of Queensberry, a choleric nobleman with only a slender hold on what others would consider sanity, called at the steps of Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, and left a visiting card on which he had written, ‘To Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite’ (sic). The hall porter at the club read the words as ‘ponce and Somdomite’.32

  The behaviour was entirely characteristic of the Scarlet Marquis (as Wilde called him). His elder son, Lord Drumlanrig, had become private secretary to Lord Rosebery, Gladstone’s foreign secretary. In 1893 Rosebery suggested a promotion for the young man by making him a lord-in-waiting to the Queen, but this involved giving him an English peerage. Scottish peers elected from among their number those who could sit in the English House of Lords. When Drumlanrig got an English peerage, entitling him to sit there as of right, Queensberry was wild with rage. He had himself not been elected by his fellow peers, on the reasonable grounds that he refused as an atheist to take an oath to the Queen and had made a nuisance of himself, littering the red leather benches of the chamber with his atheistic pamphlets.

  Furious at his son’s promotion where he had failed, Queensberry also sniffed out a homosexual tinge to the relations between Drumlanrig and Rosebery. He pursued Rosebery to Homburg, where he had retreated on health grounds, offering to horsewhip the foreign secretary on the steps of his hotel. Perhaps to quieten the rumours, poor dim Drumlanrig proposed marriage to a general’s daughter. This did nothing to appease Queensberry’s wrath. ‘It makes the institution of marriage ridiculous,’ he spluttered. On 18 October 1894 Drumlanrig was found dead during a shooting party at Quantock Lodge in Somersetshire. He was lying with his head in a bramble bush and the double-barrelled gun lay on his chest. Though the doctor told the inquest that Drumlanrig had been shot through the mouth, the coroner decided that it was an ‘accidental death’, and that the gun had gone off while Drumlanrig was climbing the hedge to join his shooting chums.33

  The death of this unfortunate young man removed a very considerable occasion of scandal from the public scene. Quite what Drumlanrig and Rosebery ever did when they were alone together we shall probably never know, but they were widely believed to have been lovers, and the belief is far from implausible, given the temperament of both men. Six months before the shooting, in March 1894, Gladstone had resigned as prime minister and Lord Rosebery had succeeded him. Even in today’s relaxed and tolerant climate there would surely be misgivings about a prime minister who had promoted his apparently talentless and very young secretary to a peerage.

  It is against the background of the scandal which never quite happened – Rosebery and Drumlanrig – that Queensberry was able to highlight the scandal which did, the unsuitable friendship of Drumlanrig’s younger brother, Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), and the famous playwright and aesthete, Oscar Wilde. The fateful pair met in 1891 when Lord Alfred (known as Bosie) was twenty-two and Wilde thirty-eight. Lionel Johnson brought the young man to tea at Wilde’s house in Tite Street and the rapport was instantaneous, quickly developing into a mutual obsession. Letters, notes, presents of all kinds were soon being showered upon the young man.

  In the long letter to Douglas sent from prison and entitled De Profundis by Wilde’s friend Robert Ross,34 Wilde makes it clear that even in the midst of the most besotted feelings of love for Bosie there was also deep boredom. The young man needed constant amusements – bicycling holidays, golfing holidays, treats, nights out. To a working artist, such distractions must have been torture. Great loves of this kind involve sexual feeling, but sex is not a big part of what is going on. Douglas afterwards said, ‘I did with him and allowed him to do what was done among boys at Winchester [Douglas’s school] and Oxford … Sodomy never took place between us, nor was it attempted or dreamed of …’ It would seem, though, that both men had a taste for going in search of the young male prostitutes who were so plentiful in Victorian London. Wilde’s large income – over £3,000 p.a. by now – and lavishly generous nature involved many a hotel room or suite, or restaurant table, at which these young men would indulge in what seems to have been sordid, but fairly mild sexual activity for Bosie’s amusement.35 It would seem as if Wilde’s part in these proceedings was largely, if not entirely, voyeuristic. Rumours circulated. Blackmailers stole some of Wilde’s more extravagantly phrased letters to Douglas. The furious marquess left his card at Wilde’s club.

  It was then that Wilde made his incomprehensible mistake of suing Lord Queensberry for libel. One of the most popular dramatists of the age suing one of the most colourful noblemen! It was bound to attract the enormous attention which both men so mysteriously needed. Equally, by the time of the trial Queensberry’s defence counsel, Edward Henry Carson (1854–1935), was bound to accumulate evidence which would reveal the nature of Wilde’s life to the world. His love letters to Bosie would be read out in court; the rent-boys would be subpoenaed; no jury of the time would have found for the plaintiff in such a case. Moreover, when one remembers that all Carson had to prove was that Wilde was ‘posing as a Somdomite’, one might think that the plaintiff did the counsel for the defence’s own work. Asking Wilde about Walter Grainger, Douglas’s servant at Oxford, Carson said:

  ‘Did you ever kiss him?’

  ‘Oh, dear no! He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly.’36

  Wilde, in this first trial – the one in which he was suing Queensberry for libel – came up with lines which are quite as good as anything in his plays.

  ‘Iced champagne is a favourite drink of mine – strongly against my doctor’s order.’

  Carson: ‘Never mind your doctor’s orders, sir!’

  ‘I never do,’ replied Wilde, sweetly, to roars of laughter from the gallery.37

  When Wilde’s libel case collapsed, as it inevitably did, it was only a matter of time before he himself was arrested for infringements of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885). The magistrates gave Wilde time to escape. The manager of the St James’s Theatre, where The Importance of Being Earnest was still showing, urged him to go abroad. ‘Everyone wants me to go abroad. I’ve just been abroad. One can’t keep going abroad, unless one is a missionary, or, what comes to the same thing, a commercial traveller.’

  Bosie even rounded on Shaw and Harris, both of whom urged flight – ‘Your telling him to run away shows that you are no friend of Oscar’s.’38

  There are a number of explanations for his reckless decision to stay in England and stand trial. Likeliest, surely, is that Bosie wanted him to do so and – such is the madness of love – Wilde was in Bosie’s thrall. He also surely knew that if he told the full truth in the witness box he would be acquitted, but he could only do so by admitting that he had witnessed various indecent acts, but performed few, if any. Indeed, the mad Marquess surely had a point when he said that ‘I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose as it which is just as bad.’ Wilde, who was sent to prison for two year
s’ hard labour for being indecent, was actually much more accurately to be described as decent. The real reason this camp, sentimental man suffered was to protect his friend.

  In 1889 there had been a police raid on a homosexual brothel at No. 19 Cleveland Street, north of Soho. Various grandees were implicated including the Earl of Euston, son of the Duke of Grafton, and Lord Arthur Somerset, an equerry to the Duke of Clarence (the Prince of Wales’s eldest son). Lord Salisbury met the courtier Sir Dighton Probyn VC at King’s Cross station to tip him off that there was trouble afoot. Lord Arthur – son of the Duke of Beaufort – fled the country and eluded arrest.

  It was a serious matter that the prime minister of the day should conspire to let a potential criminal escape justice, but Salisbury passed the whole matter off with aplomb in the House of Lords. He admitted to Parliament that he had met Sir Dighton Probyn ‘for a casual interview for which I was in no way prepared, to which I did not attach the slightest degree of importance, and of which I took no notes whatever. The train started very soon afterwards.’ He sat down amid the cheers of his fellow peers.

  As the many public scandals of the nineteenth century show, the Victorians enjoyed such things as much as we do. But they were perhaps more conscious of their destructive effect.

  The Irish people, many of them highly puritanical in private life, were prepared to overlook the scandal of Mrs O’Shea’s divorce; it was the English puritans who initiated and confirmed the destruction of Parnell. There are some who to this day believe that the Wilde trials were likewise brought to pass to discredit yet another Irishman. All the evidence, though, is that Wilde destroyed himself. Many puritans then, and some now, must be shocked by the details of homosexual life which emerged in evidence during the trials – the stained sheets at the Savoy Hotel being the most distressing. But though for a modern reader of these transcripts Wilde might seem like a gay martyr, to the Victorians his real crime was appalling frankness. ‘Things are in their essence what we choose to make them’ – the lesson he tried in his long vituperative letter to Bosie to expound from the prison cell was not really a doctrine he preached. Without a measure of hypocrisy, a blurring of the edges between Appearance and Reality, societies cannot function.

  It is not merely a moral affront to most twenty-first-century readers, it is wholly baffling, that our forebears – and right down to recent times – prosecuted men on grounds of erotic preference, and criminalized something which is mere temperament. It seemed that way to people at the time, too.

  Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

  And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

  And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

  Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

  Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet

  And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,

  And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare

  He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.39

  A.E. Housman (1859–1936) did not, of course, dare to publish these lines on the Wilde trial at the time. When his own first collection, A Shropshire Lad, was first published, in that golden age of lyric verse, all readers of the English language knew that a new star had risen in the firmament beside whom Symons and Johnson, Davidson and Francis Thompson, and all the other ‘Nineties’ poets would seem like pygmies.

  Housman’s poems are a manifesto, against ‘nature, heartless, witless nature’, and against ‘the laws of God, the laws of man’.40

  The laws of God, the laws of man,

  He may keep that will and can;

  Not I: let God and man decree

  Laws for themselves and not for me.41

  The perfectly formed, tautly contained lyrics are time-bombs of blasphemy and sexually frustrated torment; but – this is the point, not just of Housman but of the England that took him to its heart – they were deeply conservative. The yeomen and soldiers whom he hymns, who are the Shropshire equivalent of Hardy’s fictional characters, are not being enlisted for Keir Hardie’s labour movement. Housman sings of the misery of existence, the impossibility of expressing unmentionable feelings, but he does not therefore want to overthrow society.

  The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread

  And out we troop to see:

  A single redcoat turns his head,

  He turns and looks at me.

  My man, from sky to sky’s so far,

  We never crossed before;

  Such leagues apart the world’s ends are,

  We’re like to meet no more;

  What thoughts at heart have you and I

  We cannot stop to tell;

  But dead or living, drunk or dry,

  Soldier, I wish you well.42

  The archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, and his wife Mary went to stay with the Gladstones at Hawarden in the autumn of 1896. And it was there, during the confession at the beginning of Morning Prayer in the parish church, that Archbishop Benson’s breathing was heard to be stertorous and irregular. He was unconscious when they had begun on the Lord’s Prayer. By the time he had been carried back to the house and laid on a sofa in that library where Gladstone had spent so many hours, reading Homer, Dante and theology, Archbishop Benson was dead. Later they dressed him in his robes – ‘looking kingly and strong’.43

  The Benson clan provide sure proof of how dangerous it would be to confuse Appearance and Reality when surveying the late Victorian scene. You could hardly hope to find a more ‘establishment’ figure than the archbishop – the Rugby master, made successively master of Wellington and first bishop of Truro before his translation to Canterbury. He is the pioneer of a certain sort of Anglican piety – he invented the festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Christmas, one of the central national rituals of Britain, just as his son Arthur – Eton master, later master of Magdalene, Cambridge – was the author of another tradition: he wrote the words of unofficial national anthem, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Yet the whole family was the reverse of ‘conventional’. Fred – E.F. Benson – one of the six children of the archbishop, was an extraordinarily prolific comic novelist, satirizing the Souls in Dodo, anatomizing schoolboy homosexuality in David Blaize and creating a series of high camp masterpieces in the Mapp and Lucia stories. His many memoirs, which include As We Were and Mother – the latter an account of his mother’s life from the death of the father until 1918 – give away more than the autobiographies of Arthur. But the whole fascination of Bensoniana is that much of the stuff tormenting them is unexamined and perhaps unanalysable. Edward White Benson, the future archbishop, proposed to Mary Sidgwick when she was twelve – she wrote in her diary on her wedding night, ‘He restrained his passionate nature for seven years, and then got me! This unloving, childish, weak, unstable child! Ah God, pity him!… misery, knowing that I felt nothing of what I knew people ought to feel.’44

  After the birth of their sixth child – Hugh – the Bensons in effect separated for a while, and Mary had a breakdown. When she recovered, it was to discover, as Fred says, that she, ‘like all very intellectual women, formed strong emotional attachments to her own sex’. The daughter of the previous archbishop was Lucy Tait, a huge girl who dwarfed Mary, but happily shared not merely her household, but her bed. ‘Lucy slept with my mother in the vast Victorian bed where her six children had been born in Wellington days.’ Ethel Smyth was a great friend.45

  Of the children, Martin died of a mystery illness aged seventeen. The death sent their father into a deep depression and probably caused him to lose his faith. Nellie died suddenly of diphtheria aged twenty-six. All suffered from the blackest depressions, only relieved by psychosomatic illnesses. Arthur kept copious diaries in which he confided his muted crushes on boys and young men and his professional grievances and rivalries, but his character is so repressed that you could not get anywhere near exp
laining it by labelling any supposed erotic preference. Sex would have been out of the question for such a figure, as for his depressive sister Maggie, or for brother Hugh – convert to Rome, friend of ‘Baron Corvo’ and author of lurid historical romances with such titles as ‘Come Rack, come rope!’

  It is strangely fitting that the germ of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (published in 1898) was an anecdote told him by Archbishop Benson, about the ‘spirits’ of certain ‘bad’ servants, dead in the employ of the house, who were believed to have appeared with the design of ‘getting hold of’ the children. It is in many respects the most finished, the most suggestive and the most terrible of all James’s shorter works. The ghostly Peter Quint, who ‘did what he wished’ not only with the governess but also with the children, is a terrifying emblem of forbidden, morbid sexuality.