Success promotes malice. Yeats discounts, but cannot keep from relating, ‘a horrible folk story’ that Sir William once took out the eyes of a man who had come to consult him as an ophthalmologist and laid them upon a plate, intending to replace them, and that the eyes were eaten by a cat. ‘Cats love eyes,’ said a friend of Yeats. More to the point, tongues in Dublin wagged that Sir William was dirty. Yeats retails the riddle ‘Why are Sir William Wilde’s nails so black?’ and the answer ‘Because he has scratched himself.’ But Bernard Shaw calls this a misconception owing to the fact that Sir William had the kind of porous skin that looks dirty, and Yeats’s father, with a portrait painter’s exact eye, confirmed that Wilde was ‘a neat and well-dressed man,’ though the square beard that grew from rather than under his chin was untidy.32 William Wilde was aware of the danger of infection in hospitals, and, before the advent of Lister, advocated that doctors wash their hands with chlorite of lime.33 Yet once, at a dinner party in his house, he tasted the soup by dipping his thumb in the tureen and then sucking it. When he asked Lady Spencer, the Lord Lieutenant’s wife, why she did not touch her soup, he was told, ‘Because you put your thumb in it.’34
Sir William was of average height, but Lady Wilde was nearly six feet tall, which led to their being caricatured as a giantess and dwarf. In later years Speranza became so bulgy in the lumbar region that Shaw attributed her condition to gigantism, which he offered, without medical evidence, as a hereditary cause of Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality. R. Y. Tyrrell, professor of classics at Trinity, with equal authority pronounced William Wilde to be pithecoid. J. B. Yeats said, however, that ‘His figure was spare and exceedingly well-knit. He walked with his elbows … very rapidly. He had sharply inquisitive eyes … and looked very eccentric … a wiry restless man and a contrast to his ponderous wife and her measured speech.’35 Sir William was reputed to be vain, and certainly relished wearing his Swedish decoration and the uniform that went with it; members of the Irish Academy were instructed to address him as Chevalier. He was accustomed, like his son, to dominate dinner tables;† ‘the best conversationalist in the metropolis,’ his wife said of him when they married. Dubliners liked to remember that on one occasion another unstoppable talker seized the initiative before Sir William, and Sir William’s response was to put his head down on the table and audibly doze.37
He never lacked for friends; these were as various as Maria Edgeworth, whom he had known in London, the hilarious Charles Lever, with whom he had been at medical school, and the more severe Sir Samuel Ferguson, who would write his elegy. In their house at 1 Merrion Square, one of the largest and best maintained in the city, the Wildes at first gave dinner parties for a dozen guests, but later held receptions on Saturday afternoons for over a hundred.38 Writers, university professors, government officials, and visiting actors and musicians thronged to these parties. Under Lady Wilde’s aegis musicians played, actors and actresses enacted scenes, and poets recited their verses.
The energy with which Sir William faced the world was not necessarily maintained in private. Between his bursts of activity he was often despondent. His wife reported that she had asked him, ‘What could make you happy?’ only to receive the answer, ‘Death.’39 Though he was acquisitive of honor, he could be humble. In his book on the Boyne he begins by saying that he is not, strictly speaking, an archaeologist, having much other work to do, and he defers to the authority of Petrie and others (Sir William had little Irish).
One aspect of Sir William Wilde was known only to his intimates. Before his marriage he had fathered three illegitimate children. He was twenty-three when his first child, a boy named Henry Wilson (the surname slyly implying Wilde’s son?), was born in Dublin, in 1838, and since Wilde had been away from Ireland for more than nine months, the child was evidently conceived abroad. Sir William looked after his son, educated him, and took him into his surgery as a fellow practitioner. The mother or mothers of the two other children—Emily, born in 1847, and Mary, born in 1849—are also unknown. The Reverend Ralph Wilde, Sir William’s eldest brother, adopted the two girls as his wards, so they kept the name of Wilde.
In the Dublin of this time, the old Regency permissiveness lingered. Sir William’s friend Isaac Butt, before Parnell the leader of the Irish party in Parliament, also had illegitimate children, and apparently no one minded. Perhaps Oscar Wilde derived his interest in foundlings, orphans, and mysteries of birth from his experience of his father’s extended family, when they all summered together, legitimate and illegitimate children alike, in Glenmacnass, south of Dublin.40 So Dorian Gray is in love with a young woman of illegitimate birth, whose brother reproaches their mother for her fall. Lady Windermere has been abandoned by her errant mother, and a cloud hangs over Jack Worthing’s birth in The Importance of Being Earnest. Young Arbuthnot’s mother in A Woman of No Importance is unmarried. More largely, discovering who they really are is the pursuit of most of Wilde’s principal characters.
Henry Wilson outlived his father, but Emily and Mary were not so fortunate. In the course of showing off their ball dresses before a party, one went too close to an open fire, caught her crinoline in the flames, and was terribly burned. So was her sister, who tried frantically to rescue her. Their gravestone records them as dying, both on the same day, on 10 November 1871.‡ Sir William’s grief was intense, and his groans could be heard outside the house.41 A simple stone in the garden of Moytura House, bearing the inscription ‘In Memoriam,’ may commemorate the death of the two girls as well as that of Isola, legitimate daughter of the Wildes, who had died four years before.
Lady Wilde was conversant with her husband’s past, and did not resent it. John Butler Yeats many years later privately attributed her indulgence to the fact that she herself had, before her marriage, been caught with Isaac Butt in circumstances ‘that were not doubtful’ by Mrs Butt.42 She certainly admired Butt, once calling him, in print, ‘the Mirabeau of the Young Ireland movement, with his tossed masses of black hair, his flashing eyes, and splendid rush of cadenced oratory.’ But Jane Wilde needed no such history to make her tolerant of passion. She remarked in her sixties to a young man, ‘When you are as old as I, young man, you will know there is only one thing in the world worth living for, and that is sin.’ She was, however, to be severely tried by one postmarital episode. A longtime patient of her husband, Mary Travers, began to hint that Sir William had given her chloroform and then raped her. It seemed she had withheld this allegation for two years, but public recognition of the Wildes—Sir William’s knighthood, conferred on 28 January 1864, and the fanfare accorded Lady Wilde for her 1863 translation of M. Schwab’s The First Temptation—roused her to action.
Mary Travers had first become a patient of William Wilde in 1854, when she was eighteen. She dated her ‘ruin’ as from October 1862, yet she had remained a patient. That same year, she had accepted from Wilde the fare to Australia, and failed to embark. Her case was not strong. An allegation of rape after so long an interval would have had no chance of a favorable verdict; instead Mary Travers wrote letters containing dark hints to newspapers and composed a scurrilous pamphlet about the Wildes (as ‘Dr and Mrs Quilp’) which she cheekily signed ‘Speranza.’ Lady Wilde was so stung she protested by letter to Mary Travers’s father, lately become professor of medical jurisprudence at Trinity College, that his daughter was making ‘unfounded’ allegations. When Mary Travers discovered this letter of 6 May 1864 among her father’s papers, she sued Lady Wilde for libel.
The case was heard over five days, from 12 to 17 December 1864. Everyone wondered whether Sir William would take the stand, but since it was not he who was being sued, he did not have to. His failure to do so was of course a point for Mary Travers. The barrister for Miss Travers was the omnipresent Isaac Butt, who was anything but gallant towards Lady Wilde. Why had she taken no notice of the woman’s charges that her husband had raped her? he asked. Lady Wilde replied majestically, ‘I really took no interest in the matter. I looked upon the whole thing a
s a fabrication.’ Like her younger son, she was more emancipated than the age. The jury upheld the charge of libel: Sir William was not without fault, they found—some of his letters to Mary Travers, produced as evidence, showed considerable fluster—but they placed a low value on Miss Travers’s outraged innocence, awarding her a farthing in damages. Sir William was obliged to pay £2000 in costs on his wife’s behalf, a large sum in a year when he was building four houses in Bray and one at Moytura.
It has been said that the case left Sir William Wilde a broken man. The evidence points otherwise. He was not so affluent, but, according to his loyal wife, he had more patients than ever. The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, defended him in England, and after Saunders’s News Letter spoke up for him in Dublin, Mary Travers brought libel proceedings against that journal in 1865, but this time she lost.§ Lady Wilde did not trouble to bury the matter. She wrote of it to her friends in Sweden, assured them that Mary Travers was ‘certainly mad,’ and sent clippings to show how Sir William’s colleagues stood behind him. ‘All Dublin has called on us to offer their sympathy,’ wrote his wife, ‘and all the medical profession here and in London have sent letters to express their entire disbelief of the (in fact) impossible charge.’43 Sir William showed his indifference by writing his most cheerful book, Lough Corrib (1867), after the trial.44 In April 1873 the Royal Academy of Ireland conferred on him its highest honor, the Cunningham Gold Medal. When the Wildes’ two sons reached Trinity College in 1869 and 1871, they could not have helped hearing a ballad commonly sung there, which ran,
An eminent oculist lives in the Square.
His skill is unrivalled, his talent is rare,
And if you will listen I’ll certainly try
To tell how he opened Miss Travers’s eye.45
But no one brought up in Dublin would take this sort of thing seriously. Oscar Wilde brushed aside the Mary Travers case when he wrote in De Profundis, ‘I inherited a famous name.’ He might have thought twice about it, however, before instituting the prosecution of Queensberry in 1895.
Shaping Oscar Wilde
The wonderful palace—Joyeuse, as they called it—of which he now found himself lord, seemed to him to be a new world fresh-fashioned for his delight.
The marriage of William and Jane Wilde was a contented one. Lady Wilde presented her husband with three legitimate offspring to match his three illegitimate ones. The first, William Robert Kingsbury Wills Wilde, was born on 26 September 1852, and inspired her to write,
Alas! the Fates are cruel.
Behold Speranza making gruel.46
The second, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, was born on 16 October 1854, when the family was still living at 21 Westland Row, though he always claimed that they had already moved to their better address at 1 Merrion Square. The third child, Isola Francesca Emily Wilde, was born on 2 April 1857. The naming of the children was carefully done, on the principle enunciated by Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray, that ‘Names are everything.’ Willie, as he was always called, had his father’s name with the addition of ‘Kingsbury’ in tribute to his mother’s family, and both boys took the name of ‘Wills’ from the family of the playwright W. G. Wills. (Sir William dedicated his first book, Madeira, ‘with gratitude’ to two people, one of them a William Robert Wills.) The parents were more venturesome with their daughter, whose first name, ‘Isola,’ was meant to suggest Isolde or Iseult, while her second name, ‘Francesca,’ perpetuated the Italian connection. But it was the middle child whose naming was most elaborate. On 22 November 1854, Jane Wilde wrote to a Scottish friend:
A Joan of Arc was never meant for marriage, and so here I am, bound heart and soul to the home hearth by the tiny hands of my little Willie and as if these sweet hands were not enough, behold me—me, Speranza—also rocking a cradle at this present writing in which lies my second son—a babe of one month old the 16th of this month and as large and fine and handsome and healthy as if he were three months. He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde. Is not that grand, misty, and Ossianic?47
‘Oscar’ (she called him ‘Oscar’) and ‘Fingal’ came from Irish legend, but the name ‘O’Flahertie’ was added in deference to William Wilde’s connections with Gal way families through his grandmother O’Flynn. O Flaith-bherartaigh, the name of the pre-Norman kings of West Connacht, is the most Galwegian of Galway names. The famous prayer of the Galway burgesses was ‘From the wild O’Flaherties good Lord deliver us!’ Oscar Wilde misspelt the terrifying name as ‘O’Flehertie’ when he enrolled at school. At Oxford a fellow student recalled that he signed himself ‘O. O’F. Wills Wilde’ and was known as Wills Wilde (though this can have been true only for a time),48 and in his contributions to the Trinity classical magazine Kottabos he initialed himself ‘O.F.O.F.W.W.’ When someone supposed, later on, that he had always been Oscar Wilde, he replied, ‘How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me “plain Oscar”.… I started as Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as “The Wilde” or “The Oscar.” ’49‖ (He did not like it, however, when William Archer referred to him casually in print as ‘Oscar.’51) Eventually, in jail, he would find his simplest cognomen: C.3.3.
Oscar Wilde was christened by his uncle, the Reverend Ralph Wilde, rector of Kilsallaghan, on 26 April 1855 in St Mark’s Church. His mother had asked Sir William Hamilton to stand as godfather to the ‘young pagan’ (as she described him),52 but Hamilton declined. In a letter of 17 June 1855, his mother described her second son as ‘a great stout creature who minds nothing but growing fat.’ Willie, then nearly three, she saw as ‘light, tall, and spirituelle [sic], looking with large beautiful eyes full of expression. He is twined round all the fibres of my heart, but what do you think of Mrs. Browning’s son who at six years old composes the most sublime poetry? Poor child, I should die of apprehension if Willie were like this.’53 Robert Ross said that Lady Wilde longed for a girl when she bore, instead, a second boy.54 A London friend of the family, Luther Munday, recalls how Lady Wilde declared that, for the first ten years of Oscar’s life, she had treated him as a daughter rather than as a son in dress, habit, and companions.55 Indeed, a photograph of Oscar at the age of about four shows him wearing a dress.
However accommodating it is to see a maternal smothering of masculinity as having contributed to his homosexuality, there is reason to be skeptical. Jane Wilde was addicted to large statements, not meant for scrutiny. Victorian and even Edwardian children of both sexes were put in dresses during their infancy. Her letters do not suggest that she regarded Oscar as anything but a boy. Early in his third year she did give birth to a girl; having the reality, she did not need to force the semblance. Although she has been described by Thomas Flanagan as ‘the silliest woman who ever lived,’56 she had some common sense, and her treatment of her children appears to have been more normal than she was willing to admit. The birth of Isola was a great pleasure to all members of the family. A letter of 17 February 1858 from Jane Wilde remarks, ‘We are all well here—Willie and Oscar growing tall and wise, and Baby—you don’t forget little Isola I hope—is now 10 months old and is the pet of the house. She has fine eyes and promises to have a most acute intellect. These two gifts are enough for any woman.’57
Soon after Isola’s birth, the Swedish writer Lotten von Kraemer, then a very young woman, accompanied her father, Baron Robert von Kraemer, the governor of Uppsala, on a visit to the Wildes when the British Association came to Ireland in July 1857. The butler at 1 Merrion Square greeted them, and when they asked for Mrs Wilde gave them an old retainer’s wink: ‘There isn’t daylight in her room,’ he said, although it was one o’clock in the afternoon. She appeared eventually, festooned and cordial, very much the poet, and they had just sat down to what was for her breakfast when William Wilde returned to meet his visitors: ‘The noble figure is slightly bowed,’ wrote Lott
en von Kraemer, ‘less by years than by ceaseless work … and his movements have a haste about them which at once conveys the impression that his time is most precious.… He carries a small boy in his arm and holds another by the hand. His eyes rest on them with content. They are soon sent away to play, whereupon he gives us his undivided attention.’58
Oscar Wilde as a child survives in glimpses. He once ran away and hid in a cave; another time, playing chargers with Edward Sullivan and Willie, he broke his arm.59 Sir William had bought, in 1853, a hunting lodge called Illaunroe on what his son would call ‘the little purple island’ (attached by a causeway to the mainland) in Lough Fee in the west. Here Willie and Oscar learned to fish. As Wilde told Robert Ross long after, ‘The lake was full of large melancholy salmon, which lay at the bottom and paid no attention to our bait.’60
When the Wildes moved from 21 Westland Row to 1 Merrion Square in June 1855, they acquired a German governess and a French bonne, and staffed their big house with six servants. The children were brought up to speak French and German, and were privately tutored during their early years. In a revealing story Wilde told Reggie Turner, Oscar and Willie were once having their evening bath in the nursery in Merrion Square, in front of the fireplace; their little singlets were hung to warm on the high fender. While the nurse was momentarily out of the room, the two boys noticed a brown spot on one of the singlets which deepened and burst into flame. Oscar clapped his hands with delight, while Willie shouted to the nurse, who came to the rescue by pushing the singlet into the fire. At this Oscar cried with rage at having his spectacle spoiled. ‘This,’ said Wilde, ‘was an example of the difference between Willie and me.’61
Oscar Wilde Page 3