by Neil McKenna
Oscar was `preaching corruption', according to Andre Raffalovich, who knew Oscar at this time, and who, perhaps more importantly, subsequently became John Gray's lover, patron, protector and confidant. Oscar was fascinated by sexual deviancy. `He was interested in all sexual perversions,' says Raffalovich:
He feared them, he was afraid of them for himself. He liked to speak of them ... He was above all curious, on the prowl, fearful, playing with the idea of danger more than with the evil itself.
Oscar `prowled around' the sexual labyrinth of London. `He knew the little anecdotes of all London,' says Raffalovich. `Great tribades fascinated him as did sodomites who were courageous or in love.'
Dorian's passion for sensation leads him deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, just as Oscar's intellectual and physical exploration of the dark side of London's erotic moon would eventually lead him deeper and deeper into a sexual quagmire. Oscar was, according to Andre Raffalovich, set on `the downward path to which he was abandoning himself'. He `went further and further wrong, and under the sway of vanity and impunity, he ended up living the boldest kind of life and the most dangerous'. Quite how dangerous, Oscar was yet to discover.
Outlawed noblemen
`Not a year passes in England without someone disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man - now they crush him.'
`It is quite tragic for me to think how completely Dorian Gray has been understood on all sides,' Oscar jokingly wrote to Ada Leverson. Dorian Gray had been understood, perhaps too well understood, and by too many people, as a novel about love and sex between men. Oscar had set out to write a novel of Uranian love and Uranian lust, a novel that oozed homoeroticism from every pore and from every page. It was a novel of sexual exploration, a novel that took the reader on a journey through a hidden labyrinth of love and sex between men. The love that Basil feels for Dorian, the lust that Lord Henry feels for Dorian, the same lust that Dorian expands and explores and pushes to the very limits, is never named, but ever present. Dorian Gray is a triumph of revelation through concealment, of proclamation by insinuating whispers, hints and allusions.
Above all, Dorian Gray was a book designed to provoke, to draw attention to itself and to its author, a roman-a-clef, a novel with a key - the key being the oblique but nonetheless rousing declaration of Oscar's own allegiance to the love that dare not speak its name. Five years after its publication, Dorian Gray was cited in the Marquis of Queensberry's `Plea of Justification' which charged that in 1890 Oscar wrote and published:
a certain immoral and obscene work in the form of a narrative entitled `The Picture of Dorian Gray' which said work was designed and intended by the said Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde and was understood by the readers thereof to describe the relations intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits tastes and practices.
`Designed', `intended' and `understood' by its readers to be a book about sodomy and those men who practised sodomy. It was a perfectly true and accurate summation of Oscar's motives in writing Dorian Gray. The book exceeded all his expectations and became a succes de scandale. `Dangerous' was the word on everybody's lips. Walter Pater described Dorian Gray as `very dangerous', while a delighted Robbie Ross told Oscar:
Even in the precincts of the Savile, nothing but praise for Dorian Gray, though of course it is said to be very dangerous. I heard a clergyman extolling it - he only regretted some of the sentiments of Lord Henry as apt to lead people astray.
Dorian Gray was dangerous because, as Robbie's clergyman at the Savile Club remarked, the novel was `apt to lead people astray', to arouse those feelings and passions in men best left buried under the weight of Victorian social repression. Sexual feelings between men were sometimes referred to as `dangerous affections': dangerous for society, and dangerous for the individual who indulged them. `Oscar once talked to me for several hours about the more dangerous affections,' Andre Raffalovich said. The subtitle of the Chameleon, the explicitly Uranian magazine to which Oscar contributed a set of aphorisms in 1894, and which was to cause him so much trouble at his trial, was `A Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances'.
Dorian Gray was dangerous for Oscar personally. The Uranian sexual tastes of Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian were widely interpreted as the sexual tastes of Oscar, and the intense speculation about his sexuality, quelled but never entirely vanquished since his marriage to Constance, flared up again. Pater thought Oscar had gone too far and exposed himself to danger. `Oscar really is too bold,' he told Frank Harris. `The forces against him are overwhelming; sooner or later he'll come to grief.' John Addington Symonds agreed that it was bold, but had some reservations. Dorian Gray `is an odd and very audacious production,' he told a friend, `unwholesome in tone but artistically and psychologically interesting. If the British public will stand this, they can stand anything.'
Some time after the publication of Dorian Gray, Oscar was invited to join the Crabbet Park Club, a rather exclusive literary club run by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a cousin of Lord Alfred Douglas, and named after his country house where the club met once a year in high summer. Blunt's daughter Judith cruelly described Oscar playing tennis there, as `a great wobbly blancmange trying to serve underhand'. Before a prospective member's election to the Crabbet Park Club, an existing member was supposed to deliver a eulogy on his behalf. In Oscar's case, George Curzon, the future Lord Curzon and Viceroy of India, rose to deliver the eulogy. But to the surprise and embarrassment of those present, Curzon rounded on Oscar, attacking his sexual reputation and arguing that Oscar would never have been heard of, had it not been for the seduction of strange sins that clung about his name. Curzon, wrote Blunt in his diary, warmed to his theme:
He had been at Oxford with Wilde and knew all his little weaknesses and did not spare him, playing with astonishing audacity and skill upon his reputation for sodomy and his treatment of the subject in Dorian Gray. Poor Oscar sat helplessly smiling, a fat mass, in his chair.
Blunt felt sorry for Oscar. `It hardly seemed fair,' he wrote. Curzon's attack had been ferocious, much more ferocious than Blunt recorded at the time. Oscar was nonplussed but, after the initial shock had worn off, `pulled himself together as he went on and gradually warmed into an amusing and excellent speech'. Oscar's speech was a robust and articulate defence of the love between an older and a younger man, virtually the same rousing speech he was to utter in his second trial when he was asked to explain what exactly was the love that dare not speak its name.
Having deliberately, wilfully sailed as close to the wind as he dared in Dorian Gray, Oscar was nevertheless surprised and shocked by the vehemence of the critical reaction to the book. The reviews of the novel, when it was first published in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Magazine, were almost universally hostile. The book was attacked with what Frank Harris, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, described as `insane heat and virulent malevolence'. The Athenaeum called the book `unmanly, sickening, vicious', Punch described Dorian as `Ganymede-like', while the Daily Chronicle - usually a liberal and forward-thinking newspaper - said `Dullness and dirt are the chief feature of Lippincott's this month,' describing Dorian Gray as:
a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents - a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction - a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth.
`Whether the Treasury or the Vigilance Society will think it worth while to prosecute Mr Oscar Wilde or Messrs Ward Lock & Co. we do not know,' the Stj'ames's Gazette speculated.
Publicly, Oscar replied to the criticism of Dorian Gray in a series of letters to the newspapers. `I am quite incapable,' he wrote to the StJames's Gazette, `of understanding how any work of art can be criticised from a moral standpoint':
The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate; and it is to the confusion between the two that we owe the appearance o
f Mrs Grundy, that amusing old lady who represents the only original form of humour that the middle classes of this country have been able to produce.
But despite this bravura public defence of his novel, privately Oscar was worried. His publishers Ward, Lock and Co, had written to him on 10 July, barely two weeks after Dorian Gray's publication, to say that Lippincott's Magazine faced a distribution boycott:
We have received an intimation from Messrs. W.H. Smith and Son this morning to the effect that `your story having been characterised by the press as a filthy one', they are compelled to withdraw `Lippincott's Magazine' from their bookstalls. We need not say that this is a serious matter for us. If you are in the city during the next day or two we should be glad if you could give us a call.
A distribution boycott by W.H. Smith's was serious enough. But Oscar had other worries, worries serious enough to prompt him to pay a call on Sydney Low, the editor of the St James's Gazette, whom he had known slightly at Oxford. Oscar was distinctly worried by calls for his prosecution as the author of Dorian Gray, and even more worried by the veiled hints in some newspapers that he shared the sexual tastes of Lord Henry- Wotton and Dorian. The visit was a disaster. Low summoned Samuel Jeyes, the author of the Gazette's original review, and a heated discussion ensued. Jeyes was unimpressed by Oscar's by now familiar and unconvincing argument that Dorian Gray was a moral parable pointing up the dangers of sexual indulgence. Jeyes challenged Oscar to come clean. Either he was writing about sex between men, or he was not. Which was it? Oscar equivocated. Jeyes pressed his point. `What is the use of writing of, and hinting at, things that you do not mean?' he demanded. At this point Oscar lost his temper and replied hotly. `I mean every word I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in Dorian Gray."Then,' said Jeyes, `all I can say is that if you do mean them you are very likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days.'
One newspaper went further than either the Chronicle or the St James's Gazette. The Scots Observer, the forerunner of today's Observer newspaper, under the editorship of Oscar's supposed friend W.E. Henley, was the most violently critical of Dorian Gray: `Why go grubbing in muck heaps?' Charles Whibley, the paper's reviewer, demanded, accusing Dorian Gray of being `false art'. `It is false art,' he wrote:
for its interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature - for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality - for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health, and sanity.
The phrase `medico-legal' was a clear reference to the debates about sex between men, and whether sexual activity between men should be cured by the physician or punished by the state. The Scots Observer was absolutely clear that punishment by the state was its preferred course:
The story - which deals with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera - is discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.
`Matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department', `outlawed noblemen' and `perverted telegraph boys' were clear references to a celebrated scandal which had unfolded at the same time as Oscar was writing Dorian Gray. The Scots Observer was making an explicit connection between Oscar and the Cleveland Street Scandal, a scandal which, it was rumoured, involved the highest in the land.
On 15 July 1889, a fifteen-year-old telegraph boy called Charles Swinscow was interviewed by Police Constable Luke Hanks in connection with a series of petty thefts at the Central Telegraph Office. Swinscow was found to have eighteen shillings on his person at the time of the interview, three or four times his weekly wage. PC Hanks asked Swinscow where he had got the money. `I got it doing some private work away from the office,' Swinscow replied, adding that the work was for `a gentleman named Hammond' who lived at number 19, Cleveland Street, an ordinary, nondescript street situated between Regent's Park and Oxford Street. PC Hanks repeatedly asked Swinscow what he had done to earn such a sum. `I will tell you the truth,' Swinscow eventually replied. `I got the money for going to bed with gentlemen at his house.'
It transpired that Charles Swinscow had been introduced to Hammond and the male brothel at 19, Cleveland Street by a fellow employee of the General Post Office, Henry Newlove. In his statement, Swinscow told how, the previous September, `I made the acquaintance of a boy named Newlove who was then a Boy Messenger in the Secretary's office and is now a 3rd Class clerk':
Soon after I got to know him he asked me to go into the lavatory at the basement of the old Post Office building - we went into one water closet and shut the door and we behaved indecently together - we did this on other occasions afterwards. In about a week's time Newlove said as near as I can recollect `Will you come to a house where you'll go to bed with gentlemen, you'll get four shillings each time'.
Swinscow claimed that he was reluctant to go to Cleveland Street but was at last persuaded by Newlove and the promise of the money. Accompanied by Newlove, Swinscow went to Cleveland Street and was introduced to Mr Hammond. `He said - good evening I'm very glad you've come,' Swinscow recalled in his statement, and detailed his first sexual encounter with one of the Cleveland Street brothel's customers:
I waited a little while and another gentleman came in. Mr Hammond introduced me, saying that this was the gentleman I was to go with that evening. I went into the back parlour, there was a bed there. We both undressed and being quite naked got into the bed. He put his penis between my legs and an emission took place. I was with him about half an hour and then we got up.
Swinscow was not the only telegraph boy that Henry Newlove had recruited in this way for service in the Cleveland Street brothel. George Wright was sixteen when he became friendly with Newlove. Newlove used to speak to him in the lobbies and eventually persuaded him down to the basement toilets. `On one or two occasions, certainly more than once,' Wright deposed, `Newlove put his person into me, that is to say my behind, only a little way and something came from him.' Newlove took Wright to Cleveland Street where he was introduced to Hammond. `Another gentleman came in who I should know again,' Wright said, `rather a foreign-looking chap':
I went with the latter into a bedroom on the same floor and we both undressed and we got into the bed quite naked. He told me to suck him. I did so. He then had a go between my legs and that was all.
Newlove also persuaded George Wright to find him `another nice little boy' to take to Cleveland Street. Wright introduced him to seventeen-year-old Charles Thickbroom. Newlove took Thickbroom down to the basement lavatory of the old Post Office building and subsequently recounted to George Wright how he had tried to have anal sex with Thickbroom: `On one occasion at least,' Newlove told Wright, `I put my person into his hinderparts. I could not get it in, though I tried and emitted.'
Almost by accident, PC Hanks had uncovered a network of male prostitution involving telegraph boys. Scotland Yard was called in and a warrant for the arrest of Hammond was issued. But when the police arrived at Cleveland Street to apprehend him, they found that he had fled abroad. A warrant for Henry Newlove was also issued and he was successfully arrested and charged with `the abominable crime of buggery' against George Wright and `divers other persons'. Newlove was not prepared to carry the entire burden of the scandal, telling the man who arrested him, Chief Inspector Abberline of the Criminal Investigation Department, `I think it is hard that I should get into trouble while men in high positions are allowed to walk free.' `What do you mean?' Abberline asked. `Why,' replied Newlove, `Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house in Cleveland Street, so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.'
These were names to conjure with. Lord Arthur Somerset, nicknamed `Podge', was thirty-eight years old, the son of the Duke of Beaufort and the younger brother of Lord Henry Somerset, who had fled to Flor
ence in 1879 to avoid a public scandal over his affair with a young man, Harry Smith. More importantly, Lord Arthur, a cavalry officer, was Assistant Equerry to the Prince of Wales. He was a popular and well-liked man, who was on terms of close friendship with the Prince and other members of the royal family. The Earl of Euston was the eldest son of the Duke of Grafton and was a man about town with a reputation for womanising.
A watch was immediately placed on the premises at Cleveland Street. Chief Inspector Abberline reported:
Observation has been kept on the house - 19 Cleveland Street - and a number of men of superior bearing and apparently of good position have been seen to call there accompanied by boys in some instances, and on two occasions by a soldier, but after waiting about in a suspicious manner left without gaining admission. Some of them arrived in separate cabs, and evidently met by appointment at the house for unnatural purposes.
Number 19, Cleveland Street was clearly not just a brothel where men could buy sex with boys, but also a house where they could take their pick-ups, boys or soldiers, perhaps from the streets, perhaps from public lavatories, in order to have sex. Among those seen calling at the house were at least two members of Parliament and Lord Arthur Somerset. On the face of it, there was a strong case for arresting Lord Arthur Somerset. He had been seen calling at the house and, according to Henry Newlove's deposition, not only was he a frequent visitor at Cleveland Street, but he had also had sex with Newlove several times there.
But a decision to arrest him was delayed. Lord Arthur's social standing merited, it seemed, prolonged and substantial debate in the corridors of power in Whitehall. The Home Secretary, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Attorney General, the Solicitor General, the Lord Chief justice and even the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, were involved. Lord Arthur was interviewed at his barracks on 7 August about his connections with Cleveland Street. It looked then as if a prosecution was inevitable.