The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  On Saturday at mid-day, lying half asleep in bed, reading Green, I was roused by a pathetic and unexpected note from Oscar: he plaintively besought me to get up and see him. Which I did: and I found him as delightful as Green is not. He discoursed, with infinite flippancy, on everyone: lauded the Dial, laughed at Pater, and consumed all my cigarettes. I am in love with him.

  Lionel Johnson's head was easily turned by the magnetic force of Oscar's charm. Equally, Oscar found much to attract him in Lionel Johnson. He was very short, just over five feet, and looked extremely young, `more like the head boy of a Preparatory School' than a twenty-three-year-old Oxford undergraduate. Johnson looked so absurdly child-like that Oscar once quipped about him going out and hailing the first passing perambulator. The lesbian poets Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who published their collaborative work under the name `Michael Field', described Johnson in their journal as:

  a learned snowdrop (his friends say he is so old he has become a child again). He is quite young, quite pale, drooping under book-lore, with curved lids, nearly as fine as Keats's Hyperion.

  Oscar and Johnson parted after this first meeting determined to see each other again. `I hope you will let me know when you are in town,' Oscar wrote immediately after his return to London:

  I like your poetry - the little I have seen of it - so much, that I want to know the poet as well. It was very good of you getting up to see me. I was determined to meet you before I left Oxford.

  Oscar and Johnson probably became lovers at some point in 1890, and Johnson was duly inducted into Oscar's circle of young admirers. John Gray was, of course, still Oscar's officially beloved, but for a while, at least, Johnson played the role of Oscar's `new boy'.

  During their affair, Oscar must have asked Johnson about Lord Alfred Douglas, the dedicatee of his poem, and made pertinent enquiries about the exact nature of `the love of friend for friend' in Johnson's poem and whether the kindled, nameless `flame' of their passion was `the love that dare not speak its name'. It was Lionel Johnson who, in the spring of 1891, loaned his copy of Dorian Gray to his schoolfriend and fellow Oxford undergraduate, Bosie Douglas. Years later, Bosie wrote about the `intoxicating' impact the novel had on him:

  About Dorian Gray. I read it at Magdalen about 2 or 3 months before I first met Oscar. Curiously enough I don't remember hearing much about it from other undergraduates except Lionel Johnson. It had a terrific effect on me. I read it about 14 times running. For years it produced the same effect every time I read it.

  Reading Dorian Gray made Bosie impatient to meet its author. Three months later, in June 1891, Lionel Johnson called on Bosie at his mother's house in Cadogan Square and took him the short distance to Tite Street to meet Oscar, where the three of them sat and drank tea in Oscar's little writing-room facing the street on the ground floor.

  Lord Alfred Douglas, known universally as Bosie, was three years younger than Lionel Johnson. As a child, his devoted mother Sybil had called him by the West Country vernacular for `little boy', Boysie, and the name had stuck. Bosie was the third son of John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquis of Queensberry, and his wife, Sybil Montgomery. Queensberry was a short, vigorous man who lived for hunting, gambling and women. He had been educated at a naval training school in Portsmouth and entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman at the age of fourteen. For the next five years he had travelled extensively, getting into a good many scrapes and fights along the way. When he was nineteen, Queensberry, or `Q as he was sometimes known, resigned his naval commission and decided to enter Magdalene College, Cambridge. It was a strange decision. Queensberry, as his grandson later wrote, was entirely void of intellectual and artistic qualities. He was, moreover, `inordinately proud of having achieved ignorance concerning them'. But he may have felt that a university degree would be of help when he came into his majority and took possession of a large fortune of £78,000 and estates in Scotland of some 30,000 acres. The following year, tragedy struck when Qs beloved younger brother Lord Francis Douglas was killed, along with three other climbers, during their descent of the Matterhorn, after becoming the first party to reach the summit. Queensberry was devastated and rushed off to Switzerland to try and find his brother's body. It was a futile quest. `I have not been able to find a trace of darling Francy's body,' he told his family. `I am convinced it is useless to search further, and that his dear body is resting beyond the power of mortal man to reach him.'

  Queensberry left Cambridge without a degree, declaring that he had never known a degree `to be worth twopence to anybody'. He promptly got married, at the age of twenty-one, to Sybil Montgomery, the daughter of Alfred Montgomery, a Commissioner of the Inland Revenue, who was rumoured to be a natural son of the elder brother of the Duke of Wellington. The Montgomerys were extremely well-connected socially - Alfred Montgomery was a particular friend of the Prince of Wales, and Fanny, his wife, was a friend of the then Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The Montgomerys' two daughters had been brought up in an atmosphere of cultured ease. Sybil was extremely well-educated and widely read. Her winters had been spent in Florence, and she spoke Italian and French fluently. According to Gertrude, one of her future sisters-in-law, she was extraordinarily beautiful with `delicate features and creamy complexion, pretty turquoise-blue eyes and her lovely mouth, small as a rose bud and quite as bewitching'. The other sister-in-law, Florrie, was not convinced about the suitability of the match. Her brother, she thought, had fallen in love with Sybil's `beautiful face', and not with Sybil herself. It was a prescient observation.

  Queensberry and his bride were mismatched from the very start. Almost immediately after their marriage, the couple went to live at Kinmount, the vast family estate near Dumfries. Kinmount was a large Georgian pile, an imposing neo-classical house built in forbidding grey sandstone mined in Cumbria, a great stone palace, designed to impress rather than to be comfortable or beautiful. In the long chill of a Scottish winter the house was draughty and uncomfortable, and there was little to occupy Sybil, who was already missing the civilised and sociable life she had led as a young woman, as well as the mild winters in Florence. Queensberry used to get up at dawn and spend the best part of the day hunting, while his wife lay in bed reading novels. There was not much in the way of society in the vicinity, and what society there was Queensberry deliberately eschewed, choosing instead to mix with an illassorted gang of professional bruisers and sportsmen. Sybil spent her time with her children and in running the house. It was obvious that the marriage was in trouble. Fanny Montgomery visited the couple in June 1867 and wrote to Disraeli that Queensberry possessed `good abilities and good principles' but was `suffering from the overwhelming weight of high rank and nothing to do'.

  Alfred Bruce Douglas was born in Worcestershire where, in 1869, in one of those fits of impulsiveness which were increasingly to dominate his life, Queensberry had bought a house so that he could take on the Mastership of the Worcestershire Hounds. From the very beginning, Alfred was his mother's darling and remained his mother's darling throughout her long life. `After Bosie's birth, virtually no one else mattered to her,' her grandson wrote later. Perhaps it was something to do with his exceptional, breathtaking beauty, a beauty which reflected her own. Like Sybil, Bosie was fair-haired and blueeyed, with a peaches-and-cream complexion. But there was a special quality to Bosie's beauty, a pure, dreamy, poetic, spiritual kind of beauty which enthralled his mother, and most of those around him.

  Sybil's devotion to Bosie was further intensified by the fact that, as a very small boy, Bosie had to wear leg-irons to straighten his legs. Queensberry, alone in the family, was unaffected by Bosie's beauty and disgusted by his physical deformity, feelings which he recalled at the height of his feud with his son and Oscar: `When he was a child swathed in irons to hold him together it used to make me sick to look at him and think he could be called my son.' Bosie's deformity was quickly corrected and he became a healthy active child and a fine athlete.

  When he was ten, he and his older b
rother, Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig, were sent away to school, to Lambrook, near Windsor, then one of the most fashionable preparatory schools, patronised by the aristocracy and by royalty - two of Queen Victoria's grandsons were pupils there. But a year later, Lambrook was rocked by a scandal, almost certainly a sexual scandal. Bosie called it `a row' and throughout his adult life steadfastly refused to speak about it, suggesting that his time there had scarred him in some way, though it is impossible to know whether he was involved in, or a victim of, the scandal. From Lambrook, Bosie was sent to Wixenford, where he seems to have been quite happy, though he was regarded by his headmaster as a very spoilt boy. While he was at Wixenford, Bosie became `passionately fond' of an American boy called Edward Shepherd who left to go to Eton. Bosie desperately wanted to follow Shepherd to Eton, and begged his mother to arrange this. But Queensberry was having none of it. He saw the whole scheme as `a plot', concocted by Bosie and Sybil, a conspiracy against his authority. Bosie, he said, must go to Winchester instead. Bosie was thirteen, very nearly fourteen, when he arrived at Winchester at the start of the Christmas term, 1884.

  Like every Victorian public school, Winchester was a den of intense sexual activity between boys - usually, but not always, between older boys and younger boys. The problem of sex between boys in boarding schools, invariably referred to as `immorality', was well known, having been discussed as early as the 1830s in the Quarterly Journal of Education. John Addington Symonds wrote how he was `filled with disgust and loathing' at the appalling `moral state' of Harrow where he found himself a pupil at the age of thirteen, and where Bosie's brother, Francis, had also been sent to be schooled:

  Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's `bitch'. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk in the dormitories and studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences.

  Symonds recalled two boys in particular whose behaviour was disgusting:

  Barber annoyed and amused me. He was like a good-natured longimanous ape, gibbering on his perch and playing ostentatiously with a prodigiously developed phallus ... Cookson was a red-faced strumpet, with flabby cheeks and sensual mouth - the notissima fossa, the most infamous trench, of our house.

  A similar situation prevailed at Winchester. Sex between boys there was rife. The school was `a sink of iniquity', Bosie wrote. `I remember thinking that my parents must be quite mad to send me to such an awful place ... My first eighteen months there were pretty much of a nightmare.' But he gradually adapted to his surroundings:

  However, after the first shock I got used to the conditions, adapted myself to the standard of morality - or rather immorality - and enjoyed the whole thing immensely.

  Boys who did not have sex with other boys were the exception rather than the rule at Winchester. Bosie estimated that `at least ninety per cent' of his contemporaries there had sex with other boys. The remaining ten per cent were doomed to celibacy by circumstance rather than by choice. After Oscar was sent to prison, Bosie wrote that from his `own personal experience' of public school:

  The practice of Greek love is so general that it is only those who are physically unattractive that are reduced to living without love.

  A near contemporary of Bosie's at Winchester was Trelawny Backhouse, who was a little more forthcoming about sexual activity between boys at the school in his unpublished autobiography, written in Peking in 1943:

  Six years at Winchester College were little other than a carnival of unbridled lust ... I do not vouch for the statistics but fancy that between 1886 and 1892 I enjoyed carnal intimacy with at least thirty (perhaps more) boys, ascendant and descendant.

  Those boys caught in the act of having sex were, according to Backhouse, punished either by beatings or by expulsion, depending on the severity of the offence:

  In my time perhaps a score of boys were expelled for `pedicatio' and for `coitus inter crura' offences (apart from actual penetration) for both of which corporal chastisement was deemed over-light.

  Mutual masturbation was, it seems, frowned upon at Winchester, and it was an offence punishable by beating, but not by expulsion. Pedicatio or anal sex, or even coitus inter crura - intercrural sex, where ejaculation was achieved between the thighs or between the buttocks - was invariably a matter for expulsion. Backhouse alleges that Bosie practised pedicatio or coitus inter crura with him at Winchester:

  Bozic, as he was commonly called (a corruption for Boyzie), would probably not thank me for recalling numerous love episodes at Winchester in which he was usually the ascendant and I the pathic, although positions were sometimes reversed.

  `Pathic' is an archaic seventeenth-century word for the passive partner in anal sex or in inter-crural sex. Although Trelawny Backhouse's memoirs are not always accurate or, indeed, true, his accounts of his schooldays at Winchester and of his subsequent involvement in the Oscar Wilde scandal have the ring of authenticity. Sodomy was much less common in public schools than either mutual masturbation or fellatio, but it was not unheard of. Jack Saul, in his Recollections of a Mary Ann, claims that he was multiply sodomised during his first night at the boarding school he had been sent to in Colchester. And, according to the account of one Fred Jones, a soldier in the Foot Guards, who recounted his life story to Jack Saul:

  Young fellows are quite as much after us as older men. I have often been fucked by young gentlemen of sixteen or seventeen, and at Windsor lots of the Eton boys come after us.

  After Oscar's trial and conviction, progressive newspapers like Reynolds's News were starting to campaign for a clean-up of `the great public schools of England':

  It is a fact, atrocious to all acquainted with the subject, that at certain educational establishments of the highest class the morality of the students is past praying for; innocent lads, with the purity and refinement of home life in their hearts, become tainted with the traditional vices of these schools and colleges before they have been many months within their walls.

  W.T. Stead, in the Review of Reviews, pointed up the hypocrisy of punishing men like Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor, his co-defendant, for sexual crimes with men when the very same crimes were perpetrated every day in the great public schools:

  If all persons guilty of Oscar Wilde's offences were to be clapped in gaol, there would be a very surprising exodus from Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, to Pentonville and Holloway . . . But meanwhile public school boys are allowed to indulge with impunity in practices which, when they leave school, would consign them to hard labour.

  Reynolds's News and the other newspapers which made similar calls for a clean-up were missing the point. They believed in a theory of sexual contamination, a theory that still has its adherents today. They argued that the prevalence of sex between men was the consequence of boy-to-boy sexual experiences between the sons of the upper classes who populated the great public schools and the great universities of England. By cleaning up the public schools, by extirpating every vestige of `immorality', the vice of sodomy could not flourish and therefore would not exist. They were wrong.

  The assumption was that sex between men was a vice of luxuria, a vice that sprang up spontaneously among the rich, the privileged, the effete, who spread it, almost as a communicable disease, outwards into the commonality of the population. Male prostitutes from the working classes, they argued, only existed to service degenerate men from the upper classes. This view of male prostitution was articulated by Henry Labouchere, when he railed against the evils of male prostitution in the House of Commons in the wake of the Cleveland Street Scandal:

  In the streets, in the music halls, you have these wretched creatures openly pursuing their avocation. They are known to the police, yet the police do nothing to stop this sort of thing
... these poor and wretched creatures live to minister to the vices of those in a superior station.

  But sex between boys had nothing to do with class or social status. Same-sex relationships existed at every level of society, from the highest to the lowest. They were as likely to manifest themselves in the schools, reformatories, workhouses and orphanages of the poor, as in the great public schools of England. An acquaintance of Jack Saul's, a male prostitute called George Brown, given to blackmailing his clients, said to him one day `Did you ever hear that I was four years in the Reformatory at Red Hill? That was where I first had a prick up my arse.'

  From an early age, Bosie was capable of inspiring great love in others. In his Autobiography, he says that he had several friendships at school `which were neither pure nor innocent', including two which seemed to be especially intense. One such was with Lucas D'Oyly Carte, the son of impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte. Lucas was a year younger than Bosie, and they seem to have had a tortured love affair which lasted throughout their time together at Winchester, up until, and perhaps even beyond, the time when Bosie met Oscar. Lucas followed Bosie to Magdalen College in 1891, and wrote many emotional letters to him, with phrases such as Bosie, I love you more now than I ever have before. I never did really love you before but I do now.' Some of these letters were later stolen from Bosie and used to blackmail him.

  At Winchester, Bosie also had an intense friendship with the pallidly beautiful Lionel Johnson. Johnson was sexually active at Winchester, where his smallness and delicate build cast him, as one biographer tactfully put it, for the role of Giton, the beautiful youth lusted after by Encolpius and Ascyltos in The Satyricon of Petronius and whom they wish to sodomise. When Bosie arrived at Winchester, he and Johnson, who was three years older, seem to have become lovers. According to Robbie Ross, Johnson was a `bedfellow of Douglas at Winchester', and Bosie himself later boasted that he had had sex with Johnson. But these bald accounts gloss over what seems to have been, for Johnson at least, a passionate love affair. Johnson's poem dedicated to Bosie - the poem which Pater showed to Oscar - exudes erotic love, a love which he seems never to have lost or, indeed, recovered from. Bosie's feelings for Lionel Johnson can only be guessed at. He seems to have liked him, but was emphatically not in love with him. Their friendship continued beyond Winchester to Oxford, and on to their lives in London as poets.