Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Number 1 certainly was impressive. Standing on the northwest corner of the square, it was larger than the other houses, augmented along its Merrion Street flank by a two-storey addition, comprising the front door and a stone-flagged hallway on the ground floor, with, above it, a light-filled conservatory and a room in which Dr Wilde could see his patients. A door and staircase at the rear of the building gave separate access to this consulting room, while there was a larger room on the ground floor, at the back, where William could carry out operations. The principal rooms of the house were ‘fine’ indeed – high-ceilinged, with delicate mouldings and marble fireplaces, and with views across the square at the front. The Wildes filled them with books and pictures. There were Turkey carpets laid on the broad Irish-oak floorboards. A bust of Charles Maturin was one of the adornments of the ground-floor library. Six live-in servants were required to run the new establishment, their quarters confined to the basement. The nursery was at the top of the house.

  Here were installed the two boys. Jane hoped they would ‘flourish’ in their commodious new environment, and they did. Willie, in his mother’s words, was becoming ‘slight, tall and spirituelle looking with large beautiful eyes full of expression’, while the one-year-old Oscar was ‘a great stout creature who minds nothing but growing fat’.26 Jane was a devoted mother. Much of the passion and exalted vision that she had for the ‘Fatherland’ was converted into love and exalted vision for her children. William Wilde also took an active share of parenthood, despite both his professional cares and the huge project he had taken on to catalogue the collection of the RIA.27 A fresh excitement enlivened the house in April 1857 when Jane gave birth to another child: a much-longed-for daughter, christened Isola Francesca Emily. She at once became the pet of the family.

  There are occasional glimpses of the infant Oscar. A sense of self, and of self-dramatization, seem to have come to him early. One visitor recalled the two-year-old boy entertaining a group of guests in the Merrion Square drawing room, by repeatedly declaiming his own euphonious name: ‘Oscar, Fingal, O’Flahertie, Wilde… Oscar, Fingal, O’Flahertie, Wilde.’28 A photograph survives of him at this time, stout, assured, and dressed – according to the custom of the age – in a splendid dress of blue velvet.29 There was, however, nothing girlish in his manner. The young Swedish writer Lotten von Kraemer, who visited Merrion Square in August 1857, accompanied by her father, the governor of Uppsala, considered him a ‘little brown-eyed wildcat’. She recalled William Wilde coming into the room, leading the ‘golden haired’ Willie by the hand, and carrying Oscar – ‘a small unruly boy’ – upon his arm. The young brothers were already part of the bustling life of the house. The Kraemers, when they attended an informal dinner that Sunday, were amazed to find the boys still up and about; and having kissed their father goodnight, they were charged with fetching a book from the library.30

  By the following year both Oscar and Willie were, in their mother’s partial estimation, growing ‘tall and wise’. In the same letter Jane remarked of the ten-month-old Isola, ‘she has blue eyes and promises to have an acute intellect – those two gifts are enough for any woman’.31 Exaggeration, romance and the life of the mind were all part of atmosphere at Merrion Square. And so was literature. Jane read to her children from the first, and poetry in particular. As they leaned their heads against her, she unfolded the enchantments of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady Clare’ and Longfellow’s Hiawatha.32 Poe’s ‘The Raven’ was another of her favourites.33 She also introduced her sons to the rich heritage of Irish verse, from the misty grandeur of ‘Ossian’ and the melancholy lyrics of Tom Moore to the stirring nationalist ballads by Thomas Davis, Denis Florence MacCarthy and, indeed, herself (of his mother’s poems, Oscar’s favourite was the ballad of the Sheares brothers).34 And it was from his mother’s reading that he began to perceive both the music and the magic of words.

  Family life was full of affection, encouragement and caresses. Lotten von Kraemer noted how William Wilde’s eyes rested upon his children ‘with pleasure’, and how he stroked Oscar’s hair before sending him on his way.35 When Jane travelled to London, she carried with her the memory of the boys’ ‘quick kiss and warm hug at parting’.36 Her trip to the English capital, however, had been to find a trained nursery governess for the children. And with the arrival of this new helper (the first of a succession), together with the medical qualification of William Wilde’s illegitimate son Henry Wilson, travel became a possibility for the Wilde parents. Inspired by their growing friendship with the Kraemers, they made regular trips to Sweden and Scandinavia over the coming years, leaving the children behind in the care of servants.37

  But there were also holidays en famille, to villages and resorts near Dublin, or to ‘the grand wild scenery’ of Connemara, in the far west, where William had built a little fishing lodge, set – as Jane put it – ‘on the edge the Atlantic’.38* Dr Wilde’s enthusiasm for building increased with the years. In 1861 he designed and built a terrace of four ‘very handsome’ houses at Bray, the favoured seaside retreat near Dublin; three were to be let, and one used by the family.39

  Over one holiday, spent at the lovely village of Enniskerry at the foot of Glencree (perhaps in 1860 or 1861, before the completion of the Bray houses), Jane befriended Fr Lawrence Prideaux Fox, one of the Oblates of the Immaculate Heart charged with running the nearby – and recently established – St Kevin’s Reformatory. He was an energetic and entertaining man, with literary and artistic interests: he knew Charles Dickens and Cardinal Newman, and was renowned for his ‘talent as a decorator’: at Inchicore, the oblate foundation on the outskirts of Dublin where he was based, he had originated a celebrated ‘crib’.40 During that Glencree vacation he and Speranza ‘enjoyed many a pleasant hour’ of conversation.

  Religion was a subject much in her thoughts. She was working on a translation of the controversial German romance Eritis Sicut Deus (‘You shall be as God’). The book – which had first appeared anonymously in 1854 – dramatized the crisis of faith, and the response to it of German philosophy, through the story of Robert and his beautiful wife, Elizabeth. The former renounces God in favour of a self-created aesthetic creed of art-worship and sensual indulgence, only to encounter despair; the latter briefly follows him down this path, but, having been brought to the brink of madness, recovers her faith – and with it, her sanity, and her happiness.41 Although Jane herself had (as her son later described it) ‘a very strong faith in that aspect of God we call the Holy Ghost’, she was impatient of all religious dogma, and particularly of ‘any notion of priest and sacrament standing between her and God’.42 Nevertheless she maintained an aesthetic appreciation of many aspects of Catholic worship. In an article written for the Dublin University Magazine in 1850 she had praised the contemporary Catholic Church in Ireland for its inspired patronage of the arts, noting that ‘Catholicism alone has comprehended the truth that Art is one of the noblest languages of religion’.43

  During the Glencree holiday she took the children to services at the small Gothic-revival church next to the reformatory. There was a tribune that allowed visitors to attend without coming into contact with the reformatory inmates. Fr Fox recalled that it was not long before she asked him to instruct Oscar and his brother: ‘After a few weeks I baptised these two children, Lady Wilde herself being present on the occasion.’ The priest subsequently called on William Wilde to tell him what had been done. The doctor, who was ‘bitterly opposed to reformatories’ as a means of dealing with the numerous boys convicted for petty crimes in the troubled aftermath of the famine, had never been particularly easy with Fr Fox, but in this instance he merely remarked that he did not care what his sons ‘became so long as they became as good as their Mother’.44 Oscar retained a memory of this second christening, but it was not backed up with any further Catholic teaching or contact during his childhood.45

  Other spiritual forces impressed him rather more. He vividly recalled being awakened one night by a series of piercing shriek
s. He thought it was a dog in pain. The next day, however, news arrived that a relative had died, and he was told that the cries of the night before must have been those of the Banshee – the fairy harbinger of death.46 Irish lore and legend were always part of the family’s shared imaginary world, and they became more so when in 1862 William Wilde bought 170 acres of land along the shore of Lough Corrib close to the little town of Cong, in Co. Mayo, in the far west. The land had special meaning for him, having once belonged to his maternal Fynn relatives. But it was also – he believed – the site of the legendary battle of Moytura (Magh-Tura) where the two ancient Celtic peoples of Ireland, the Dananns and the Firbolgs, had fought for supremacy. He began work on a handsome dwelling there, to be called ‘Moytura House’. Set in ‘a picturesque situation’ looking over the lough, the two-storey building, whitewashed and steep gabled, would become a second home for the family. It had spacious rooms in which to entertain. There was a rose garden with a sundial, and a walled kitchen garden filled with fruit trees.†

  In days spent playing together, Oscar developed a happy ‘boyish comradeship’ with his older brother – a relationship smoothed and lightened by Oscar’s conciliatory nature.47 At one juncture he even gave Willie his favourite teddy bear: ‘Whenever afterwards I got angry with him,’ he later explained, ‘I used to threaten him with an “I shall take back my bear, Willie.”’ It was a saying that retained a currency between the brothers well beyond the end of their childhood.48 But, though he was ready to accommodate himself to others, Oscar’s individuality of outlook was also becoming apparent. On one Connemara holiday he ran away from the family and hid in a cave.49 On another occasion – at Merrion Square – he and Willie were having their evening bath in front of the fire in the nursery, their little nightshirts hanging to warm on the fender. While the nurse was momentarily out of the room, the boys noticed a brown spot appear on one of the shirts. It deepened slowly and then burst into flame. While Willie shouted for the nurse to come to the rescue, Oscar clapped his hands in delight at the conflagration. And when the nurse rushed in, snatched the flaming garment from the fender and pushed it into the fire, Oscar ‘cried with rage at the spoiling of the pageant and the end of the fun’. This, he would later explain, revealed something of the difference between him and Willie.50

  Oscar and his brother began their educations at home. A succession of governesses, usually foreign, introduced them at least to both French and German.51 But they learnt rather more at the parental board. The Merrion Square house was often filled with interesting people and interesting talk; and – as the Kraemers noticed – the young Wilde children were excluded from little of it.

  The social gatherings chez Wilde, lit by the energy and charisma of the host and hostess, overflowed with intellectual merriment and wit. There were regular Saturday dinner parties for what Jane described ‘ten or twelve clever men’: they would dine at half past six and part at eleven.52 Sometimes the meal would be followed by poetry or music. The company would include not only ‘the brilliant genius of Ireland’ (the leading literary, scientific and antiquarian lights of Dublin), but also ‘celebrities of Europe and America’.53 The ‘earliest hero’ of Oscar’s childhood was the ‘tall and stately’ Smith O’Brien – one-time leader of the Young Ireland movement – who became a regular visitor, having returned to Dublin from exile in Tasmania.54 In the summer of 1861, when Dublin hosted the annual meeting of the National Association, the Wildes kept open house for the Swedish contingent, giving a series of happy informal dinners at which Irish and Scandinavian delegates could meet and talk ‘merrily, freely and easily’.55

  For many foreign visitors the conversation at Merrion Square was a revelation. Lotten von Kraemer recalled that her first dinner seated beside Dr Wilde gave her ‘an idea of what English “table talk” really must be. So very striking was his easy and humorous way of entertainment.’56 The adjective ‘English’ was ill-chosen. The ease and humour of Merrion Square discourse was distinctly Irish. Even among men of science, facts were never allowed to dominate diversion. Dr William Stokes, William Wilde’s great friend and mentor (who lived in the square at No. 5), pronounced it as ‘the golden rule of conversation, to know nothing accurately’.57 Many things, though, were known with assumed inaccuracy. Conversation ranged across ‘all the current topics and literature and science of the day’.58 Ideas were taken up, played with and discarded. Nothing was sacred: at the Wilde’s table ‘every creed’ was both ‘defended and demolished’. And Oscar, while still a young boy, heard it all. He came to consider ‘that the best of his education in boyhood was obtained from this association with his father and mother and their remarkable friends’.59

  If Oscar was aware of his parents’ brilliance, he was also conscious of their rising social prestige. The purchase of the Moytura estate had made his father a landowner. And at the beginning of 1864 there was a further advance when William Wilde received his knighthood. According to the citation, the award was given less in consideration of his European-wide medical reputation, than in recognition of his services ‘to statistical science… in connection with the Irish census’. If Dr Wilde was gratified to become ‘Sir William’, his wife was even more delighted to be transformed into ‘Lady Wilde’. She found no difficulty in accommodating her Nationalist sentiments to the glory of royal recognition. Oscar’s pleasure in this development, however, took place at one remove. He was away from home.

  * The house stood (and still stands) beside Loch Fee, on the small peninsula of Illaunroe, meaning the ‘red island’. William Wilde was very proud of the sash windows, which he had installed, claiming they were ‘the only sash-windows in Connemara’. When, however, he came to show them off to a visiting friend, ‘he found that they would neither open nor shut’.

  † Although William Wilde was pleased with his mansion, some considered it ‘so singular in its construction’ that it was dubbed by the Dublin wits ‘Wilde’s eye-sore’.

  2

  A Fair Scholar

  ‘Knowledge came to me through pleasure.’

  oscar wilde

  At the end January 1864 Oscar and his brother were sent away to school, leaving the six-year-old Isola at home.1 It was an escape from the nursery and the rule of governesses. The Portora Royal School at Enniskillen in Co. Fermanagh, 100 miles north of Dublin, was an ancient foundation, established in 1608 by James I for the education of the town’s recently transplanted Scotch Presbyterian population. It had, however, during the course of the nineteenth century, transformed itself into a far more outward-looking institution. And, under the enlightened stewardship of Rev. William Steele (beginning in 1857), it emerged as a small but flourishing – and academically renowned – ‘public school’. The position of Enniskillen at the heart of the expanding Irish railway network made it a convenient location. Boarding pupils arrived from across the country, the sons of colonial officials, Irish gentry, established clergy and professional men.2

  The Wildes had connections with Portora (the art master, William ‘Bully’ Wakeman, was a friend of the family, and had provided some illustrations for Sir William’s book on the Boyne), but the reputation of the place, both academic and social – it was known to some as ‘the Eton of Ireland’ – would have been quite enough to commend it. The school was handsomely housed in a fine Georgian mansion on the top of the hill outside the town, with beautiful views out over Lower Lough Erne. When the Wilde brothers arrived, they were among 175 pupils: 112 boarders and 63 dayboys. The boys, ranging in age from ten (according to the prospectus) to seventeen, were divided into distinct lower and upper schools.3

  The headmaster, Dr Steele, was a remarkable man: intellectually distinguished, liberal-minded, frank, even noble (he encouraged Catholics to attend the school, though few came). Aged forty-four in 1864, he had still a ‘lithe, vigorous frame’, a quick step and an eye that ‘gleamed with energy and bright intelligence’.4 And he stood at the heart of the life of his school. He took morning prayers and roll call.5 He was �
��almost always present at the boys’ dinner, which he himself carved’.6 He managed – as one of Oscar’s contemporaries recorded – to achieve ‘the happy mean’ between being too distant and being too familiar ‘in his constant association with the boys, and the many unobtrusive ways by which he showed his interest and watchfulness in what was going on among them’.7 As he made his rounds, his approach was usually heralded ‘by the vigorous shaking of a large bunch of keys, which he held in outstretched hand’, so that all had timely warning of his proximity.8 He treated the boys (and, indeed, the masters) ‘as if they were gentlemen’ – and hoped that, as a result, they would behave as such. On the whole they did.9

  Steele considered that classics and mathematics provided the best basis for the education of the young. Other subjects should certainly be taught – English, French, history and geography – but they were of lesser importance in the curriculum. To learn French properly, he believed, it was really necessary ‘to go to France’, while ‘at the age when boys are at school, they are not capable of receiving a philosophic knowledge of history or geography’.10 Steele himself was an excellent preceptor, with a real love of the classics. Anxious to have the boys ‘well grounded in first principles’, he mainly taught Latin and Greek in the lower school.11 He was a firm believer, too, in the virtues of examinations and prizes – and he instituted a popular annual midsummer prize-giving and sports day, a gala end to the first half of each year. There were only two terms – or ‘halves’ – in each school year, one running from the end of January to the middle of June, the other from late August to late December.12