It was not, however, just energy and imagination that Steele poured into the school. He also expended his own money on improving the place. Impatient with the bureaucracy of the school board, and needing additional accommodation for the ever-growing number of boarders, he filled in the spaces between the original house and its two free-standing wings (creating the so-called ‘Stone Hall’ and ‘Master’s Hall’). He built a sanatorium, and modernized the school’s plumbing. In 1864 he was planning an ambitious new scheme: a spacious hall to accommodate the entire lower school, with three dedicated classrooms underneath.13
Steele appreciated the school’s splendid setting, and devoted care to ‘the beautifying of the grounds’.14 The lough – a vast stretch of water running some twenty-five miles from Enniskillen to Belleek – was also a great asset. It provided a focus for recreation and sport, for swimming and rowing. Boys could take out boats to explore the islands. And rowing races became a feature of the school sports days. There were other organized games – football, athletics, racquet sports, cricket (on a newly laid-down cricket pitch) – as Steele embraced the new post-Arnoldian public school ethos.
The ethos, whatever its general benefits, was not one that the newly arrived Oscar Wilde found immediately congenial. At nine years old he was almost a full year younger than the designated entrance age. And there was little in his character that suited him to the rough and tumble of boarding-school life: slight, imaginative, independent and dreamy, he drifted to the edge of things. He made no firm friends. Games – the great motor of schoolboy existence – held no interest for him (‘I never liked to kick or be kicked,’ he claimed).15 Work, too, at first failed to engage his energies. He distinguished himself mainly by being hopeless at mathematics.16
Willie, by contrast, thrived. Good at lessons, fond of games, sociable, boisterous, kind-hearted, he began at once to establish a position and a reputation among both his peers and his masters. He secured a lower school prize at the end of his first half – although, that year, the prize day, at which he would have received his award, had to be cancelled at short notice following the tragic drowning of two pupils in a boating accident on the lough. The incident was the first of a succession of painful dramas that would punctuate Oscar and Willie’s schooldays.
The closing weeks of the Christmas half brought the second such blow: the lurid pantomime of the Mary Travers case. Even at Portora the brothers would have felt the reverberations. The Dublin press was readily available in Enniskillen, and the town’s three local papers also carried full details of the court proceedings together with much disparaging comment.17 The case offered a rich subject for discussion to both pupils and staff. Nevertheless, the relative youth of the Wilde boys (Oscar just ten, Willie barely twelve), as well as the almost immediate arrival of the Christmas holidays, probably preserved them from too much prurient ribbing from their schoolfellows.
At home that Christmas they would have been bolstered by the parental line on the debacle – that it was a ‘disagreeable’ incident now mercifully passed. Lady Wilde wrote to her Swedish friend, Rosalie Olivecrona:
The simple solution of the affair is this – that Miss Travers is half mad – all her family are mad too… It was very annoying but of course no one believed her story – all Dublin now calls on us to offer their sympathy and all the medical profession here and in London have sent letters expressing their entire disbelief of the, in fact, impossible charge. Sir Wm. will not be injured by it and the best proof is that his professional hours never were so occupied as now. We were more anxious about our dear foreign friends who could only hear through the English papers which are generally very sneering on Irish matters – but happily all is over now and our enemy has been signally defeated in her efforts to injure us.18
The papers – both popular and medical – while lamenting the whole ‘melancholy transaction’, had indeed been broadly supportive.19 They condemned the ‘demoniacal’ Miss Travers for her ‘scandalous, unwomanly, vulgar and degrading’ conduct, while saluting Sir William’s professional eminence and his wife’s injured dignity. The few public voices of dissent (led by the ophthalmologist Arthur Jacob in the Dublin Medical Press) could be put down to professional rivalry.20 Private reactions were more varied. Not quite ‘all Dublin’ did side with the Wildes. There were a good many who enjoyed the discomfort of so conspicuous a pair. Tall poppies were there to be cut down. To unsympathetic viewers the case confirmed that ‘Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid [ape-like] person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice [for “funking” the witness box] and that his wife was a highfalutin’ pretentious creature whose pride was as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate verse-making.’21 For others the debacle simply provided an opportunity for humour and chaff. The students of Trinity College Dublin delighted in the details of the case; one undergraduate ditty began:
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.22
But any sense of embarrassment was to be outfaced. Dublin society was not large enough to allow for escape (the Wildes continued to meet Isaac Butt on what appear to have been terms of friendship, or at least civility).23 The family still had many friends and admirers. There was much sympathy for Speranza.24 And as for Sir William – whatever the exact truth of the matter – there were many men in his circle who were reluctant to condemn him for such peccadillos. Dublin retained something of its permissive eighteenth-century air, and was little inclined to moral censure. Sir William’s practice continued to prosper, which was just as well since he was faced with the vexing business of raising the legal costs.
It had been a bruising episode for the whole family, but Oscar and Willie were able to return to school at the beginning of 1865 with at least some feeling of reassurance – and some sense that their privileged place in the world remained secure.* Portora provided distraction from the cares of home. The boys enjoyed it in different ways. Willie’s enthusiastic engagement with the details of school life seemed to license his younger brother’s more detached stance. Little interested in lessons, Oscar escaped into his own books, and his own thoughts. It was said of him that he got ‘quicker into a book than any boy that ever lived’.25 Literature gave him a realm over which he could hold sway: from his earliest childhood, he recalled, ‘I used to identify myself with every distinguished character I read about’.26 Oscar’s intelligence, nevertheless, did make itself known. In the summer of 1866 he was awarded a lower school classics prize (Willie, as in the two previous years, also gained one – together, on this occasion, with Mr Robinson’s special ‘prize in classics’ and a drawing prize).
Away from school, the long summer holidays were spent largely at Moytura. The house offered the family a retreat from Dublin life – and Dublin gossip. The place became Sir William’s great passion. It was there that Oscar, under his father’s instruction, learnt to be not merely an Irishman but a countryman and a Celt.† He became imbued with the ‘wild magnificent beauty’ of the western landscape, its bare hills and changing skies. The ‘intensity of nature’ on such a scale impressed him.27 There was boating on Lough Corrib. Oscar learnt to fish for the ‘great melancholy carp’ that never moved from the bottom of the lake, unless lured from the depths by the magic of Gaelic song. Oscar – though he does not seem to have progressed far in the old Irish language – always retained a memory of one of these airs, with its mournful opening, Athá mé in mu codladh, agus ná dúishe mé (‘I am asleep, and do not wake me’).28 He learnt to shoot. And he came to know some of the neighbouring landowning families who had children of his own age: the Martins at Ross House and the Moores of Moore Hall. Oscar and Willie, as they grew into their teens, would sometimes row up the lough to Carra to spend the day at Moore Hall. Old Mr Moore was greatly impressed by them, thinking his own four sons ‘dunces’ in comparison.29
Oscar’s
developing imagination was stimulated, too, by exploring the ancient Celtic remains in the locality. He and Willie assisted their father with the book he was preparing on the area’s history and antiquities – ‘taking rubbings and measurements’ of archaeological sites – as well as listening to mythic tales about the days of yore.30 Sir William’s ‘passion for the past’ was supported by that rare gift ‘which converts a piece of stone into a text for a glowing romance’. Rambling across the countryside with Oscar and Willie, he would linger happily over some ‘piece of antiquity, filled with the actual delight of building up pictures of the past and its departed glories’.31 All around were scenes of ancient heroism, where Nuada, king of the Dananns, had led his victorious forces against the Firbolgs. This was a world – both historic and ethnological – that the young Oscar readily adopted as part of his own identity. From his father he learnt to see himself as an heir to the ‘bold, honourable, daring’ and ‘intellectually superior’ Danann Celts. It was a rich inheritance, given William Wilde’s belief (shared by many of his antiquarian fellows) that these Celts came of the same stock as the ancient Greeks, and shared many of their exalted characteristics. Lady Wilde was delighted to suppose that the Celts held in common with the Greeks a love of ‘glory, beauty and distinction’ – and that, like the Greeks, they hated ‘toil’ and despised ‘trade’: for both peoples the ‘highest honours were given to learning and poetry’.32
Ireland’s medieval past was also much in evidence at Moytura, and offered its own stimulus to the imagination. When, during the summer of 1866, Oscar and his father came across a curious stone-built ruin at Inishmain near Lough Mask, Sir William persuaded himself that it must have been the ‘penitentiary’ for the nearby abbey. An image of it – drawn by Mr Wakeman – was duly published in his book, together with a gratifying caption explaining that the structure had been discovered ‘by the author and his son Oscar’.33
But, whatever the excitements of the past, the cares of the present always threatened to break in: 1866 ended with the sad death – by drowning – of Dr Steele’s eldest son, Frederick, another victim of the cold waters of Lough Erne. A highly promising classicist, he had just won a scholarship from Portora to Trinity College Dublin. His death cast a pall over the school. For Oscar, though, this tragedy was soon eclipsed by an even greater one. On 23 February 1867 his sister, Isola, died suddenly. Recovering from a brief bout of fever, she had been sent to recuperate at Edgeworthstown, some 65 miles west of Dublin, where her uncle, Rev. William Noble (married to Sir William’s sister), was rector. Her condition, however, had worsened and, following ‘a sudden effusion on the brain’, she died. She was just nine years old.
It was a devastating blow. Isola had been a remarkable little girl. The doctor who attended her at Edgeworthstown Rectory thought her ‘the most gifted and loveable child’ that he had ever seen.34 Sir William was ‘crushed by sorrow’ at her death. She had been his idol.35 ‘Isola was the radiant angel of our home,’ Lady Wilde lamented to Lotten von Kraemer, ‘and so bright and strong and joyous. We never dreamed the word death was meant for her.’36 During her brief life she had become the happy pivot around which so many familial relationships turned. That dynamic was destroyed.
There seems to have existed a special bond between the twelve-year-old Oscar and his young sister.37 She had offered him, perhaps, a more sympathetic companionship than the prosaic Willie. He spoke of her as ‘embodied sunshine’, a ‘wonderful creature, so gay and high spirited’. Certainly he was ‘inconsolable’ at her loss. Taken to Edgeworthstown (maybe for the funeral) his lonely grief sought vent ‘in long and frequent visits’ to her grave in the village cemetery. He carefully preserved a lock of ‘My Isola’s hair’, decorating the envelope in which it was held with elaborate images of love, hope and redemption: linked initials, radiant crosses, lettered scrolls, laurel wreaths, a jewelled crown. Nor was pictorial art the only way in which he strove to express his emotion. He found solace, too, in verse, producing several ‘touching, albeit boyish, poetic effusions’. They were a first hint that Oscar might be a ‘votary of the Muses’.38
The Edgeworthstown doctor was struck by the intensity of Oscar’s feeling. He was impressed too by the boy’s intelligence. As he later recalled, he instituted ‘in conversation with his uncle, a comparison between [Oscar] and his elder brother, Willie, a very clever lad, and our assigning the meed of superiority in mental depth to “Ossie”.’ It was a shrewd observation, for in the conventional sphere of school life Willie continued to dominate. He was, again, a serial award winner at the 1867 prize day, while Oscar received only a single ‘highly commended’.39 Dr Steele would frequently hold Willie up as an example to his younger brother.40 Oscar, however, was becoming increasingly sure of his own developing mental powers. His mother too, always on the alert for excellence, seems to have recognized their special force. When quizzed by a friend about her two schoolboy sons, she is reported to have said, ‘Oh, Willie is all right, but as for Oscar, he will turn out something wonderful.’41
She had a chance to assess the boys at close quarters during the summer holidays of 1867, when she took them over to France for three weeks (Sir William remained at Moytura). It was a release from the sadness of life at home, and, for Oscar, a thrilling introduction to a new country and a new culture. From that first encounter, so he later claimed, he became ‘passionately fond of the French character’ – a character, he liked to believe, ‘having some kinship with that peculiar to the Irish nation’.42 The little party visited Paris, then the most exciting city in the world. An Exposition Universelle was in full swing, housed in a vast temporary ‘palais’ on the Champs de Mars, surrounded by amusement parks and pleasure gardens. Among the displays of scientific invention, mechanical innovation and cultural diversity there was a Swedish peasant village, some Chinese violin players, a promotion for Steinway pianos and a revelatory exhibition of Japanese art. The family returned home lit up by the experience, and with a distinct sense that, beside the brilliance of Paris, Dublin might be only ‘a little provincial town’.43
Almost from the moment of their return, the pace of Oscar’s progress seemed to quicken. Although there is no evidence that the visit had a beneficial effect on his French, his thorough mastery of the rudiments of Latin and Greek was confirmed when his career in the lower school closed with him winning three classics prizes at the 1868 prize day.44 He also gained an award for drawing.
Oscar arrived in the upper school as a very young looking thirteen-year-old. To one contemporary – who entered Portora at that time – ‘he was then, as he remained for some years after, extremely boyish in nature, very mobile, almost restless when out of the school-room’. Almost everything, though, about the teenage Oscar carried some suggestion of his growing sense of self, of style and of humour. All three qualities are discernible – beneath the schoolboy concerns and erratic punctuation – in the illustrated letter he sent his mother on 5 September 1868 (the first of his letters to survive, and the only one from his schooldays):
Darling Mama,
The hamper came today, I never got such a jolly surprise, many thanks for it, it was more than kind of you to think of it. The grapes and pears are delicious and so cooling, but the blancmange got a little sour, I suppose by the knocking about, but the rest all came safe.
Don’t forget please to send me the National Review, is it not issued today?
The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie’s, mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac, but it is too early to wear them yet, the weather is so hot.
We went down to the horrid regatta on Thursday last. It was very jolly. There was a yacht race.
You never told me anything about the publisher in Glasgow. What does he say and have you written to Aunt Warren on the green note paper?
We played the officers of the 27th Regiment now stationed in Enniskillen a few days ago and beat them hollow by about seventy runs.
You may imagine my delight this morning when
I got Papa’s letter saying he had sent a hamper.
Now dear Mamma, I must bid you goodbye as the post goes very soon.
Many thanks for letting me paint. With love to Papa, ever your affectionate son,
Oscar Wilde.
He gives signs of a dandified assurance in his discrimination over his own ‘quite scarlet’ and lilac shirts, and reveals an artistic concern at being allowed to continue his painting lessons. There is a neat paradoxical turn in the ‘horrid’ regatta having been so ‘very jolly’, a subversive mischief in his hope that ‘Aunt Warren’ (his mother’s ultra-conventional sister, Emily Thomasine Warren, wife of an officer in the British army) might have received a letter on Nationalist-tinged green notepaper; and a playful cod-melodrama in his vision of ‘ye hamperless boy’.
Oscar allied himself with his ‘darling’ mama’s interests, both literary and patriotic. The National Review, which he hoped to receive, was a new Dublin-based periodical that had published her verse ‘To Ireland’ in the previous number; the poem would be used as the ‘dedication’ in a new edition of her collected poetry produced by Cameron and Ferguson, the Glasgow publishers he mentions.45 More than this, though, he accepted his mother’s whole vision of the world: grand, extravagant and bright with possibility. He accepted (and always retained) her vision of herself as ‘one of the great figures of the world’ and her vision of himself as ‘something wonderful’.46 All his letters to her from school, it seems, reflected elements of this shared understanding. Certainly Lady Wilde loved the promise that they showed – recalling them as ‘wonderful and often real literature’.47 They were, however, a private performance.
Willie remained always the larger public presence. Two years above Oscar, he had grown into ‘something of a character’ – ‘clever, erratic and full of vitality’.48 He was steeped in the life of the school. Although he took only a modest part in games, he knew all about football and cricket.49 He may not have been a systematic scholar, but he was still a good one. He was approved of by the masters and liked by his schoolfellows. He made a point of being ‘kind and friendly with the younger boys’. He played the piano, with real feeling – and tolerable accuracy – and would entertain the juniors with impromptu recitals. He told a good story. There was a pleasant air of Falstaffian absurdity about him: he was apt to be boastful and prone to be teased about it.50 His nickname was ‘Blue Blood’. He had – together with Oscar – inherited his father’s swarthy open-pored complexion; and on account of it, was, like his father, often considered to look ‘dirty’. On one occasion, defending himself from this charge, he had claimed that he only looked grubby because – as an O’Flahertie and thus a descendant of the kings of Connaught – his blood was blue, rather than red.51
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