Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  61 Frederic William Burton, the one Irish painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a connection of WRWW’s, had moved to London in 1874 to become director of the National Gallery.

  62 Algernon C. Swinburne and William Michael Rossetti, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (1868), 44–5.

  63 ‘The Theories of a Poet’, New York Daily Tribune, 8 January 1882, 7.

  64 ES, in Harris, 23.

  65 J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), 414.

  66 Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 415.

  67 Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 309; Crabbe, Wordsworth and Goethe are also seen as inheriting from the naturalistic tradition of Theocritus; OW, ‘Mental Photograph’.

  68 Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 422n.

  69 Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), 100.

  70 Harris, 24.

  71 Harris, 22; OW added a Whistlerian butterfly to his picture.

  72 OW ms notebook (Berg); the poem is almost certainly unfinished. The additional stanza may have been intended for it: ‘What shall we give thee? lies of men / Enough thou hast – enough to spare; / For men wax sick and faint with pain / Because thy face and form are fair, / Because thy form is fair to see, And lithe limbs, fashioned amourously.’ Swinburne’s Rosamond was published together with The Queen Mother. His last published play was the similarly named Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899). It is interesting that the title of OW’s poem ‘Ye Shall Be Gods’ provides an echo of Eritis Sicut Deus (‘You Shall Be As God), the novel that JFW had translated as The First Temptation.

  73 Philosophical Society minute book, re. meetings on 10 December 1870 and 1 Feb 1872. Other indications of the vitality of literary culture at the ‘Phil’ are Charles Frizzell’s paper on Chatterton (2 February 1871) and Professor Dowden’s paper on Walt Whitman (4 May 1871).

  74 Harris, 2.

  75 Poems by WCKW in Kottabos: ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’, (Hilary 1872), 261; ‘Le Voile’ (Trinity 1872), 292–3; ‘Nil restat ni quale decorum puellae (from Victor Hugo)’ (Michaelmas 1872) 312; ‘Saith the Poet’ and ‘Riposta’ (Trinity 1873), 4–5; ‘Italia (from Vincenzo da Filicaia’ (Hilary 1874), 80–1; ‘Love’s Axioms’ (Michaelmas 1874), 124; ‘Les Lendemains’ (Michaelmas 1874), 134–5; ‘Ad Amicam Meam (from the French of Victor Hugo)’ (Hilary 1875), 161; ‘Schubert’ (Hilary 1876), 245.

  76 Mahaffy, ‘Life of Trinity College Dublin’, in Coakley, 136.

  77 Harris, 25.

  78 Horace Wilkins, ‘Memories of Trinity Days’, in Mikhail, 2.

  79 Ellmann, 557 n.61: ‘Letter to the editor of the Irish Times 28 Aug 1954, from Murroe Fitzgerald. In 1919, he says, he prepared a claim for a woman who had been nannie for both the Wilde children and Edward Carson at Dangarvan when she was fifteen years old, in 1859’; Hyde, Oscar, 15; Sherard, Life, 115. Carson never rose out of the second rank while at TCD.

  80 ALS Reggie Turner to A. J. A. Symons, 26 August 1935 (Clark). OW probably overstated in telling Turner that he and Carson went about ‘arm in arm’; Mahaffy, quoted in Coakley, 143. Edward Marjoribanks, The Life of Lord Carson (1932), 13, states that Carson, even at this period, disapproved of OW’s ‘flippant approach to life’, but is a very unreliable source for the relations between Carson and Wilde.

  81 Hyde, Oscar, 15.

  82 Harris, 26; Sullivan matriculated in June 1872, aged nineteen (TCD Register).

  83 JFW to LVK, 3 April 1870, Tipper, Kraemer, 51–2. Although in this letter JFW says the receptions ran ‘from 3 to 6’, an invitation card at the BL is printed: ‘At Home, Saturday, 4 pm to 7 pm. Conversazione.’

  84 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Taranaki Herald (NZ), 13 April 1895, 2.

  85 Melville, 115 n.24.

  86 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Taranaki Herald, 2.

  87 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Taranaki Herald, 2.

  88 Melville, 116.

  89 Melville, 116.

  90 Harris, 23; OW and WRWW attended the ‘Vice-regal Reception’ given by Lord Lieutenant and Countess Spencer; Freeman’s Journal, 25 February 1874.

  91 Harris, 28.

  92 Sherard, Life, 115. Each term began with term exams, followed, later, by exams for honours and prizes.

  93 Purser, Notes on Portora.

  94 Mahaffy, ‘Life of Trinity College Dublin’, in Coakley, 136.

  95 Sherard, Life, 119, lists all OW’s marks.

  96 Purser, Notes on Portora. This achievement dispelled the idea, apparently held by some of his contemporaries, that OW was – academically – only ‘an average sort of man’. Sherard, Life, 116–17.

  97 Hyde, Oscar, 13; the room was ‘believed to have been on the first floor of [staircase] No. 18’. He also states that he ‘shared [the] rooms’ with WCKW.

  98 Harris, 23.

  99 Sile O’Shea (Assistant Librarian at the King’s Inns) to M. Sturgis, 10 November 2015. At that time students for the Irish Bar were obliged also to ‘keep terms’ at one of the English Inns of Court; it was, though, only necessary for them to eat three dinners at the Inn per term in order to fulfil this requirement. WCKW kept the following terms at the King’s Inns: Hilary and Easter 1872; Hilary, Easter, Trinity and Michaelmas 1873; Hilary 1874; Hilary and Easter 1875; and at the Middle Temple Inn: Michaelmas 1872; Hilary and Easter 1873; Hilary 1875. He does not appear to have kept term at either Inn during Easter, Trinity and Michaelmas 1874.

  100 Freeman’s Journal, 21 January 1874. It was the same motion on which WCKW had spoken two years earlier, on 17 January and 7 February 1872. It is not recorded whether OW’s side carried the motion.

  101 Harris, 23.

  102 Harris, 25.

  103 Mikhail, 2.

  104 Ellmann, 29, suggests OW was caricatured in the Philosophical Society ‘Suggestions Book’ (TCD MS 2058), but the image of two figures contemplating a poster advertising a ‘Midnight Meeting’ [such as were regularly held for the reform of prostitutes], and captioned ‘The Benevolent Bobby’ (Crozier), ‘That Prig of a Policeman’ (Wilde) is very hard to decipher. It is possible that the taller clean-shaven figure, with his hair falling over his collar, is supposed to be OW, although it does not look very like him. It may, perhaps more probably, be WCKW. The smaller bearded figure (whom Ellmann supposed to be OW) bears a passable resemblance to later photographs of John B. Crozier, OW’s TCD contemporary and the future archbishop of Armagh. But why is ‘Wilde’ (whether OW or WCKW) wearing a policeman’s hat, and why is he captioned as (or shown remarking) ‘That prig of a policeman’? These are mysteries that await elucidation.

  105 TCD contemporary, quoted in Hyde, Oscar, 14.

  106 Horace Wilkins, in Mikhail, 2; Hyde, 14; ES, in Harris, 23.

  107 Hyde, Oscar, 16, quoting ES; Harris, 23, refers to the don as John Townsend Mills, but in the TCD registers, and other sources, he appears merely as Townsend Mills. He took his degree in 1864, and his MA in 1867.

  108 Sherard, Life, 96.

  109 O’Sullivan, 189.

  110 Harris, 23; Whistler began using his stylized butterfly signature at the beginning of the 1870s. Several of the Nocturnes that he exhibited at Dudley Gallery in 1872 were signed in this way.

  111 Fr Dunne to the secretary of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland [n.d.] (Clark): ‘Even in his early years while still in his Father’s house in Dublin he was moving towards the Catholic Church under Jesuit influence, I believe’; Hunter-Blair; Katharine Tynan, Twenty-five Years (1913), 130.

  112 OW, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, 3 December 1900 (reproduced in Intentions, October 2010); Alice ffrench recalled talking to OW on ‘religious matters’ when he was at Trinity and noting that he ‘seemed to hold decidedly… High Church views’, though she (erroneously) assumed they were ‘advanced Anglican’ rather than Catholic. W. E. Redway to Robert Ross, 17 July 1924 (Ross Memorial Collection, University College, Oxford).

  113 Croft-Cooke, 33; the TCD chapel ‘communion book’ has no record of Wilde taking the sacrament during his time at college.


  114 CL, 1226; OW, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, 3 December 1900; Tynan, Twenty-five Years, 130; Fr Dunne to the secretary of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland [n.d.] (Clark).

  115 William Dillon, The Life of John Mitchell (1888), 2:285, refers to ‘a pleasant dinner’ chez Wilde, in September 1874, at which ‘Father Thomas Burke, the celebrated Dominican’, was present.

  116 CL, 1226; Stanford, ‘Robert Yelverton Tyrrell’, 9; in 1893 when CMW was considering becoming a Catholic, OW discouraged her, saying ‘it would be the ruin to the boys [their sons]… No Catholic boy is allowed to go to Eton or to take a scholarship at the University.’ Moyle, 229.

  117 Another able Trinity classicist, of the half-generation before, Henry B. Leech, had moved on from Dublin to take his degree at Cambridge, subsequently becoming a fellow at Gonville and Caius; William Ridgeway would follow a similar path (The Times, 26 March 1921).

  118 Typescript of Robert Ross’s introduction to the German edition of OW’s works (Clark). ‘It was Sir Henry Dyke Acland and Professor Mahaffy who persuaded Sir William Wilde to allow his son to go to Oxford.’ WRWW was relieved that OW would be escaping from his Jesuit connections by going to Oxford (Hunter-Blair), so this may have been one of the arguments used by Mahaffy to persuade him.

  119 Hyde, Oscar, 15.

  120 Louis Perrin, of 12 Merrion Square, matriculated October 1873; Peter Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, Wildean, 19 (2001), 24.

  121 Oxford Handbook; Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, 19, 26; G. T. Atkinson, Cornhill, in Mikhail, 16; the examination was held jointly with candidates for scholarships to Worcester College.

  122 JFW to [John Hilson], 5 May [1875], Tipper, Hilson, 75, where the letter is [mis]dated ‘1876’; JFW to Rosalie Olivecrona, Melville, 122; Ellmann, 34.

  123 Ellmann, 34; Schroeder, 14; Carlyle made two visits to Ireland, in 1846 and 1849; JFW had a copy of Tennyson’s poems inscribed by Carlyle. It is unclear whether this was also the volume in which Carlyle had written the lines of Goethe.

  124 Wilfrid Hugh Chesson, ‘A Reminiscence of the 1898’, Bookman, 34 (1911), 389–94, in Mikhail, 378.

  125 For OW’s place at the head of the list, see Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, 26; for the Wildes’ travels see JFW to Rosalie Olivecrona, ‘late July’ 1874, quoted in Melville, 122; for Sphinx see Isobel Murray, ed., Oscar Wilde: Complete Poetry (1997), 199.

  126 Mahaffy, Social Life in Ancient Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), viii, dated ‘4 November 1874’; Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 24.

  127 Hyde, Oscar, 17, follows Mahaffy’s biographers, in suggesting that this passage might have been one of Wilde’s ‘additions’ to the text, given that it embodies the ‘Art’s for art’s sake’ creed that he later espoused. But it seems more likely that, at this stage, the current of influence was still running the other way.

  128 Plato, Symposium, 202–12. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1996), xiv–xv.

  129 Mahaffy, Social Life in Ancient Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), 306–12.

  130 Oliver St John Gogarty, As I was going down Sackville Street (1937), 239.

  Part II: The Nightingale and the Rose

  Chapter 1: Young Oxford

  1 Margaret L. Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, Fortnightly Review, 150 (1941), 276.

  2 Harris, 26; OW called Oxford ‘the most beautiful city I had ever been in’, Hofer & Scharnhorst, 19; ‘The Theories of a Poet’, New York Tribune, 8 January 1882.

  3 Peter Vernier, ‘Poem-sites at Magdalen: Oscar Wilde’, Wildean, 23 (2003), 38. The rooms, ‘Chaplain’s I, 2[nd floor] Pair Right’ are still undergraduate accommodation.

  4 Harris, 26.

  5 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 16.

  6 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 16.

  7 Arthur Shadwell to A. J. A. Symons, 7 July 1931 (Clark).

  8 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’, NYT, 4 February 1882.

  9 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  10 Bodley diary, 25 October 1874. They met again in the Pembroke Junior Common Room after a dinner; [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  11 Dr Bulley’s notebook (Magdalen College archive), lists ninety-nine undergraduates at the 1874 terminal examination; some thirty are listed as in lodgings.

  12 Besides OW’s fellow demy, G. T. Atkinson, there was only Arthur Edmund Street, the oldest son of G. E. Street, the Oxford architect to whom William Morris had been apprenticed. There is, however, no evidence of any friendship between Street and OW.

  13 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  14 Hunter-Blair, 117.

  15 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 17; Harold Hartley, Eighty-Eight Not Out (1939), 269. Hartley was told by an Oxford contemporary that when OW first came up he was keen to take part in games, but ‘physically he was quite unfitted. Yet he showed great courage in persisting.’ While others laughed at him, Hartley’s friend ‘backed him up and endeavoured to help him’; OW was always grateful for this kindness.

  16 Oliver St John Gogarty, ‘A Picture of Oscar Wilde’, 50.

  17 Atkinson, in Mikhail 17.

  18 B. De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, being the Recollections of some Seventy Years of the Life of a very ordinary Gentleman and his Friends in Three Reigns (1924), 75; even in Dr Bulley’s notebook he is listed as having been only two years at TCD.

  19 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 17.

  20 Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, xiii.

  21 Smith & Helfand, 77–8, 108; Wright, 85: OW bought the five volumes of the 1875 edition of Jowett’s translations of Plato’s Dialogues. ‘Max Müller loves him,’ JFW reported proudly of her son’s achievements; JWF to [John Hilson], 5 May [1875], Tipper, Hilson. For OW’s knowledge of Green’s ideas at a slightly later date, see Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 155–6.

  22 John Ruskin to JFW, 5 December 1879 (TCD), thanking her ‘for having taught your son to care for me’.

  23 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 19.

  24 OW, ‘English Poetesses’, The Queen, 8 December 1888, OET VII, 124; Harris, 28, says that Ruskin ‘was an inspiration when he sang’.

  25 Harris, 28.

  26 OW, in Harris, 28.

  27 Hofer & Scharnhorst, 19; ‘The Theories of a Poet’, New York Tribune, 8 January 1882.

  28 OW quotes from this passage in his ‘Oxford Commonplace Book’, Smith & Helfand, 145, 197; and, more fully, in his lecture ‘The English Renaissance in Art’.

  29 Hofer & Scharnhorst, 22–3; ‘The Science of the Beautiful’, New York World, 8 January 1882.

  30 ‘University and City Intelligence’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 7 November 1874; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 7 November 1874, 6.

  31 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’, makes it clear that OW did not join the road-makers in November 1874. OW gave various fanciful accounts of his connection with the road-making scheme; e.g. Hofer & Scharnhorst 19; ‘The Theories of a Poet’, New York Tribune, 8 January 1882. The fullest and most inventive is in his 1882 lecture ‘Art and the Handicraftsman’: ‘Well, we were coming down the [High] street – a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or cricket-field – when Ruskin going up to lecture in cap and gown met us. He seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat. He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all labour there was something noble. Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he wished. So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the villager
s could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank – a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road. And what became of the road? Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly – in the middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for the next term there was no leader, and the “diggers”, as they called us, fell asunder.’

  32 Dr Bulley’s notebook. Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, 26, points out that during OW’s five years at Magdalen, only ten students – including OW – were placed in this category.

  33 Dr Bulley’s notebook; Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, 26.

  34 [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  35 De Sales La Terrière, Days that Are Gone, 74.

  36 Spiers and Sons’ bill for Oscar O’Flahertie Wilde Esq, ‘Ross Collection’ Univ; reproduced in Wildean, 44 (2014), 45. OW’s first purchase, ‘2 china jugs’, made on 19 January 1875, is misdated by Ellmann, 44, to Wilde’s ‘first term’, Michaelmas 1874, and misdescribed as ‘two blue mugs’.

  37 Harris, 27; WRWW to OW, Dublin, 1874, re. some money which he expects from ‘Maturin’ and proposes to divide; he will credit OW with his share, £315 (Dulau); Anne Clark Amor, ‘Heading for Disaster: Oscar’s Finances’, Wildean, 44 (2014), 37, suggests WRWW gave OW an allowance of £300 p.a., but gives no reference. The amount seems unlikely.

  38 Bodley, ‘Diary’; [Bodley], ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  39 Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882), 99; CL, 42, and OW’s ‘scrapbook’ (National Library of Congress, Washington).