Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  76 Shane Leslie, Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley (1931), 17.

  77 CL, 20; Hunter-Blair, 123; there were 23 Firsts among the 118 examinees. Wilde’s fellow Magdalen demy, Atkinson, also got a First.

  78 CL, 20; The Times, 6 July 1876.

  79 CL, 20.

  80 OW’s Spiers bill lists the purchase, for £3 15s, on 8 July 1876; CL, 28.

  81 CL, 23.

  82 CL, 21–3.

  83 CL, 22.

  84 CL, 25.

  85 CL, 39, 41.

  86 CL, 25.

  87 CL, 27; O’Sullivan, 66.

  88 CL, 27–8.

  89 Cathcart & Hemple & Co [Solicitors] to Oscar OF F. [sic] Wilde, 1 May 1876 (Clark); advertisements appeared in Freeman’s Journal on 24 August, 29 August and 4 September 1876, listing the houses as ‘Property of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde, Esq’.

  90 CL, 30.

  91 CL, 30, 31.

  92 JFW to OW, [August 1876], in Tipper, Oscar, 34–5.

  93 Arthur Llewelyn Roberts to OW [5 July 1876], (Clark); Roberts was a Magdalen contemporary, and later secretary of the Royal Literary Fund.

  94 Edith J. Kingsford to OW, 11 October 1876 (Clark).

  95 OW to Reginald Harding, CL, 29, although OW does not mention her name, and gives her age as ‘seventeen’ the letter almost certainly refers to Florence. Her birthday was on 17 July.

  96 Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (1997), 16–17, 53; CL, 29; CL, 71–3.

  97 OET I, 17; OW ms at Morgan Library (New York) opening: ‘I saw her thick locks like a mass / of honey dripping from the pin, / Each separate hair was like the thin / gold thread within a Venice glass.’

  98 OW notebook at Beinecke Library, Yale. The first fifty-six pages contain notes on Roman history; two pages at the back of the notebook contain scrawled aphorisms. It also contains – reversed – a pencil draft of his play Vera.

  99 Ethel Smyth, Impressions that Remained (1919), 116; Smyth was being chaperoned by Mrs Evelyn Wood. Freeman’s Journal, 7 September 1876, lists both ‘W. C. K Wilde’ and ‘The Hon Mrs Wood, family, and suite’ as having ‘left Kingstown for England’.

  100 CL, 32.

  101 Freeman’s Journal, 9 August 1878, ‘Law Intelligence’ gives the un-met ‘reserve price’; ms ‘Estimate’, 25 October 1876 (Clark). Although hard to make out, the total seems to be £67; Freeman’s Journal, 20 November 1876.

  102 JFW to OW [October 1876], in Tipper, Oscar, 42–3.

  103 The ceremony took place on 27 November 1876; Bereisner, ‘Oscar Wilde: A University Mason’; OW’s account with G. H. Osmond, St Aldate’s, Oxford, reproduced in Wildean, 44 (2014), 43.

  104 CL, 36; Hunter-Blair, 120–1.

  105 CL, 35–6. The ring was preserved at Magdalen College but was stolen in 2002; the inscription, in Greek, ran round the outside with, on the inside, ‘OFFW & RRH to WWW, 1876’.

  Chapter 3: Hellas!

  1 CL, 34–6; Harris, 31.

  2 CL, 34–5; Arthur Dampier May, painter, b. 1857.

  3 ‘Gower Lodge’, acquired that year; see Gower, Lord Ronald, Bric-a-Brac (1888).

  4 ‘Mr. Punch’s Select Committees’, ‘No. I: On Drawing-Room Decoration’, Punch, 12 May 1877, 216.

  5 Mary Ward (Mrs Humphrey Ward), quoted in L. W. B. Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (2016), 472. The Wards moved into Bradmore Road, North Oxford, in 1872.

  6 Harry Quilter, ‘The New Renaissance or the Gospel of Intensity’, Macmillan’s Magazine, September 1880, 392–3.

  7 George Macmillan to Alexander Macmillan, 28 March 1877; CL, 43–4.

  8 CL, 40, 42; OW’s Spiers bill, purchase made in January 1877, together with ‘six coffee cups and saucers’.

  9 CL, 38–40.

  10 CL, 389; WCKW had been experimenting with the form too. He seems to have considered poetry writing as a useful weapon in his amatory arsenal. He had one sonnet (on Schubert) published in London Society, and several more in Kottabos.

  11 Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 408.

  12 G. T. Atkinson, in Mikhail, 19.

  13 CL, 42.

  14 CL, 42. JFW to OW [Feb 1876], in Tipper, Oscar, 20–1, describes Lady Westmeath approvingly as ‘young, Greek head, ivy wreath’.

  15 CL, 28–9; the chorister Eric Richard Ward was born in 1863 at Bedminster, Somerset. Charles John Todd had been one of the guests at OW’s dinner at the 1876 Commem. He became a vicar.

  16 OET I, 10, 42; ‘Choir Boy’ is an almost Betjeman-esque fragment, beginning:

  Every day in the chapel choir

  Praises to God I sing,

  And they say that my voice mounts higher,

  Than even a bird can sing –

  Though the organ be loudly pealing,

  It reaches the heavens blue,

  Up through the vaulted ceiling

  To where God sits out of view.

  17 CL, 39.

  18 Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters and by Deceased Masters of the British School, Royal Academy, 1876; the exhibition opened in December 1876.

  19 CL, 42.

  20 CL, 41.

  21 Although OW’s own desire for success was quite enough to ensure that he would work hard, on 7 March 1878 J. A. Symonds sent him a letter – and a photograph – admonishing, ‘Get a good degree if you can. It is worth something in after life.’ (The Oscar Wilde collection of John B. Stetson, cat. item 407).

  22 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 17; Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’.

  23 Atkinson, in Mikhail, 18; Mr Bulley’s ‘President’s Notebook’ (Magdalen), 30 May 1875, records that Prince Leopold, together with Princess Alice and Prince Louis of Hesse ‘attended Chapel Service this day, at 5 o’clock… They are on a visit to the Dean of Christ Church’; Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, 28–9.

  24 CL, 39.

  25 Hunter-Blair, 31–2, where he misdates the incident to ‘early in 1876’; CL, 41, 43.

  26 G. Macmillan to A. Macmillan, CL, 44.

  27 G. Macmillan to A. Macmillan, CL, 44; G. Macmillan to Margaret Macmillan, quoted in Ellmann, 68.

  28 OW, ‘Tomb of Keats’, OET VI, 11–12; Ruskin, Modern Painters, II.

  29 OW, ‘Mental Photograph’, 44–5; OW, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, OET VI, 5.

  30 OW later (1881) changed the phrase ‘honied hours’ to ‘Hellenic hours’; OET I, 33, 234.

  31 Letter from Mahaffy to his wife [2 April, 1877], quoted in Starkie, Scholars and Gypsies, 100–1.

  32 G. Macmillan to Margaret Macmillan, 29 March 1877, in Ellmann, 68.

  33 G. Macmillan to A. Macmillan, CL, 44.

  34 OW, ms notes on Greece (Berg).

  35 CL, 45.

  36 John Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece (1878), 48; [George A. Macmillan], ‘A Ride Across the Peloponnese’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 123, no. 751 (May 1878), 550; OW ms notes on Greece (Berg).

  37 G. Macmillan to Malcolm Macmillan, 14 April 1877 (Hellenic Society); OW, Grosvenor Gallery review, 1877, OET VI, 1–11.

  38 OW, OET I, ‘Santa Decca’, 44.

  39 Blackwood’s, 551.

  40 Blackwood’s, 552, 554–6.

  41 Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, 290.

  42 Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 53: OW made this remark to Ricketts apropos the Hermes of Praxiteles, which was unearthed at Olympia the week after OW’s visit, and which he never saw at first hand.

  43 OET I, 34–5.

  44 [Otho Lloyd], ‘Stray Recollections’ by his ‘brother in law’, The Soil, 1, no. 4 (1914), 155–6.

  45 Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, 404; G. Macmillan to Malcolm Macmillan (Hellenic Society); Blackwood’s, 558, 561; Starkie, Scholars and Gypsies, 100–1.

  46 G. Macmillan to Malcolm Macmillan, 14 April 1877 (Hellenic Society).

  47 G. Macmillan to Malcolm Macmillan (Hellenic Society); Blackwood’s, 563–4. It is worth recapping OW’s full Peloponnesian itinerary (derived from G. Macmillan’s ‘A Ride Across the Peloponnese’ article and his letters) as i
t is incorrectly given in Ellmann: 1 April (Easter Sunday), leave Brindisi by steamer at 8.30 pm; 2 April, morning, arrive at Corfu; 3 April, depart Corfu at 5 pm by steamer; 4 April, arrive Zante, pick up a lift on a sailing boat ‘through the kindness of an American merchant’, arrive Katakolo 5.30 pm, spend night at Pyrgos; 5 April, ride to Olympia and look over site, spend night at Druva; 6 April, ride to Andritzena; 7 April, visit Bassae, spend second night at Andritzena; 8 April (Greek Orthodox Easter), attend Easter Service in the early hours of the morning, then ride to Megalopolis, arriving in the early evening; 9 April, ride to Tripoliza; 10 April, visit Tegea, then take carriage to Argos, spend night at Argos; 11 April, visit Argos in the morning, then visit Mycenae in the afternoon, return to Argos before setting off to Nauplia; 12 April, ride from Nauplia to Epidaurus, take sailing boat from Epidaurus to Piraeus.

  48 G. Macmillan to Malcolm Macmillan (Hellenic Society).

  49 G. Macmillan to Olive Macmillan, 17 April 1877 (Hellenic Society).

  50 ‘George Fleming’ [J. C. Fletcher], Mirage, 3 vols (1877), 2:94.

  51 Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies in Greece, 55.

  52 G. Macmillan to Olive Macmillan (Hellenic Society).

  53 CL, 66.

  54 G. Macmillan to Olive Macmillan (Hellenic Society).

  55 [Otho Lloyd], ‘Stray Recollections’, 155–6.

  56 [Otho Lloyd], ‘Stray Recollections’, 155–6. Otho Lloyd to A. J. A. Symons, 22 May 1937 (Clark).

  57 It is not known which sonnet he wrote in the immediate aftermath of his audience. The two likely candidates are ‘Urbs Sacra Aeterna’ and ‘Easter Day’, which both mention pilgrims kneeling before the ‘Holy’ Lord of Rome, OET I, 35, 37.

  58 OW ‘Tomb of Keats’, OET VI, 11; OW to Lord Houghton, CL, 49–50.

  59 Hunter-Blair, 133; CL, 57.

  60 ‘Mental Photograph’ lists ‘Cardinal’ as ambition, and ‘Renaissance’ as time he would have liked to live; and the ‘Apoxymenos’ as favourite sculpture. J. A. Symonds on the Apoxymenos; [unknown] to OW, 26 October 1878 (Clark) re. WCKW wanting to be an MP, and OW wishing to be a cardinal; Harris, 31.

  61 Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (1930), 61; OW’s ‘Mental Photograph’ lists Correggio as one of his favourite painters; Ruskin condemned the artist in Modern Painters. OW also knew and admired Correggio’s work at Parma. Although the details of his visit there are unrecorded, the city was a major railway hub, and it is possible that OW called there, together with Mahaffy and co., on the train journey from Genoa to Ravenna.

  62 Ward, in Mikhail, 14; CL, 58, 61; Fleming/Fletcher’s first book was A Nile Novel (1877).

  63 CL, 58; J. C. Fletcher to OW, 19 August 1877 (Clark).

  64 President’s notebook, 26 April 1877 (Magdalen).

  65 Ricketts, 35; CL, 47.

  66 President’s notebook, 4 May 1877 (Magdalen).

  67 CL, 47.

  68 OET VI, 197: OW probably attended Rubinstein’s concert on the afternoon of 9 May 1877, at which Beethoven’s ‘Sonata in F Minor’ (the ‘Appassionata’) was played.

  69 ‘Grosvenor Gallery’, Morning Post, 1 May 1899; ‘London Notes’, Ipswich Journal, 1 May 1877; OW, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, OET VI, 1.

  70 ‘Variorum Notes’, Examiner, 5 May 1877.

  71 CL, 33; OET VI, 11 and CL, 52 suggest OW’s acquaintanceship with Whistler.

  72 OW, ‘Mrs Langtry’, OET VI, 23.

  73 Laura Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals (1999), 38; ‘Interview with the Jersey Lillie’, Daily Telegraph, 3 October 1882.

  74 Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 38.

  75 Shane Leslie, Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley (1931), 68: Bodley, talking of Langtry, recalled how ‘one night, when an undergraduate’ (he graduated in 1877) he was leaving the Vaudeville Theatre with OW, who said he ‘had to hurry away, explaining enthusiastically that he was going to meet the loveliest woman Europe in the … studio of Frank Miles’.

  76 Gower, My Reminiscences, 2:153; ‘Laura’ was the muse of Petrarch’s sonnets.

  77 There is a possibility that he retitled his mock-medieval ‘Chanson’ (published in Kottabos the previous year) in Lillie Langtry’s honour. A manuscript of the poem (Austin, Texas) is titled ‘Lily-Flower’. OW’s list of sonnets, written and planned, compiled c. July 1877 (OET I, 322) has none obviously relating to Mrs Langtry, although the titles 23 ‘Bournemouth’, 24 ‘Picture’, and 25 ‘Friendship’ are vague enough to allow the possibility.

  Chapter 4: Specially Commended

  1 CL, 48.

  2 CL, 48; Mahaffy’s lectures On Primitive Civilizations and Their Physical Conditions were published in 1869. There is no record of when, or even if, OW delivered his lectures; two unpublished manuscripts, ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Women of Homer’, may perhaps be drafts for these lectures. See Thomas Wright, ‘Oscar Wilde: Hellenism’, Wildean, 41 (2012), 2–50.

  3 Mason, 75–6.

  4 Irish Times, 25 May 1877; Thomas Wright and Paul Kinsella, ‘Oscar Wilde, A Parnellite Home Ruler and Gladstonian Liberal: Wilde’s career at the Eighty Club (1887–1895)’, https://oscholars-oscholars.com/.

  5 CL, 36.

  6 CL, 46.

  7 CL, 48.

  8 Lord Houghton to OW, 20 May 1877 (Austin); W. M. Rossetti to OW, 3 August 1877 (Austin) thought Shelley more deserving of a statue than Keats.

  9 OW to Keningale Cook, CL, 51.

  10 OW, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, Dublin University Magazine, July 1877; OET VI, 1–11.

  11 CL, 58.

  12 Walter Pater to OW, 14 July [1877] (Austin).

  13 CL, 58–9.

  14 Florence Balcombe to OW, ‘Thursday’ [June 1877] (Clark).

  15 D. Hunter-Blair to OW, 1 June 1877 (Clark).

  16 He died at ‘midnight’ on Tuesday 12 June, so his death was registered as 13 June. Freeman’s Journal, 15 June 1877. His address is mistakenly given as ‘2 Merrion Square’.

  17 CL, 54.

  18 CL, 54; in due course he consulted a lawyer, and paid WCKW £10 to renounce his claims on Illaunroe. 3 August 1877: ‘Draft Assignment & Release’ from J. A. Rynd, a Dublin solicitor (Clark).

  19 JFW to OW [1879], in Tipper, Oscar, 54.

  20 Mason, 67, quoting a letter from editor of the Dublin University Magazine to OW, 21 July 1877, ‘I shall be glad to see your Greek paper when ready’ but suggesting that he should also try it with ‘Allingham of Fraser’s Magazine’.

  21 CL, 60; Mason, 243–5; Freeman’s Journal, 15 February 1879.

  22 The thirty-five-line opening section of the poem runs from ‘A year ago I breathed the Italian air’ to ‘I stood within Ravenna’s walls at last’. In the published version the poem is prefaced by a date-line – ‘Ravenna, March 1877. Oxford March 1878’ – but it is not clear that this would have been in the ms submitted to the judges. In OET I, Fong and Beckson list over twenty-five self-borrowings from pre-existing poems, both published and unpublished (247–51); Hunter-Blair, 137, re. King and Pope.

  23 Holland, Wilde Album, 44–5; Peter Vernier, ‘A “Mental Photograph” of Oscar Wilde’, Wildean, 13 (1998), 29–51.

  24 The details of the transaction are recorded in the reports of case ‘Wilde v Watson’, Freeman’s Journal, 8 July, 9 July, 12 July, 13 July, 18 July 1878; the sale memorial was dated 4 October. The friendship between the Quains and the Wildes is confirmed by JFW’s letters to OW, in Tipper, Oscar, 49; Tipper, Oscar, 52 suggests that Mr Quain hoped OW would have access to the money he had offered.

  25 President’s notebook, 15 October 1877 (Magdalen).

  26 CL, 62.

  27 Shane Leslie, Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley (1930), 17–18.

  28 Walter Pater to OW (six letters 1877–8) (Clark); also The Oscar Wilde collection of John B. Stetson, cat. item 392: Walter Pater to OW, ‘I look forward to seeing you at dinner at my room in B.N.C [Brasenose College] on Wednesday, 6. to 6.30.’ etc.

  29 Leslie, Memoir of John Edward Courtenay Bodley,
17.

  30 H. E. Wortham, Oscar Browning (1927), 186.

  31 ‘Mr Pater’s Last Volume’, OET VII, 243.

  32 Harris, 28.

  33 CL, 349.

  34 G. T. Atkinson, ‘Oscar Wilde at Oxford’, in Mikhail, 19 (where he misdates the lectures to 1874); ‘Housman on Ruskin, Oxford 1877’, www.victorianweb.org.

  35 H. W. Nevinson, Changes & Chances (1923), 55. Nevinson matriculated at Christ Church in May 1875.

  36 CL, 349; Atkinson, in Mikhail, 18.

  37 Smith & Helfand, 145, 196–7. The phrase ‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’ comes from Alfred de Musset’s poem ‘Après une lecture’, and is an inversion of the phrase ‘rien n’est beau que le vrai’ from an earlier poem, of that title, by Nicolas Boileau.

  38 CL, 61; [Otho Lloyd], ‘Stray Recollections’, 155; Atkinson, in Mikhail, 16.

  39 OW to JFW, in Tipper, Oscar, 48–9.

  40 Mrs Ernest Stuart Roberts (née May Harper), Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge (1934), 66, recalls talking to OW after dinner in 1878; he told her of his blue and white china experience.‘He told me, too, that he was having his rooms decorated, and didn’t know what to do about the ceiling, but was thinking of having it gilt.’ For Burne-Jones’s reproductions see Ellmann, 66, 560 n.560; and CL, 68.

  41 ‘The Science of the Beautiful’, New York World, 8 January 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 23; members of the clique included Leonard Montefiore and Harold Boulton.

  42 Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, 281; CL, 67–68; Roberts, Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge, 68; although the heads of colleges had long been permitted to marry, the ancient requirement for teaching fellows to be celibate was only just beginning to be relaxed in the late 1860s and early 1870s, each college following its own line in the matter. The trend was encouraged by the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Act of 1877.

  43 Roberts, Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge, 68.

  44 Sherard, Life, 137–8; ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review, 134.

  45 Cf. ‘Ravenna’, ‘Magdalen Walks’ (published in the Irish Monthly, April 1878) and ‘The Burden of Itys’; Sir James Rennell Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories (1922), 22.

  46 Lady Poore, An Admiral’s Wife in the Making (1917), 58. Lady Poore, née Ida Margaret Graves, with her sister Lily, attended the 1878 Commem. Lily thought OW’s views ‘silly and affected’; Ida came to realize that they were, in fact, rather sensible.