Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  47 CL, 65.

  48 Hofer & Scharnhorst, 27; Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, 282; Douglas Sladen, Twenty Years of My Life (1914), 109. Neither account appears to be first hand.

  49 Roberts, Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge, 60.

  50 CL, 41.

  51 Smith & Helfand, 141, 154, 159.

  52 Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, 281.

  53 Hofer & Scharnhorst, 23.

  54 G. T. Atkinson, in Mikhail, 18.

  55 A. T. D., ‘Familiarum Sermones, II: O’Flighty’, Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal, 27 February 1879, 249, mentions it as ‘a favourite remark’ of ‘O’Flighty’s [Wilde’s]’.

  56 ‘The Theories of a Poet,’ New York Tribune, 8 January 1882, 7, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 20; OW was approximating the quotation from memory. Hunter-Blair, 118, records that the sermon was preached by Dean Burgon. The Historical Register of the University of Oxford (1900) lists John William Burgon (BD, Oriel) as one of the ‘Select Preachers’ for the academic year beginning Michaelmas 1877 (i.e. OW’s last year). And it seems likely that the ‘blue china’ mot was made in 1878 during OW’s final year, when he was becoming more exaggerated in his aestheticism. Ellmann, 44, however, dates the saying to 1876 based on an assertion by Oscar Browning. In a letter written in October 1912 to the periodical Everyman, Browning wrote: ‘When I went to Oxford, in 1876, to stay with my old pupils, George Barnes and W. R. Paton, Barnes said to me, “There’s a man at Magdalen named Wilde, who is very anxious to make your acquaintance. He says that he has heard you so much abused that he is sure you must be a most excellent person.” He then added, “He’s the man who said he wished that he could live up to his Blue China.” So that M. Mazel’s story is older than he imagines. The friendship thus begun continued to Wilde’s death.’ There are, however, reasons for supposing that the date given by Browning – recalled over thirty years after the event by a man of seventy-five – is not quite correct, and should be put back a couple of years. Although Browning is known to have visited Oxford in the spring of 1876 (H. E. Wortham, Oscar Browning (1927), 150), neither William Roget Paton nor George Stapylton Barnes were there at that time; they did not matriculate at University College until October 1876. And although it is possible that Browning made an unrecorded return visit to Oxford at the end of 1876, there is nothing to suggest that Wilde knew Paton and/or Barnes at this early date. They were in different colleges, studying different subjects; they came from different backgrounds, and neither Paton nor Barnes was a Freemason. Moreover, Oscar Browning’s biography, written by his nephew and friend H. E. Wortham, records (186) what was clearly an established family tradition, that Browning first met Wilde at Oxford when he was staying with Walter Pater. Pater did indeed become a friend of both Paton and Barnes, and of Wilde too. But Pater’s connection with Wilde did not begin until 1877. And it would seem much more likely that Browning’s introduction to Wilde, and his awareness of the ‘blue china’ mot dates from after 1877 – perhaps even to the time of his visit to Oxford in May 1878. (Lene Ostermark-Johansen, ‘“Don’t forget your promise to come here soon”: Seven Unpublished Letters from Walter Pater to Oscar Browning’, The Pater Newsletter, 59/60 (2011), 17–28). The earliest direct evidence of Browning’s friendship with OW is a letter at Austin, dated 29 May 1879, and beginning, ‘My dear Wylde’ [sic], which suggests a fairly recent connection. As does OW’s reply – CL, 80 – beginning ‘Dear Mr. Browning’.

  57 W. Ward, in Mikhail, 13; Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, 281 (on OW’s unpopularity); G. T. Atkinson, in Mikhail, 17, states that he had no knowledge of OW being ragged. There are, however, three accounts of such an incident but each of them is highly suspect. Sherard, Life, 138–9, claims that OW was set upon by some ‘healthy young Philistines’ who ‘bound him with cords and dragged him to the top of a hill. “Yes,” said he when released, flicking the dust from his coat… “the view from this hill is really very charming.”’ As Atkinson remarks, ‘It sounds strange’, and would seem to be an elaborate misremembering of the occasions when Bodley and his friends rolled OW down the bank at Blenheim. Sladen, Twenty Years of My Life, 108–9, describes how ‘another gang of sportsmen… broke into his rooms, smashed his blue china, and held his head under the college pump for an appreciable period’. This was the treatment meted out to Aesthetic undergraduates in the years after OW left – see ‘From our London Correspondent’, Newcastle Courant, 17 March 1882, where it is specifically said that OW did not suffer such indignities. And Sir Frank Benson, My Memoirs (1930), 136–9, gives a highly coloured account of OW thwarting an attempt on his rooms made by ‘three or four inebriated intruders’ from the Magdalen JCR, in which he hurls them down the stairs one by one. But – as Horst Schroeder points out – Benson did not matriculate until after OW left Oxford, and his story (in the words of one critic) ‘betrays the tritest kind of anecdote-making’.

  58 Dinner on 16 March 1878. P. Vernier, ‘Oscar Toasts the Boat Club’, Magdalen College Record, 2001.

  59 CL, 64.

  60 Fr Bowden to OW, 15 April 1878 (Clark).

  61 Raffalovich/Michaelson, 111.

  62 [Bodley] ‘Oscar Wilde At Oxford’.

  63 William Ward, in Mikhail, 13.

  64 CL, 39.

  65 OW, PDG, re. Dorian’s flirtation with Roman Catholicism; see Ellmann, 91.

  66 O’Sullivan, 65.

  67 Roberts, Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge, 60.

  68 OW, in Harris, 26.

  69 Harris, 26.

  70 Woods, ‘Oxford in the Seventies’, 281; she refers to it as a ‘hired suit of plum coloured velvet’.

  71 G. T. Atkinson, in Mikhail, 18; Sladen, Twenty Years of My Life, 10–11. The incident occurred in 1878 (not, as Ellmann suggests, in 1876); the Oxford University Gazette shows that W. A. Spooner was one of the examiners in 1878, but not in 1876. Also Sladen matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford in 1875; he took ‘Rudiments’ in May 1878, and received his BA in 1879.

  72 Robert Forman Horton, An Autobiography (1917), 44.

  73 Tipper, Oscar, 51.

  74 Tipper, Oscar, 52.

  75 Dulau records letters to OW from Leonard Montefiore and S. Fletcher.

  76 Irish Monthly, November 1878, 610; reproduced in Mason, 246. The same issue of the Irish Monthly also contained an article entitled ‘An Irish Winner of the Newdigate’, 630–3.

  77 Hunter-Blair, 136–7; Irish Monthly, November 1878, ‘An Irish Winner of the Newdigate’, 630–3: ‘Whatever halo the sun of Hellas may throw around [Byron’s] early death, it is, alas, an amiable extravagance to speak of his “perfect name” or to imply that pitying Truth has not almost as bad a story to tell of him as venomed Slander.’

  78 Stuart Mason, A Bibliography of the Poems of Oscar Wilde (1907), 3. OW’s account in the Shrimpton’s ledger, reproduced in Mason, 245, confirms OW bought at least 128 copies.

  79 Walter Pater to OW, 10 June [1878] (Clark).

  80 Reproduction of a sketch of OW, signed ‘Yours Oscar Wilde, Magdalen 1878’ (Yale).

  81 Lady Poore, An Admiral’s Wife, 58.

  82 Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate Journal; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 29 June 1878; Harris, 26; Thomas F. Plowman, In the Days of Victoria (1918) 270; JFW to OW, [28 June 1878], in Tipper, Oscar, 52.

  83 CL, 69.

  84 CL, 69; the letter dated ‘Thursday’ could be 18 July, with Wilde concerned about recovering the costs.

  85 Freeman’s Journal, 18 July 1878; Watson and Pym seem to have been considering an action against Messers Battersby, which might have held up any payment.

  86 Hunter-Blair, 123

  87 The Times, 20 July 1878, 8. OW was one of eighteen Firsts from a field of ninety-five candidates; G. T. Atkinson, the other Magdalen demy, got a Third.

  88 CL, 103.

  89 CL, 70.

  90 CL, 70.

  91 Hunter-Blair, 122.

  92 World, 21 August 1878, 11; Freeman’s Journal, 19 August 1878.

  93 [
Otho Lloyd], ‘Stray Recollections’; almost certainly Marian Huxley (1859–87), artist, studying at the Slade.

  94 World, 2 October 1878.

  95 Tipper, Oscar, 52.

  96 JFW to OW, ‘Friday night’ [1878], in Tipper, Oscar, 56–7.

  97 Tipper, Oscar, 55–57; Tipper dates these two letters to early 1879, but the reference to the Ashford [Castle] photograph suggests a late 1878 date.

  98 Tipper, Oscar, 53.

  99 Harris, 210.

  100 Tipper, Oscar, 52–3.

  101 CL, 71–2.

  102 ‘Apologia’ ll. 29–36. The four poems in the sequence are ‘Apologia’, ‘Quia Multum Amavi’ (Because I Have Loved Much), ‘Silentium Amoris’ (The Silence of Love) and ‘A Farewell’. ‘A Farewell’ appeared in Poems (1881) divided into two poems, ‘Her Voice’ and ‘My Voice’. The poems are hard to date exactly as no manuscripts exist. It has been suggested that they could refer not to Florence Balcombe but to Lillie Langtry. This, however, seems unlikely to me. OET I, 122–6, 279–81.

  103 World, 8 October 1879, 9; Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 70.

  104 Smith & Helfand, 37ff; Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 59–62.

  105 28 November 1878.

  106 Peter Vernier, ‘Oscar at Magdalen’, 32.

  Part III: The Happy Prince

  Chapter 1: A Dream of Fair Women

  1 ‘Mental Photograph’, 44.

  2 W. Ward, in Mikhail, 14.

  3 Hunter-Blair, 120–1.

  4 CL, 739.

  5 The arrangement was made when OW, together with WCKW, returned briefly to Dublin at the beginning of 1879. Both brothers were in want of ready money. Repairs needed to be undertaken at Merrion Square before it could be sold, and OW wanted to arrange the rental of Illaunroe for the coming summer (he took out an advert in the Field). OW was able to raise £250 from a Miss Catherine Knox by mortgaging his share of the property at Clonfeacle; William C. Hogan & Sons to OW, 20 October 1882 (Clark).

  6 L. Langtry, The Days I Knew (1925), 60; H. C. Marillier memoirs quoted in Jonathan Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, Wildean, 28 (2006), 2. General Sir John Bisset had his London pied-à-terre on the ground floor; an ancient Dr Turner lived in the attic.

  7 CL, 85.

  8 Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, 3; Mrs Claude Beddington, All That I Have Met (1929), 34.

  9 ‘A Chat with Oscar Wilde’, Quiz (Philadelphia), 25 January 1882, 4; Tom Taylor to Mrs Boughton, Monday, 19 May [1879] (Austin).

  10 Pearson, 49, has a (surely garbled) anecdote in which OW calls unannounced on Spottiswoode in London, saying ‘I have come to dine with you; I thought you would like to have me.’ L. B. Walford, Memories of a Victorian Lady (1912), 147; Desmond Hillary to M. Sturgis, 19 June 2013, quoting Gordon Raybould’s 1967 pamphlet on Combe Park and its environs; CL, 78 n.; Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (1907), 191–4.

  11 ‘Exit Oscar’, Truth, 11 July 1883; JFW to OW, [13 May 1879], in Tipper, Oscar, 60: ‘If you like call on Mrs Cashel Hoey [the Irish short-story writer]. She is in the Literary Set – & would be delighted to see you.’ Mrs T. P. O’Connor, I Myself (1910), 158.

  12 ‘Fashion and Varieties’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 July 1879. Among OW’s fellow guests were ‘the Hon De La Poer Trench’, ‘the Hon. David Plunkett, M.P.’ and ‘Mr A. Moore’.

  13 CL, 87, Melville, 159. Melville, 149 describes 1 Ovington Square as ‘lodgings’, but the 1881 census suggests that JFW and WCKW, together with one servant, were the sole occupants of the house. Reginald Auberon [Horace C. Wyndham], The Nineteen Hundreds (1922), 75.

  14 Mrs Clement Scott, in her memoir of her late husband, Old Days in Bohemian London (1919), 238, records that ‘[OW] had almost a reverence for the art of acting even then [when still dividing his time between Oxford and London], and several of his college-day essays on plays and players were printed by Clement Scott in the Theatre Magazine… They appeared under the pseudonym, if it can be called one, of “A Young Oxonian”.’ The statement is something of a mystery. Clement Scott only took over the editorship of The Theatre magazine in 1880, after OW had moved permanently to London. And I have been unable to trace any articles in The Theatre by ‘A Young Oxonian’ – or any very suggestive of OW’s style. The early numbers of the magazine (1878–80) contain unsigned compendium reviews of London theatre productions, and it may be that OW contributed material anonymously to these.

  15 CL, 154.

  16 He had made his stage debut at seventeen, and had already appeared with Ellen Terry before following her to the Lyceum for the 1879 productions of The Iron Chest and The Merchant of Venice.

  17 Obituaries in The Times, 30 September 1932, 7; 1 October 1932, 6. In later life Norman Forbes-Robertson had a part interest in a Bond Street gallery and was instrumental in identifying Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, now in the National Gallery of Scotland.

  18 CL, 89. The letter is dated by Hart-Davies and Holland to March 1880, but a letter at Austin from Norman Forbes-Robertson to OW, dated ‘20 March 1879’, indicates that it belongs to March 1879. Forbes-Robertson’s letter runs: ‘Dear Wild [sic] – I am very sorry I could not call on you yesterday more especially so as I should have had you all to myself. But I had an engagement to dine with a friend which I couldn’t very well get off. Perhaps I may call some other day as I want to learn about your poems. Yours very truly, Norman Forbes-Robertson.’

  19 E. W. Godwin, ‘Diary 1879’ (V&A). Godwin attended almost every Forbes-Robertson ‘at home’ between 9 May and 1 August, listing OW among those also present.

  20 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 87.

  21 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 86. Ellmann, 89, suggests that his teeth were discoloured due to a course of ‘mercury treatment’ for syphilis contracted while he was at Oxford (mercury could turn the teeth black). There is, however, no contemporary evidence that OW contracted the disease, or took mercury. And nothing in his behaviour makes it likely. The discolouring was more likely due to smoking, or a dead front tooth. For further discussion of OW’s supposed syphilis see Part XI, chapter 3, n. 70.

  22 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 86; Augusta Fane, Chit Chat (1926), 103.

  23 Thomas Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton (1916), 1:172.

  24 Harry Marillier, quoted in Fryer, ‘Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible’, 2.

  25 Julian Hawthorne’s diary, 18 Feb 1880, quoted in Ellmann, 57; and ‘We had several acquaintances in common, and I saw him frequently. I was impressed, like others, with the brilliance of his mental quality… something in him repelled and something attracted me to him.’ J. Hawthorne, ‘Oscar Wilde and What He Wrote’, Philadelphia North American, 3 Dec 1900, 8.

  26 Harris, 36; Langtry, The Days I Knew, 87.

  27 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 86–7.

  28 Violet Hunt, ‘My Oscar’ (ms Cornell), quoted in Robert Secor, ‘Aesthetes and Pre-Raphaelites: Oscar Wilde and the Sweetest Violet in England’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 21 (1979), 402–3; Topeka Daily Capital, 16 January 1882.

  29 ‘Wilde’s Personal Appearance’ by his ‘sister-in-law’ (Mrs Frank Leslie?), The Soil, 1, no. 4 (1914), 150.

  30 Harris, 36.

  31 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 87.

  32 Harris, 36.

  33 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 96.

  34 Walter Sickert to Alfred Pollard, 27 August 1879 (private collection).

  35 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Pasadena Star-News, 17 July 1924, 8, quoted in Gary Scharnhorst, Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son.

  36 Tom Taylor to Mrs Boughton, Monday, 19 May [1879] (Clark); Frank Harris, in his biography of Wilde, stated that OW arrived in London describing himself as a ‘Professor of Aesthetics and a Critic of Art’ – a piece of presumption that he castigates as ‘at once infinitely ludicrous and pathetic’. But the description (as Harris acknowledges) was taken from Foster’s Alumni
Oxonienses, a volume not published until 1886. The epithets (given either by OW or the editor) date from that time, not 1879.

  37 Godwin, ‘Diary’; Walter Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (1907), 191–4. Whistler was declared bankrupt on 8 May 1879. He left for Venice in September 1879 and did not return until November 1880. The White House was sold, on 18 September 1879, to the art critic Harry Quilter.

  38 The Sickerts were also friends of the Forbes-Robertsons, and of Godwin. See Godwin, ‘Diary 1879’ (V&A).

  39 CL, 77.

  40 CL, 88.

  41 Harris, 37; Maureen Borland, D. S. MacColl (1995), 25.

  42 The date of their first meeting is unknown, but OW knew – and admired – James when they met again in Washington in 1882.

  43 Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984), 211.

  44 ‘Violet Fane’ to OW [mid May 1879] (Austin), thanking him for an inscribed copy of Ravenna, saying that she had already read the poem, having been given a copy, by ‘Mrs Lacy – our mutual friend’, adding, ‘the beauties I found in it prepared me in some measure for the more mature perfection of ‘The Triumph of Time’ which I admire very very much.’ She looks forward to seeing OW and his brother at her reception on 28 May ‘between 5 and 7’. The letter is mis-catalogued at Austin as from ‘Violet Lane’.

  45 C. G. Leland to OW, 4 October 1879 (Austin); see also JFW to C. G. Leland (TCD), 1 Ovington Square, hoping to see him ‘again on Saturday afternoon’.

  46 Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (1964), 456.

  47 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 86–7.

  48 These points are well drawn out in Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 3–4.

  49 ‘Exit Oscar’, Truth, 11 July 1883.

  50 The two Newdigate prizewinners before OW – Mallock and Hardinge – both turned to novel writing, as did George Moore.

  51 Quoted in R. B. Glaenzer, ed., Decorative Art in America: A Lecture by Oscar Wilde (1906), 32; CL, 98.