Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  The jury, after a short deliberation, decided that Mary Travers had been libeled in the letter Lady Wilde wrote to her father. While damages were set at just a farthing, the verdict meant that the Wildes were responsible for costs, which amounted to £2,000, almost a quarter of a million pounds in today’s money. The Irish Times concluded: “Thus ended a suit that shook society in Dublin like a thunderclap.”

  *

  In Reading Gaol, the regime was not as severe as it had been in Pentonville and Wandsworth, where Oscar Wilde had spent the first months of his imprisonment. He did not, for example, have to do hard manual labor in Reading. He was assigned work in the garden and was put in charge of bringing books to other prisoners. While he took enormous exception to Colonel Isaacson, the governor of Reading during the early part of his stay, stating, with his usual flair for phrasing, that the colonel had “the eyes of a ferret, the body of an ape, and the soul of a rat,” he grew to admire Major J. O. Nelson, who replaced Isaacson in July 1896 when Wilde still had ten months of his sentence to serve. It was Nelson who was in charge when Wilde wrote De Profundis in his cell.

  That Sunday afternoon, as I kept reading from De Profundis, I did not check the time or take a break. I tried not to stumble over the Greek words with which Wilde had peppered the text. The tone moved from the ruminative, the speculative, to the most intimate and confessional and private. It was hard not to imagine Oscar Wilde lying back on his plank bed and realizing that there were certain things about his life and the life of his family that Lord Alfred Douglas did not know and did not need to know. It is impossible, for example, that he returned to Merrion Square from Portora in December 1864 for his Christmas holidays and did not hear about what had happened in the court during the weeks before.

  What is remarkable is how many connections there are between the case of Mary Travers versus Lady Wilde and the case that Oscar Wilde took against the Marquess of Queensberry. First, there was the frenetic, fearless, almost manic activity of both Travers and Queensberry, who sought to embarrass and harass in public and private Sir William and Oscar Wilde respectively, both of whom were becoming increasingly famous and feeling more and more unassailable. The image of Mary Travers outside the lecture that Sir William was to give is close to the image of the Marquess of Queensberry attempting to disrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. Both wished to use a grand, ceremonious occasion for maximum dramatic effect.

  Both Travers and Queensberry also left printed accusations for everyone to read, the former a pamphlet, the latter the “posing as a somdomite” card at Oscar Wilde’s club. Both controversies centered on a long and turbulent sexual relationship between one of the Wildes and a younger person. Both controversies suggested that this person had been corrupted by one of the Wildes. Both controversies also included a libel action. In both cases, the lawyer for the other side was someone whom the Wildes knew. Although Oscar Wilde did not know Edward Carson, who represented the Marquess of Queensberry, as well as his parents had known Isaac Butt, they had been at Trinity College Dublin together. “No doubt he will perform his task with the added bitterness of an old friend,” Wilde said when he heard that Carson was to take the brief. Both Butt and Carson, ambitious men who later became influential politicians, attempted to use a book to suggest to the jury that the witness’s morals were suspect: the first that novel translated by Lady Wilde, the second The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Lady Wilde and her son made jokes and attempted a superior tone in the witness box. In each instance, the main focus of the case, Sir William Wilde and Oscar, had two young sons who were away at school as the court proceedings took place.

  Of much more importance, however, are the differences between the two, especially the differences in the outcomes. While Oscar went to prison and was ostracized by polite society, many in the medical establishment supported Sir William in the aftermath of the court case, as Emer O’Sullivan emphasized in The Fall of the House of Wilde. For example, on Christmas Eve 1864, the Irish correspondent of the Lancet devoted an editorial to the conclusion of the trial:

  Sir William Wilde has to congratulate himself that he has passed through an ordeal supported by the sympathies of the entire mass of his professional brethren in this city; that he has been acquitted of a charge as disgraceful as it was unexpected, even without having to stoop to the painful necessity of contradicting it upon oath in the witness box, by the expressed opinion of one of the ablest of our judges, by the verdict of a most intelligent special jury, by the unanimous opinion of his fellow citizens, and by, what I am sure he will not value least, that of every member of his own profession.

  Four days earlier, however, the Times in London, while expressing sympathy with Lady Wilde, did not take the same lenient view of his behavior:

  She [Mary Travers] did not deny that she had received money from Sir William even subsequently to the time of the alleged offence, but she also maintained that though she had asked for money, it had been freely offered, and sometimes returned. The general conclusion, in short, to be drawn from her evidence . . . is that Sir William, having originally been introduced to her in his professional capacity, had taken a great interest in her affairs, had wished to befriend her, and had gradually placed himself on terms of intimacy which were afterwards abused. She then retaliated as best she could in the manner which induced Lady Wilde to interfere.

  Lady Wilde wrote to a Swedish friend, pointing out that

  Miss Travers is half mad. She was very destitute and haunted our house to borrow money and we were very kind to her as we pitied her—but suddenly she took a dislike to me amounting to hatred. 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 disbelief of the (in fact) impossible charge. Sir Wm will not be injured by it and the best proof is that his professional hours were never so occupied as now . . . happily all is over now and our enemy has been signally defeated in her efforts to injure us.

  The case also brought Isaac Butt “a flood of business,” according to his biographer: “In one day alone he was handed seventeen briefs. He was very pleased.”

  The Travers court case did not seem to affect the lives of the Wildes in any obvious way. They were invited, for example, to the ball at the lord mayor’s to meet the Prince of Wales when he came to Dublin in May 1865. In May 1870 Sir William was among the distinguished and varied group that attended a meeting in a Dublin hotel addressed by Isaac Butt to form the Home Government Association in Ireland. And in 1873 Sir William received the Cunningham Medal from the Royal Irish Academy, its highest honor.

  It is possible that the court case was seen as another symptom of what fame meant, just as Lady Wilde’s efforts to be prosecuted in 1848 added to her notoriety, but caused her no apparent harm.

  By 1871, Charles Gavan Duffy, at whose trial she had attempted to intervene, had become premier of Victoria in Australia. In Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, political prisoners were slowly coming to be seen as heroes. As William Murphy wrote in Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912–1921:

  prison was transformed into a pulpit, a soapbox, a stage and, providing one survived, time served as a political prisoner became an important qualification for public life in Ireland . . . The lesson was not lost on ambitious men. By early March 1889 twenty-four sitting Irish MPs had been imprisoned at least once, and this trend continued . . . Isaac Butt’s presidency of the Amnesty Association, established in 1869 to campaign for the release of Fenian prisoners, provided him with the base from which to launch the Home Government Association in 1870 and to become an MP in 1871.

  In 1882 in America, Oscar Wilde gave a lecture entitled “The Irish Poets of 1848” and remembered the Young Irelanders, the so-called Men of ’48, coming to parties in his parents’ house. These included not only Gavan Duffy but also John Mitchel, whose Jail Journal was published in 1854, the year of Oscar
Wilde’s birth, and William Smith O’Brien, who had been sentenced to death in 1848. When the sentence was commuted, Smith O’Brien was transported to Tasmania, returning to Ireland in 1856.

  This is not to suggest that the allegations made against Sir William Wilde in 1864 and the libel action against his wife were in any way political. The case was personal, sexual, intimate. But it does suggest that the experience of court and then prison was something that had been normalized or even fetishized in the house on Merrion Square where Oscar Wilde was raised. In the soirées that his parents gave, the idea of loyalty, whether to the crown or to Victorian sexual mores, was never stable.

  This instability may have made conversation more glittering, and, since his best characters obey no rules, it may have nourished the later work Wilde did as a dramatist, but it did not help him once he had to stand in an English witness box, when he, unlike his parents, was facing an actual prison sentence.

  Of all the differences that Oscar Wilde established in De Profundis between his family and that of Lord Alfred Douglas, the opposing views of what court appearance and prison meant were perhaps the most profound. In the tone Wilde used in what he wrote in that cell in the early months of 1897, there is a sense of shock at discovering the difference between prison as something imagined and then something that became desperately real for him when, at the age of forty, he found himself sentenced. In February 1897, as Wilde was writing De Profundis, Major Nelson remarked to Wilde’s friend Robert Ross: “He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.”

  Wilde, in fact, survived for three and a half years after his release. His father lived for more than eleven years after the Mary Travers libel action. In 1867, Sir William published Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands, which is his most relaxed and engaging book. As he traveled by steamboat along the shores of the lake and then meticulously studied the landscape close to the house he had built at Moytura, he displayed his inquiring mind, his enthusiasm and his knowledge. He was not a great writer, but rather someone who managed to show himself as a great talker as he wrote. The pages were filled with a tremendous and absorbing sense of his own presence, as he measured old ruins or offered his theories about building practices or complained about how badly kept important old buildings were.

  In explaining why certain churches were not aligned east–west as they should be, for example, he offered the ingenious idea that the builders, “in laying out these churches, were guided by the sun’s rising and setting at the time of the year in which the building was commenced.”

  When he found himself among the ruins of the medieval Franciscan friary of Ross Errilly, he was ready to be both seduced by the atmosphere and appalled by the level of neglect:

  Wandering among these noble ruins, evincing so much taste, if not luxury, one cannot help peopling them, in imagination, with the inmates of four or five hundred years gone by; when, after dinner, the brown-robed friars strolled in the adjoining cloisters, of which several of the arches are quite perfect. But the picture dims as we proceed from that portion of the ruins allocated to the creature comforts of the clergy . . . for passing into the great church by its western entrance, amidst heaps of human skulls and bones, into the great aisle or nave, we are at once met by droves of sheep and oxen, that rush from off the altars, or from out of the tombs, or from within the precincts of the small chapels around us.

  Some of Wilde’s lists and descriptions in this, his last book, were brilliant. For example, he wrote about the amount of water in the vicinity of Cong in County Mayo:

  There is water everywhere—gliding by in the broad river; gushing from the surrounding rocks; boiling up in vast pools that supply several mills; oozing through the crevices of stones; rising in the interior of caverns; appearing and disappearing wherever its wayward nature wills; passing in and out everywhere, except where man tried to turn it—into the monster dry canal.

  As with his Boyne book, William Wilde noted the differences between Ireland and England; he understood that efforts to conquer Ireland in the name of the crown were essentially doomed, almost from the start:

  The people were . . . poor, and likewise ignorant, improvident, and uneducated, although far superior to the same class in the sister country; but they were disloyal—not so much on account of Protestantism, tithes, Catholic disabilities, the want of educational resources, or any other real or sentimental grievance, but because they had never been conquered by either force, justice or kindness.

  In his wildly colorful speech on the Aran Islands, he was sure that he had invited his guests to dine at the site of “the last standing-place of the Firbolg aborigines of Ireland, here to fight their last battle if driven to the western surge, or, as I have already pointed out to you, to take a fearful and eternal departure from the rocks they had contested foot by foot.” He admitted, however, that “of that race we have no written knowledge.”

  In his Corrib book, he mentioned “the battle of Moytura, stated by the bards, and believed by the early writers, (where they assign dates to events), to have been fought in the year of the world 3303.” Later in the book, he gave a forty-page vivid description of the battle as it took place. He wrote almost as though he had been a witness. He moved us moment by moment through what happened over the four days of the battle and inch by inch through the landscape in which it took place. As with his version of the history of Dun Aengus on the Aran Islands, it all made sense until none of it did, since all of it was based on legend and supposition. As Terence de Vere White wrote, Wilde

  was using his old friend John O’Donovan’s translation of the unpublished manuscript [of “The Book of Invasions”] (in the library of Trinity College) for his account of the battle. It lived in his memory and he never tired of trying to identify the various places, speculating on the circles of flat stones like miniature Stonehenges that abound in the district.

  William Wilde must have been marvelous company as he tramped through these ancient sites. His interest in locating a precise site for a legendary event was not unusual, it should be pointed out. Less than a decade after Wilde published his Corrib book, a German archaeologist, using Homer’s Iliad as a source, claimed to have found ancient Mycenae and the tomb of Clytemnestra.

  However, there were times in his Corrib book when he allowed himself to be hesitant and careful about the origin and purpose of what he had discovered. Close to Inishmain Abbey, for example, he unearthed a solid structure formed of undressed stone with openings, like crypts, cut into it: “These crypts are certainly the most remarkable and inexplicable structures that have yet been discovered in Ireland. At top they are formed somewhat like the roof of a high-pitched Gothic church, with long stone ribs or rafters abutting upon a low side wall, and meeting each other at top.”

  What is fascinating here is a footnote that contains a simple sentence: “Subsequent to its discovery by the author and his son Oscar, in August 1866, and after Mr. Wakeman had taken drawings of it, the Earl of Dunraven had a very perfect photograph taken of the western face of this structure.” In the main text, Wilde resumes his speculation about the function of the building: “Possibly it may have been a prison, or penitentiary, in which some of the refractory brethren of the neighbouring abbey were confined.” There is also an illustration included in the book of an enclosure on an artificial island on Lough Mask, which Sir William Wilde said is “by Master Wilde.”

  Oscar Wilde was eleven then, almost twelve, and would have been on holidays from Portora. This picture of him wandering on a remote island in the west of Ireland with his father seeking out ancient buildings that had not been noticed or charted, and making drawings, is a new version of him, far away from the London he eventually moved to, far from the parties and gatherings, the witticisms (“Nature: a place where birds fly around uncooked”), the cosmopolitan jibes (“Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris’s poorest workman could make you
a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can”).

  Wilde knew about grass and birds. On his holidays from Oxford, he spent time at Moytura and at Illaunroe Lodge. In August 1876, he wrote to his friend Reginald Harding, beginning the letter “Dear Kitten”:

  Frank Miles and I came down here last week and had a very royal time of it sailing. We were at the top of Lough Corrib which if you refer to your geography, you will find to be a lake thirty miles long, ten broad and situated among the most romantic scenery in Ireland . . . On Friday we go into Connemara to a charming little fishing-lodge we have in the mountains where I hope to make him land a salmon and kill a brace of grouse . . . I expect to have very good sport indeed this season.

  Since Miles was a painter, Oscar Wilde did a painting too, a watercolor of the view from Moytura House.

  Later in August, he wrote to William Ward from Illaunroe Lodge, Connemara:

  I have only got one salmon as yet but have had heaps of sea trout which give great play. I have not had a blank day yet. Grouse are few but I have got a lot of hares so have had a capital time of it. I hope that next year you and “The Kitten” will come and stay a (lunar) month with me. I am sure that you would like this wild mountainous country close to the Atlantic and teeming with sport of all kinds. It is in every way magnificent and makes me years younger than actual history records.

  Sir William Wilde had died the previous April, at the age of sixty-one. Crowds attended his funeral; even Isaac Butt was among the mourners. His daughter Isola had died in 1867, shortly before her tenth birthday. And in 1871, Sir William’s other two daughters, Emily and Mary, aged twenty-four and twenty-two, were burned to death in a fire. John B. Yeats wrote to his son the poet that Sir William attended the funeral and he had been told that “his groans could be heard by people outside the house.” He added: “there is a tragedy all the more intense, because it had to be buried in silence. It was not allowed to give sorrow words.” In the inquiry into their deaths, their names were given as “Wylie” rather than “Wilde.” The name Wilde, however, was on their gravestones.